Pets: Vet problem

Jan 29 2010 by Lizzie Struthers, Irvine Herald

MY 12-year-old daughter would like to buy a hamster.

We looked in a couple of pet shops and saw all sorts of hamsters.

Which ones make the best pets?

I love hamsters – at one point I bred and showed them and kept about 60 at a time.

The original pet hamster was the Syrian or Golden Hamster (the original ones were all gold).

These are the largest pet hamster and must be kept on their own as they will kill another hamster that shares its space.

There are now hundreds of different combinations of colour, coat types and eye colour – long-haired, satin coated, curly coated, black, white, copper, yellow, tortoiseshell, black-eyed, red-eyed ruby-eyed etc.

They live up to three years. They are most active at dawn and dusk but if they are fed at a certain time of day, such as just after school, they will tend to be awake for their food. As they get older they get less active.

Like any caged pet, you need to make their environment as interesting as possible with tubes and boxes to hide in. They can even be toilet trained.

All hamsters can be handled.

They should be used to being handled from a young age. Unfortunately some can bite and these are the ones who have little or no human contact from a very young age.

Chinese hamsters are sociable and can live in pairs or groups. They are usually a brown /grey colour.

There are several types of dwarf hamster which can all live to be about two.

Proborovskii with their distinctive eyebrows are very sociable, least likely to bite and very active. But very fast. They are not suitable pets for younger children but great fun to watch.

Psungorus are their cousins and come in different piebald patterns. These Siberian hamsters have furry soles on their feet.

There are other less common varieties and there is also a European hamster which are quite large but these cannot be kept as pets in the UK.

The rules to remember are that Syrian hamsters must live on their own and dwarf hamsters need cages with very small gaps between the bars as they can escape from regular cages and try and get one which is used to being handled.

Apart from that it is a personal choice.