My daughter is six and she’s been begging for a pet for months now. Today we finally gave in and got a hampster. We brought him home and put him in his cage with water and food and chew sticks. He explored a little, found the hampster wheel, got in and started running.
And he hasn’t stopped.
Occasionally he’ll pause for a bit, and poke around outside the wheel, but thirty seconds later he’ll be back in. He did nibble on a bit of food we put next to the wheel, but as soon as it was gone he was back in the saddle, running full tilt.
Is this … normal? Is this a stress response from being brought home in a little cardboard box? Is it pure joy at no longer sharing a cage with other hampsters? Does he just really, really like running in his wheel?
Bless his little heart, I don’t want to spoil his fun, but the wheel is squeaky, it’s getting late, and I don’t want him to collapse from exhaustion.
Don’t worry. If ‘thunk’ is the past tense of ‘think’ at 3 AM, ‘hampster’ is an acceptable spelling of ‘hamster’ after one has been squeaking a wheel in your ears for six hours.
7 hours seems a little long. But the little buggers do run marathons on those things. I’d say it’s pretty normal, and will probably run less in the future. IIRC hamsters sleep about 20 hours a day. My previous experience is that they do run at night, so figure out a quiet place for them to run.
Get the little bugger one of these . As a hamster owner who’d had many sleepless nights due to late night wheel running, I can say with confidence that you won’t hear a peep with that wheel.
