Quote:
Originally Posted by AprilPearl
I think everything has already been said. I actually just wanted to say something about the faeces eating. It was my belief that hamsters don’t eat the ordinary poop pellets that you find in their cage. They produce two kinds of poop: the ‘wet’ one (which has some complicated name beginning with a c that I cannot remember), which they eat directly from their bottom and still contains some unused nutrients (thus the re eating) and the dry pelleted kind. Food is digested, comes out as the former wet kind and then re eaten before finally coming out as dry pelleted poo which is not re eaten. We never see these wetter poops because they are eaten immediately. So, removing any poops you find in the cage is not a problem, as they will be the kind that has already “gone around” once and thus no longer contains any usable nutrients so would not be re eaten by the hamster.
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The word you are looking for is "caecotroph". This behavior is common in almost all species of rodents as well as in other critters such as rabbits. Caecotrophs are different than the typical pellets you'll see lying around the cage. These are generally passed at night when us humans can't see so you may go your hamster's entire lifetime without noticing this behavior! However, hamsters do occasionally eat feces lying about in their cage. After reading some studies and articles on coprophagy in hamsters, the results found were inconclusive. All we know is that the feces aren't hurting them, but could potentially be helping so it's best they're left in. If you're a neat freak though, removing some bits of feces once a month or so won't hurt a thing
