Hello again, just wondering about some odd behaviour on part of my Louise (she still eats, drinks, and plays with her wheel as usual):
1. She has been as good as gold and tame enough for my husband and I to stroke her fur softly. She has gone as far as to putting her paw on our palms directly to eat treats. We've been on good terms for about a week.
She suddenly became really skittish. She jumps out of her skin and runs away even if the shadow of our hand moves anywhere near her, and she certainly won't let us stroke her anymore. There is only a half chance that she will take treats from the tips of our fingers - sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn't. She has been skittish for a week, and has also given both my husband and I a nip each on separate occasions (but she wasn't scared when she did the nipping, just a soft nip and remained where she was, sniffing us curiously). My husband says she is probably going through a hamster version of the teenage rebellion phase... I love her but I want my good little girl back!
2. She sleeps in weird places. She has a proper house, a ceramic house, an ice-house and a toilet roll, and she does use all of them, but sometimes, she would just sit in a ball in the open, half-dozing. She even goes as far as to remove all substrate from a corner of her cage and sits there on the bare plastic. Yesterday she sat on the bare plastic but burried her head in the substrate to sleep. She really likes the plastic a LOT and sometimes just keeps scratching the plastic non-stop for no apparent reason (amusement?). Any thoughts on her behaviour? It's just so unusual to me that she half-dozes in the open or prefers bare plastic half the time. Sometimes she sits in a ball and sometimes she just spreads herself out flat.
Edit: I don't think her scratching the plastic means she is trying to escape. She loves her current cage and doesn't bite the bars, or even attempt to climb them. Sometimes we leave the lid off when we watch her and she has never attempted to climb and escape, although she very well could (she has climbed to escape for about 5 minutes when she was first introduced to the cage a few weeks ago, but of course we had the lid on so she couldn't escape then).
3. She is terrified of cheese. I didn't expect this! I bought some cheddar for her and offered a tiny piece to her. She took one whiff and ran away from it, scared. I placed it on the substrate for her, but she started kicking the substrate frantically in the cheese's direction to cover it up. I tried gently to give it to her a few more times and decided to remove it before it scared her further. Anyone heard of a hamster that doesn't just dislike, but is positively scared of cheese?
Any thoughts? I'd like to understand more about her behaviour.