Hello! I am a new Hamster owner and am having a horrible start! We got my 4 year old a hamster for her bday (Unicorn) and it turned out that there was a mental issue with the hamster. She constantly would bite and was just in crazy in general. She died after only 13 days of having her. Our vet seems to think she had something wrong mentally.
Well we are trying again. New hamster (Rapunzel) is so much different. She has not tried to bite at all not once even when I moved her from the transport box into the cage, which didn't go very smoothly. She seems to be very sweet. We have had her for almost a week now and she is still mostly hiding in her tubes that go across the top of the cage, but has started to come out a little to see what is going on and even took a couple of treats from me through the bars of the cage. When I tried to open the door and reach in to give her she went back into the tubes. So we were making progress. Well today I made the dumb mistake of disconnecting the tubes at the end she was not at to try and get some of the nasty out. she did come to the open end of the tube so I put her in the exercise ball I got for her so she didnt just get out. Figured I could at least spot clean a bit but only had her in there for about maybe 5 minutes. Now she is stuffing as much food in her cheeks as possible to go back to the tubes. Did I ruin all the progress we made and traumatize our poor little Rapunzel?