Teds cage stinks worse

lorrapaw · 01-26-2016, 01:16 PM

Do hamsters wee smell more as rhey get older as ted is honking. I spot clean every other day and do full clean once a week but his cage still honks.

StarlightSerenity · 01-26-2016, 01:23 PM

What species is he? It could be his age, a health issue like diabetes or, most likely, you're cleaning the cage TOO often.

Spot cleaning should be done as you are doing it however doing full cleans should be done as infrequently as possible. I find with a Syrian in a 80-50cm cage full cleans need to be done no more than every two weeks. Depending on how well you are able to spot clean (litter training etc) you may be able to leave it longer.

A hamster will scent mark his/her cage as it's their territory, if we clean their cages out a lot they feel the need to scent mark much, much more which results in a pretty stinky cage.

cypher · 01-26-2016, 11:37 PM

I agree that you do seem to be cleaning too much & it really shouldn't be necessary to clean that frequently, I'm guessing we're talking syrian here so diabetes is unlikely though not impossible, it's possible he could have a UTI though, how much does he drink & pee?

lorrapaw · 01-27-2016, 03:27 AM

He is a syrian and hes been seen by vet recently cos of drinking a lot but he says hes fine. He is still very active for nearly two years old and loves his grub. I will cut down full clean to fortnightly. Do they still scent mark if you spot clean every other day?

Pebbles82 · 01-27-2016, 03:55 AM

Hi lorrapaw. Erin's Hamsters has a really good video on cage cleaning (below) - it helped me a lot. I followed the advice and it's worked a treat. Our hamster uses a potty and now I only do full cage cleans about every 2 or 3 months, and even then it's a 'partial' clean. The big tip is not to clean everything at the same time. The other big tip is, the more substrate you have in the cage, the less you end up using

. Because if it's deep enough, the bottom half stays dry. It's really good for hammies to have deep substrate anyway, they can dig a bit (and even dig tunnels sometimes), and it means the bottom of the cage doesn't really get wet and smelly - you just take out the odd handful of wee'd on substrate and replace it with a new handful and mix it in (that's what's meant by spot cleaning). Sorry if I'm telling you things you already know.

You can get in an itch scratch cycle with scent marking - ie they keep doing it every time you take things away! Especially if you take their hoard away. If you have to remove any of the hoard, then replace it with new food in the same place. I find usually it's ok to leave the hoard if it hasn't been wee'd on. I went through a cycle where Charlie had wee'd on his hoard and I had to remove most of it. And he kept weeing on it more to scent mark it so no-one stole it! This went on for a while and stopped when I made some changes - gave him a bigger house so he had more room for his hoards without using his potty as a hoard. That seemed to do the trick and he now just wees in his potty again.

Anyway, for now, maybe add extra substrate if it isn't very deep and just spot clean, add some new substrate and mix it in and don't do a clean for a couple of weeks. Then in a couple of weeks clean the wheel, and keep spot cleaning the substrate. A week later clean some of the toys if they smell. Next time you do a full cage clean, keep half the old substrate and mix it in with the new and replace any hoards, keeping any food that is dry and putting it back. It's good that the vet found nothing wrong, but keep an eye on things if he is still drinking a lot. Don't use anything scented in the cage cleaning (eg strong disinfectants - I find warm water is ok for the cage base when doing a full cage clean, but if the base has got smelly, then a mild pet safe disinfectant, or a bit of white vinegar in some water will clean/disinfect that, but always rinse it well afterwards to remove most of the scent from the cleaning stuff). Anyway, here's Erin's video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jVnEjrXbww