What bedding for what purpose?

[Ria P]

Originally Posted by NibblesTheHam

I might try him on carefresh and see if he prefers burrowing like that, or with the aspen. Nibbles isn't a huge fan of burrowing, he doesn't live in a burrow or anything, he just occasionally digs himself down. As kind of a side question, do you prefer burrowing towers/boxes, or a wall, or just pile bedding in a corner? right now I'm using a box, but I think I'll switch to a wall.

Neither. The plastic base of my hamsters cages is filled right up to the top with substrate so they can do what they want. Their bottomless houses sit on top of the substrate so they can sink their nests in it and keep a hoard underneath. The dwarfs dive down into the substrate wherever they choose to and sometimes i can hear them scurrying along from one side of their habitat to the other without surfacing. The Syrians don't burrow but make these huge nests inside their big houses and kind of dig themselves in a bit.

[cypher]

I find burrowing boxes to be a bit pointless really, the idea is that they should be able to burrow throughout the whole cage & be able to move around under the substrate so you just need to have a really deep layer of substrate in the whole of the cage.

[NibblesTheHam]

Originally Posted by cypher

I find burrowing boxes to be a bit pointless really, the idea is that they should be able to burrow throughout the whole cage & be able to move around under the substrate so you just need to have a really deep layer of substrate in the whole of the cage.

Hi! Nibbles' cage is made up of 2 (about 640 square inches each I think,) bins, so would it be ok to only put burrowing space in one of those bins?

[cypher]

Ideally you want deep substrate in both but if she's unable to move through her whole cage under the substrate then it probably won't make a lot of difference to her, unless you have a problem with something like the height of the wheel still make it as deep as possible throughout.