Concerned for Shelter's Hamsters! And a bit mad.

[Esmy]

They have been peeking at one another sometimes through the cages. It's cute.

[Colby and the Dwarfs]

Originally Posted by Esmy

I have the brothers home now that grew up together and lived together for the 1yr 7mo. They are in separate cages, but I'm going to let them have supervised play together unless they don't seem to care one another is there. Their cages are going to be side by side so they can visit.

Not sure that's a good idea. Syrians can get, well, they might be scared and skittish if they smell another male ham, I believe. And I certainly wouldn't let them have play dates!

Hamsters, although we would like to think they do, don't feel emotions quite like we do.

[kyrilliondaemon]

Our syrians know they're not completely isolated as they can definetly smell the others - Scamp viewed Fwirl as competition and basically insisted if Fwirl was getting fuss then Scamp wanted it too.

I would still never let a syrian have a play date with another or really interact with others even through mesh (breeding aside of course), ours tend to get stressed if they're closer than a metre or so. When Scamp was insisting on being out when Fwirl was we always had to sit at least a metre apart or the girls would both be more tense and less confident than usual. It was like there was an invisible boundary in the air and if one of us crossed it both girls were tense - then if we moved further apart they both relaxed again.
Our syrians are definetly happy and definetly tame and content without interaction beyond being able to smell that there are other syrians in the same room. We also couldn't run a controlled test to see if ours were more or less aggressive when allowed to interact with others (through mesh) as Muddle wouldn't know aggression if it poked him on the nose, and Fwirl and Eggbiscuit both take major provocation to show any signs of unhappiness with people (e.g screeching/nipping e.t.c). We'd be able to see how aggressive they were to each other but we can't judge that very easily either - we'd have to record it at the start of an experiment and record it again at the end and trust we didn't accidentally show any recording bias (which we would because we're human and have expectations of how the test would go). But even if we could find a way to do a proper controlled test we'd still be stressing our pets for the sake of an experiment and that seems kinda cruel to me really. Plus there's always the risk of injury even through mesh (although that can be minimised by using a double layer of mesh a bit apart or by using very small mesh).
I'm always cautious of reading things in magazines though as without being able to read the original study I can never judge the methodology or the results for myself and there are a lot of cases where studies have been either conducted poorly or utterly misrepresented and then wound up quoted as fantastic factual studies for months (or years). If I can't read the source material I can't assume the magazines interpretations are correct because there are far too many journalists out there who seem more "sensationalist" than "scientist" really.

I'm not saying the magazine was definetly wrong, just that I'm personally quite sceptical - especially when so many external factors affect the aggression shown by hamsters anyway.