Meet Pepper

Penguin · 03-01-2018, 02:36 PM

I picked up Pepper on the 27 of January, she's a lovely little girl but still very shy.

Screenshot by Lightshot

Pepper is our first syrian hamster and a longhaired syrian hamster, too! I thought she was rather big when I first picked her up, but she keeps growing! I have no clue about her weight though, as she isn't tame at all.

She made great progress at first. It took her 2 weeks to show any interest in treats, and after that she took some big steps forward within the next week. At first she would get spooked if I moved any of my fingers and find somewhere to hide, but one evening, she got super confident and decided to exit her cage and sit on my hand while taking snacks from my palm.

The next time that I saw her, she was very hesitant about taking food from my palm. And the time after that, she sneezed, touched me in the process, got scared and flew into her house with a speed almost unreal.

Since then, the poor thing has started freezing up and wont move if I get close to her cage while she was walking around. With a bit of luck, on some days I can make her take a sunflower seed from my fingertips but then she will waddle away to a place where she feels safe. It's been a week like this and she wont come out until I either go to bed or it's 1.30am.

I'm confident she'll come around, she just needs some more time, but from time to time I can't stop worrying as I have been quite lucky with my 3 previous hamsters, which were all used to people before we got them.

She's a lovely little girl though. She's incredibly gentle and always have to feel any treat I give her with a teeth a few times before taking it from my hand/fingers.

I'll post some more pictures whenever she feels a bit more safe, she has these 2 cute tuft of long hair on her hips, while the rest of her fur is rather short in comparison (: