Serendipity, thank you for the wonderful, insightful post! I absolutely loved reading it.
You say that hamsters have some human-like qualities, and I think they do too. They certainly do have qualities that they share with us (all creatures do), and though things are much simpler and a different perspective for a hamster, I think they feel fulfilled by many of the same things, too. At least, I like to think so when I try to empathize with them.
I think one interesting thing to look at is the relationship of the hamster with the caregiver(s). A hamster is likely to be much less stressed, hide less, etc. if they know their humans and aren't afraid of them. Likewise, an attentive caregiver who is able to spend time with the hamster will be able to be more sensitive to the hamster's individual needs. That's one thing I didn't like about the cage size experiments. The hamsters didn't have any real relationship with their caregivers.
If you have a good relationship with your hamster, you are more likely to spend time with it outside of its cage, giving it stimulation. If the hamster isn't afraid, it would greatly enjoy time outside of its cage. So I think it's not a bad thing to be persistent in taming a hamster. It's one reason I used a small wire cage set up in a high traffic area in order to bond with our new dwarfs when we got them. I wanted them to have just enough to feel safe, but not so much that they could hide from us all the time. In this way I kind of "forced" them to get used to us. It was also a good way to teach my children how to call a hamster out of its nest, instead of messing up the cage to find the hamster.
I like the thought of always leaving part of the cage intact, especially the nest, for some familiarity. That's a good idea. And you know, I noticed that my hamsters will sometimes clean out their own nest or bathroom too. It doesn't surprise me, though - they're just doing whatever needs to be done! The first time I really witnessed that was when I had a fairly elaborate setup for a Syrian in a 55 gallon tank. (I used the plastic coated wire racks I posted in another thread somewhere, sorry.) I'll try to find you a pic. Speaking of this setup, I recall after setting it up one of my kids saying they wish they could be a hamster in there! She has said it for a lot of setups. This is the daughter whom I speak of often - she says she loves animals more than people.
That would be very interesting to videotape our hamsters at night. I do have a device that could probably do that, at least for a few hours I imagine. Even more interesting, a hamster forum could potentially do their own experiments and collect data. Have you guys ever considered doing something like that? It would be so much better and more realistic than doing a lab experiment...and we wouldn't euthanize and gut the hamsters once they turned three months old.
I feel like a bunch of hamsters died just so someone could "prove" that bigger cages are better, but all the same, these hamster cage studies were interesting. The more variables they added, the more they seemed to find out that cage space wasn't necessarily the issue. Since I can't get them out of my head, I might as well post them so you guys know what I'm talking about.
Cage size study
Cage size + enrichment
Hamster wheel study
Deep bedding study
Deep bedding study 2
Also, here's a
blog someone made based on the findings. They say, "Many researchers have come to the conclusion that hamsters should not be kept as pets because they can not be offered the right conditions."
