Hi... I keep adding on how Bean's taming is coming along on other people's threads so I thought it would be better to start my own. I see that there are other people with new Robos who ask questions here, and my experiences may be interesting or even helpful to them, as theirs may be to me.
By "taming," I mean getting him to relax around me, which I started by just dropping a sunflower seed in front of him (I remove them from his seed/pellet mix, so they are a treat), then offering one from my fingertips, then putting one in the palm of my hand. It took about 10 days before he would get into my hand.
To start at the beginning, I adopted Bean on August 12, thinking he was a Russian dwarf as labeled on his enclosure at the pet store. When I posted a photo here, some people said he was a Robo. I looked that up. Since he doesn't have a stripe down his back, he does have white "eyebrows," and I just got my first clear daylight look at him yesterday, I agree. He is TINY.
I was disappointed because I thought I would probably never have much contact with a Robo, but now, there is some contact, and there may be more to come.
The taming has been slow and sometimes there will be several days on which I only see him for a couple of minutes before he runs back to his burrow. The last few days there seems to have been more progress. Yesterday I came into his room when he was out in the the middle of the day, and he didn't seem to be afraid of me. He wanted his sunflower seed! He's gotten used to hopping onto my hand to get them. I had just put out his seed/pellet mix and he went over and sorted through that after the sunflower seed. I quietly left so as to give the episode a peaceful ending. Then last night he was out earlier than usual and that went well too. At night he just keeps playing on his flying saucer when I come up to the tank, although he stops for the sunflower seed. I don't stay with him extremely long, maybe 5 minutes, in case it's stressful for him. I've been lengthening it some as his fear level has seemed to go down.
This has been 17 days and I think we've made a lot of progress, but I still don't think he's really thrilled with the contact, just okay with it. I may be wrong though. He just doesn't jump up and down like a dog.
