Hamster Central - View Single Post

AmityvilleHams · 11-02-2022, 12:47 PM

Themes honestly are for the humans, not the hamsters. Frequent change is extremely stressful for them especially with big substrate change and such. Unfortunately you won't always see signs of stress or stress induced illness, but it does lead to a weaker immune system and with hamsters being fairly sensitive already it's best to avoid unnecessary stress like that.

A much better alternative to the intrusive and stressful full themes is just decorating safely outside the cage. For cages on any kind of stand or furniture you can decorate those too. I would definitely be careful still to not put anything unsafe like electrical cords, fabric, etc within hamster reach but you can do quite a bit with exterior decorations for themes.

A safe option for a pop of color inside the cage would be using hamster safe edible flowers scattered around in small amounts. For example you could do red or pink rose petals for a valentine's theme, or The Hay Experts have black mallow that I think could've fit into a halloween theme.

11-02-2022, 12:47 PM
AmityvilleHams PM Fluffy for custom title Join Date: Mar 2016 Posts: 4,545	Re: Changing cage set up Themes honestly are for the humans, not the hamsters. Frequent change is extremely stressful for them especially with big substrate change and such. Unfortunately you won't always see signs of stress or stress induced illness, but it does lead to a weaker immune system and with hamsters being fairly sensitive already it's best to avoid unnecessary stress like that. A much better alternative to the intrusive and stressful full themes is just decorating safely outside the cage. For cages on any kind of stand or furniture you can decorate those too. I would definitely be careful still to not put anything unsafe like electrical cords, fabric, etc within hamster reach but you can do quite a bit with exterior decorations for themes. A safe option for a pop of color inside the cage would be using hamster safe edible flowers scattered around in small amounts. For example you could do red or pink rose petals for a valentine's theme, or The Hay Experts have black mallow that I think could've fit into a halloween theme.