Little Menace

[gcwebbyuk]

Coco our lovely friendly little (well she is pretty big actually) Syrian has been causing a bit of mischief with her cage.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8309/7946058496_2917b03af3_b.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gcwebbyuk/7946058496/)
Coco (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gcwebbyuk/7946058496/) by grahamWebb (http://www.flickr.com/people/gcwebbyuk/), on Flickr

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8310/7946056736_155c286961_b.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gcwebbyuk/7946056736/)
Nosey (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gcwebbyuk/7946056736/) by grahamWebb (http://www.flickr.com/people/gcwebbyuk/), on Flickr

She has a Hamster Heaven. We originally removed the Penthouse, as she was weeing up there and it was becoming a bit unsavoury.

I then rerouted the tubes, so that they ended up coming out on the green side of the cage.

This all seemed great for probably six months, when she started to take her food up there like a store, and then her bedding, and eventually it became just like her Penthouse - part hang out - part toilet - she does have a toilet with litter, which she uses most of the time - haven't noticed her weeing anywhere else.

I decided to remove the tubes, and replace them with the Savic tube stoppers. This has caused Coco a lot of confusion, and she started to attack the stoppers and is slowly demolishing the one next to her house on the pink side of the cage. We tried lowering the pink level, but she is still able to reach.

I put a portion of her tubes back inside the cage, laying them under the green side, but she once again started to build a secondary nest in there...

Is there anything we can use to calm her down? She has plenty of other items in her cage to gnaw on, but she only seems to want to gnaw on the plastic.

We are considering buying her a different cage - thinking that something completely different may change her behaviour - as she obviously remembers there were tubes there....

What can you suggest?

[Lynternette]

My Dusty does exactly the same. He's in an Imac and chews the tube connectors to pieces. I took the tubes away and used ladders. He didn't like it one little bit. Infortunately no other connector will fit as you can't get Imac ones.

[Stockannette]

Coco is too beautiful to cause any trouble... someone else must be gnawing the stoppers! ;)

[gcwebbyuk]

Damn - you caught me - it's me gnawing them! ;)

[pinkneon]

Look at her little face!! She's like "me?" "Never!"

[de4life]

What a little sweetie :)

Hjalmar did a similar thing in one of his cages... it has a 'nesting zone' at the top of a tube. When he was younger he used to sleep in it, but then one day he just started stuffing bedding so tightly into the tube whilst he was in the nesting zone that he couldn't actually get back down. As all his food and water was at the bottom of the cage this was not good. I had no choice but to remove his access to the nesting zone (he has two bin cages attached to the wire cage so he's not short on space anyway!). He soon made a nest elsewhere and accepted the tube was gone, but males do generally seem calmer than females. Female hams seem very headstrong and will make it known if they're annoyed xD