What quanity of food does everyone give their Syrian hamster

[sarah]

Hi,

When I first got Maisie I was keen to encourage her to eat most of the food I give her and not just pick and choose the best (naughty) bits. I've read that they only need about a teaspoon of food a day but that seems awfully stingy so each day I always seem to put 2 - 3 teaspoons in.

What does everyone else do. With my previous hamsters I used to just provide a large bowl of food for the week but I was thinking if I provided a little fresh food every day it will encourage Maisie to forage around her cage more.

What does everyone think!

[babyboos]

I give a tablespoon of Harry Hamster Food to each hamster in their little earthenware bowl each night, more for pregnant or nursing females. Some people prefer to sprinkle the food across the floor of the enclosure but thwen it gets a bit dirty and ground into the litter I find, of course many of the hamters just gobble it all up into their cheek pouches and hide it all in their house where it gets mixed with bedding pee and poo, yummy, so they are not fussy where you put it :twisted:



http://chinchillacymru.co.uk/pics/nibbles/pets/hambowl.jpg



I tried feeding once per week but that was 7 tablespoons which is too much for the bowls - when going away I will put 3 tablespoons in, and another water bottle, this way if I get a little delayed for any reason I know they will be fine even although there is no way they would ever actually eat one tablespoon of food in a day anyway :oops:

[Emma]

I do pretty much the same as babyboos - Phoebe gets about a tablespoon of HH food every day, along with a small amount of fresh food most days, things like fresh fruit, vegetable, cheese, egg, ham, etc - whatever I've got in, or the ends of veg I've chopped for my own dinner. She also tends to get a small dog biscuit most days, which I wedge through the bars at her favourite chewing spot - it distracts her from chewing the bars, and takes her a while to dislodge and gnaw up. The dry mix goes in a small earthenware bowl, really so I can tell when she's taken it, but sometimes I will hide the fresh food somewhere so she has to work to get it - I might put it in a small closed cardboard box so she has to gnaw her way in, or under something she has to move to get it. Peanuts in shells are a good treat, they come in the Harry Hamster mix but I pick them out and feed them as treats.



I monitor her food store and take out fresh food that she hasn't eaten after a day or so, also if her store is getting big sometimes I don't feed her for a day so she has to eat some of her store!

[nooboo]

i sort of do the same, due to the amout of caging my hamsters have they each have two food bowls, and i have it set that there is a big one, which is the current food and a smaller one, which is older food. basically, they get what amounts to just under a tablespoon, with banana chips, veg and fruit added (usually on the top) i try to check their food stores for the fresh produce everyday (which is becomeing impossible with one, she has decided all food, most her bedding, and nesting materal from 4 places should live in a section of tubing ) i leave the rest of the food store, i am maybe crule in that when they set up another food store it is moved into the second bowl, and the tubing full of food when given a clean out has the fresher looking/smelling food put into the bowl of old food. for some reason most the time they prefer the old food bowl, yet get excited when the new one is filled. i have to keep a close eye on them, or otherwise i might find the food store became really old food (over a week old) then i tend to bin it, and replace from the second food bowl



confused yet? my partner is, he just keeps topping up the normal food bowl any time it looks kind of empty, sometimes wonder how many meals a day they get :|

[SnuggleHam]

I don’t measure how much mine get, I just keep an eye on their food bowl and fill once they have eaten all of it.. Well the majority anyway since nobody east those little alfalfa pellets lol.

[sarah]

Okay - thanks everyone - i was just a bit worried as a teaspoon of food felt awfully stingy when i put it in her big bowl, so i always gave Maisie a bit more.



Should we not provide more and let them choose what they will wat?

[babyboos]

there is a big difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon so it would have looked a bit stingy :wink:



a teaspoon is 5 mg and a tablespoon nearly three times the quantity 14 mg

[Emma]

I think a tablespoon looks stingy too, but I do try and stick to it!



Sarah if we let them choose what they want then their diet will be unbalanced.....they'd only eat their favourite bits (like if you let a child pick what it wanted, it'd live on crisps & sweets). If you feed a smaller amount so they eat it all then they have a balanced diet, if you look at the side of the hamster food packet it should say % protein, amounts of vitamins etc, well they only count if the whole diet is eaten, although like Candace said, no hamsters eat the alfalfa pellets anyway, so most diets won't be exactly what it says on the packet. But I think Burgess do a pellet-free hamster diet, I haven't seen it in shops though.

[Catherine Spark]

Oakie gets three dessert spoonfuls of hamster food which I think is actually mixed by the pet shop I got him from.
Added to this he gets:

- three or four cheerios
- 6 or 7 rice crispies
- 4 home grown uncooked peas
- 4 or 5 raisins
- A piece of weetabix

Sometimes he gets a little piece of cereal bar as well. Occasionally he gets a few drops of vegetable oil mixed in. One time I was having porridge and gave him a bit to try, which he enjoyed. I should add that I feed him once a day in the morning with enough food to last for him to creep down and fetch throughout the day.

[merita]

I use a plastic scoop thing that came with an esspresso machine I used to have. It was for measuring out the ground coffee. Koda gets a scoopful of that every night in his earthenware bowl, plus a monkey nut that I have to make a hole in or he ignores it, a gigantic raisin and a few dried mealworms. On every other night or after he's been out in his playpen or ball I give him a yogurt drop. He always leaves those little dark green pellets though, he loathes them and in fact he doesn't seem to like anything green coloured except fresh veg. He won't touch dried food that's green LOL

He's extremely fussy and won't bother to work for food, like gnawing through a tube to get to it or anything like that, it just goes ignored till I get rid of it. He loves baby rice pudding and cheese and scrambled egg too but these are rare treats as I don't have a fridge so don't often have eggs or dairy in.

I clean him out once a week and usually find a huge store of food in his house, which all gets chucked out.

[Catherine Spark]

To update...in his latter 'years' Oakie ate a 1:1 combination of 'Supreme Science Selective' hamster (a monocomponent diet), and Cow & Gate 'My First Muesli' (contains apple, raisins, apricot, banana, prunes, oats, wheat, rice, millet, barley, maize, rye, coconut, hazelnut, multivitamins and calcium), with a tiny little bit of fish oil to keep his joints supple (at age 2+ his coat was vibrant and soft, and he was climbing up the bars of his cage and pulling himself up the tiers without the need for a ladder). He usually got about 1 plastic scoop (20g or so) every other day. Because he loved that muesli so much I always waited until most of the heart-shaped biscuits had gone, as I knew he needed to eat them, because they had everything he needed and were tailored to a hamster's dietary requirements. He had a crafty habit of storing the hearts and eating the muesli on the spot to try and get more muesli sooner, but I would check his bed, and he did eat them - I could see the nibble marks!

P.S. Just to clarify - I always DID provide a ladder! Just in case anyone panics :D

http://i695.photobucket.com/albums/vv319/catherinespark/Oakie%20Lonely%20hearts%20advert/Truffling.jpg

[Elliriyanna]

I feed what the hamster will eat in 24 hours ... usually with mine this has ranged from 1-2 tablespoons. IMO they should always have food in their dish even if its just the little bits they dont like.

[Catherine Spark]

That seems sensible. You never know when they'll get the munchies and eat through their stores :)

[kyrilliondaemon]

1 tablespoon for Scamp

[Gamina]

I don't really have a select amount ... they have half a bowl full in the cage and then I scatter feed a small handful throughout the cage. Hamsters are very good at knowing what to eat and what they do not need at the time. What can look like selective eating is just that but its not necessarily a bad thing unlike with say a gerbil that will chew through anything fatty and end up like a ball!
Also while mixes are marketed as complete they can be full of fillers like the little brown alfalfa tubes that I have never seen a rodent eat! or hunks and hunks of corn. If I waited for the alfalfa to disappear I think Greyjoy would starve to death or wilt alway from the lack of nutrition those things give :)
Mine are loving Silvers mixes now and polish pretty much everything off.