Can I feed my hamster dried fruit?

[Louise]

Hi, Im fairly new to owning Hamsters, got one in August and her names is Fudge, she is luvverly!!! And Im dedicating a lot of my time to make her short stay on this earth as happy as possible! I feed her a normal hamster mix, and a few times a week I feed her various veggies/fruits, a lot of sites like this one have been very helpful for me on finding out what foods are good for, and what ones are bad....but one thing I cant find out a lot about is wether or not I can feed her dried fruit. And by this I mean the type that we can buy in the supermarkers, the mixed sort, with raisans, banana chips, strips of coconut, almonds, hazelnuts, mango, papya ect ect, you get the picture!!! I do know that some dried fruit can be quite high in sugar, so I wouldnt give her too much of that, but in general, what do you guys reckon?

[souffle]

Yes you can Louise as long as it is not the type that have been candied in sugar like cherries. Ours enjoy all types you mentioned but only maybe one bit two or three times a week. We sometimes buy the little kiddies snack packs of dried fruit mixes for ours :) Favourites seem to be raisins

[happysaz133]

I buy dry fruit bags from Pets at Home. Its in the birds section and says birds on it, but there's nothing harmful to hammies in there. Mine especially love the raisins and banana chips.

[shazzy]

Can they have most varieties of dried fruit, like Apricots, Papaya, cranberries, pineapple, melon etc? Because I've been tempted to buy Mo those bags of mixed dried fruit you can get - but never know which bits she can and cannot have.

[flogging_molly]

yup, just double check for any additives or a lot of sugar on the packet :) i add some dried fruit into my rats mix from time to time for a bit of variety

[Thames Valley Rodents]

Considering how lethal raisins can be to other animals (namely dogs and skunks) it always seems a little wierd to me to feed them to rodents but I've never had any problems from feeding them. I always used to add a single bag of dried fruit to 30kgs of my homemade rodent mix when I had more animals.

Kat