Can a bar chewer ever go back to barred cages?

[StarlightSerenity]

Originally Posted by sully

That is very interesting, i thought they were just trying to escape?

No, there are many reasons why they do it and is likely to turn into an addiction of sorts. My Luna chews the bars when she wants attention and will stop if we ignore her (she wont do it when the lights off as she knows we wont get her out then).

[TheFeldhamster]

Originally Posted by kyrilliondaemon

TheFeldHamster - In total shes got roughly 11000 square cm of space at the moment, but it is spread over three floors of a bin cage and a bunch of smaller rotastak bits. The bin cage is the biggest we could manage for her and there wasn't anything bigger we could buy to make it with (plus now we can't fit anything bigger in the room lol). She doesn't touch most of it and happily ignores the bottom level of the bin cage most of the time. (Or did - now she loves to chew there because she's realised its the hardest bit of her cage for us to access, so she can chew for longer before we interrupt her.)
The temp cage will be about 5000 square cm, and the only bars will be well out of her reach.
Oh and she has no interest in burrowing whatsoever, doesn't seem to grasp the concept of it. She has a burrowing chamber and I've even tried to coax her into using it by burying treats e.t.c, trying different substrates and she doesn't care. She'll store food there sometimes but only right on the top. I even buried her favourite food in there once and she dug it out, dragged it off and promptly stopped caring about digging again lol

Ok, that really is big. Rare to find someone who has the room for that, congrats! I'm not sure how much difference it makes that it's spread over several cages and levels. I guess it would make some difference - just like having several rooms on different floors is not quite the same as having one big ballroom all in one piece. How much of it is on the same level? Is it all stacked or is some of it on the same level?

Is there any possibility that you could put her in 2-3 big bin cages instead of several different smaller ones? With maybe 2 of them on the same level and only the 3rd on top? I don't know what you setup is like so it's a bit hard to say anything constructive. Is there a photo of your setup somewhere so we could think about it and offer some ideas?

As for the digging - what is the substrate like? If it's too crumbly/too fluffed up it won't be possible to dig anything stable in it and then most hamsters never do. It needs to be a mixture of short stuff and longer stuff - eg. wood shavings and hay and needs to be pressed down really hard to make it diggable. Esp. with a female syrian it would be really rare if she did not dig at all. Males now, they are more lazy so if you offer them a house that's "good enough" many never dig. Or RC dwarfs who in nature often use the burrows of other animals. But for a female syrian there's a good chance that she'll start digging once you hit that perfect mix of bedding.

Definitely, as a first measure get her into something where the wires are out of reach before the behavior becomes too ingrained. Once the behavior is deeply ingrained it becomes very hard to stop even in a great habitat. Just like Demecat said.

Could you try with a new mix of bedding in the temp cage? Maybe if she has no more wires to chew she'll start to dig out of boredom and then get more interested in that?

[kyrilliondaemon]

lol thanks, we were surprised when we did the maths and found out its that big to be honest. The problem is that it is on different levels, as she's got her own shelves with the smaller bits on and the bin cage next to those. The bin cage is three levels of 2145 square cm each, then the biggest of the rest is only about half that. I am aware none of it is very big alone, but its why she has so much and why I spent days looking for bigger bins before giving up and buying the ones she has.
We might be able to rearrange and put bins next to each other if we can connect them well, but it would probably be difficult and we'd have to take her rotastak off her which might upset her since she won't sleep anywhere else.

I haven't got a current photo of the setup, but I'll attatch the one showing all the parts of her cage, just in a different arrangement (it was before we moved her into our bedroom). She does get considerably more woodshavings now too, that photo was during Scamps phase of refusing to let anywhere have a deep layer of them so we gave her the depth she wanted rather than having to unblock tubes twice a day.

Her burrowing chamber has a mix of woodshavings and hay, with some carefresh in there, but no mix we've found yet works. We tried just woodshavings, tried woodshavings and hay, and tried the carefresh as well as mixing the three but so far she hasn't cared. Our other hamsters manage to burrow surprisingly well in their woodshavings but Scamp really isn't interested and it doesn't matter how many things we try. She only ever visits if she wants to rearrange woodshavings and wander off again.

We'll give it a go changing her substrate in the temp cage, and hopefully that'll make a difference. Have you got any idea if we'd be better just adding hay to her woodshavings or changing her to the extra carefresh? (If its carefresh she probably won't get it in the entire cage, but we can put whats left in as much of the cage as it'll be good for.)

We have found a few ways to distract her before but nothing has managed to work for more than a day or two yet before she's back chewing her bars.

It doesn't matter too much if she can't go back to bars ever, I just wanted to find out sooner rather than later as it'll be a bit of work changing caging around until we've got everyone in cages we're happy with.
The important thing is keeping our pets happy, and if Scamp needs us to spend days changing cages around we'll do it, it'd just be easier if we didn't have to.

[TheFeldhamster]

Ok, I guess I can see your problem. I guess for her it's like run 5 paces, climb to the next compartment - run 5 paces - climb etc. Ideally you'd have it all in one piece on one floor but you might get away with having 4 of those bins with 2 each side by side and then stacked on 2 floors in a shelf. If you stack them in a shelf instead of on top of each other you could just mesh the tops instead of having to mesh the sides.

I don't know what your other ham's setup looks like but I often see people who have several "towers" of bins next to each other with one ham per "tower". It always gets me thinking that it might be much better to arrange the setups in "rows" of bins on top of each other. So that hamster 1 has one row, hamster 2 has the row of bins on top of hamster 1 etc. Know what I mean?

The digging area is that tank on the bottom right of the pic? The substrate doesn't look bad from what I can recognize on the pic. But maybe she just doesn't want to dig in that specific place or thinks it's too small or something. I'd rather try to give her continuous deep bedding over a large floor area. I have no personal experience with carefresh but from pics I've seen I doubt that it's diggable. It's more or less like little balls of paper, right? I'd try to add more hay to the mix and then really stamp it down hard to compact it before you put her in.

btw: are you in the US or UK? If you're in the US you might be able to get an artificial christmas tree bin cheaply now that they're in season. They are really nice and big, you might want to consider those. I'm not sure if you can get them in the UK, though.

[kyrilliondaemon]

Yeah, we'll take her bars off her for now and work out if we're willing to risk putting her back in a barred cage or not later I guess. We'll consider seeing if we can get the bins side by side though, it might be possible depending on how we keep the room arranged.

The other hamsters don't have bin cages, they're all in shop-bought cages, and if we ever have lots of bins next to each other I'll make sure they're in rows rather than stacks.

And yeah, thats the digging tank. We'll try giving her a deeper layer of woodshavings and hay in the cage when we change her over later, hopefully that'll get her attention and its good to know that compacting it might be useful.
Carefresh is something like that, so we'll leave it out.

And we're in the UK, if we weren't I'd have bought at least one Christmas box a while ago. Unfortunately they're not avaliable over here, I spent a couple of hours looking one day and came to the conclusion that its either not possible or the way to get them here is very well hidden.

Thanks for all your help though, hopefully we'll get Scamp happier in a no-barred cage tonight and then we'll have a good think and decide if its worth the risk of putting her back with bars in future.

[TheFeldhamster]

Oh, you're totally welcome. I know it's always a big problem with female syrians, they are just so demanding. People over here are having so many problems with them going wild even though many of them use 120cm x 50cm tanks (if you are lucky you can get leaky ones quite cheaply here) - it's just never enough for the girls

I don't know where you are in the UK so have no idea if there's an IKEA near you. If there is, then you could get the biggest 130l "Samla" boxes from them. Box+lid+lid clips (don't forget to get them) is only 15.80 pounds. I'm not sure if ikea would deliver if you are not near one but maybe you could get another member of the forum to buy them for you and mail them to you? Or send them to you via a ridesharing agency? Over here (well, in Austria not so much but in Germany) people use ridesharing a lot to send rescue hamsters and materials all over the country. Usually people have no problem taking stuff or even small animals like hamsters instead of a passenger.

[kyrilliondaemon]

We're hoping to avoid getting more caging, as we have a lot already, so we're planning the best way to give her a bar-free cage from now on, and when she's in her temporary bar free home will see how she copes. If we do need to go to IKEA I'll drive as far as it takes though, we decided a while ago that if we need hamster stuff that isn't local and can't get it online we'll plan a day out to where-ever we want the stuff from and then buy what we need as an extra thing to do that day.

If she finds other things to do a lot then we'll probably let her get her bars back once more, if she isn't happy we'll try and find ways of sparking interest in other things again.
How well she manages with finding other things to do will hopefully tell us if she's ok to have bars again in future or not.

If she can't have bars we've worked out how to rearrange hamster caging so she'd have a total of about 9600 square cm, so she shouldn't be able to object too much even if we do have to keep her away from bars permanently.
It'll just mean changing hamster cages around a bit and probably spending a few days working on them to make sure they're all perfect for the new owners.

Oh and if she does get her bars back we'll stay ready to move her to a bar-free cage if it ever proves needed.


Edit - Decision made, we'll give her a week in the bar-free cage. If she sulks for the next two days we'll start work on the things we'll need to do to give her a large enough permanent bar free cage, if she copes well all week we'll either give her her bars back or leave it a few more days and then give the bars back.
I'll let everyone know how this turns out.

[newham]

look up puppy antignaw spray in a act of desperation I put some on sephies bars of his cage and he hasnt done it since.

[kyrilliondaemon]

Originally Posted by laurarodentfink

look up puppy antignaw spray in a act of desperation I put some on sephies bars of his cage and he hasnt done it since.

Awesome! We'll see how things go in the bar-free cage first, but will definetly consider that as a possible alternative to permanently keeping her away from bars.

[newham]

Originally Posted by kyrilliondaemon

Awesome! We'll see how things go in the bar-free cage first, but will definetly consider that as a possible alternative to permanently keeping her away from bars.

best part is you know its safe and non toxic because puppies are delicate cute balls of fluff....that and I read the ingredients and checked on them online XD