Syrian hamster bites without being frightened

[AllanK]

Hi all,

My syrian hamster, Pelliodas, is 6 months old and I got him from a pet shop. Me and my girlfriend were doing some nice progress on taming him to the point where he would let us pet him and he'd come and onto our palm... he was never willing to be lifted tho as he would immediately jump out of the palm.

But for a while already, maybe 2 months, he started biting us really bad for no apparent reason. He doesn't feel frightened, as his behaviour is the same. In the beginning, he would smell the hand and mind his own business or climb up if there's any food. Now all he does is bite... and he bites really hard. I guess there's no need to mention the blood, but for example he got stuck with his teeth in my finger... and today he got the sleeve of my hoodie while i was changing his water and he wouldn't let go of it to the point where I felt like trying to take the bone out of a dog's mouth.

I thought this is maybe because the smell on my hands, but he genuinely bites everything, even my clothes or the comb I use to brush his long fur. The ONLY time he's not biting is he's eating. When he eats I can pet him, even between his ears and he doesn't care, also he still eats the food I give him from my hand, although I only dare give him bits at once with my finger as I don't trust him to climb in my palm again without taking a bite out of it.

No matter where he is in his cage, or what he's doing, he will always come to inspect and ultimately bite anything that's getting into his cage. Strange enough, when my friend got his hand there, the hamster was running away from him.

We didn't take him out of his cage yet, because the cage is quite big (6000cm²) and we currently can't have a play pen in our room. Might he get territorial? Or what could be the reason?

Any suggestions help as we're getting really sad as he might hate us and we don't even know why, especially because he doesn't do any noises and we're trying as much as possible to never corner him or anything like that, as I've said, he's straight up coming to my hand and it's getting difficult even to change his water or clean his sand bath... stuff he's never done before.

Thank you very much and I am extremely sorry fot the long essay and if this kind of question was already answered.