Ignoring colored biscuits all of a sudden

[Kiraff]

Mmk then I'll leave them in.
I broke those biscuits up. They're surprisingly hard to break.

[kyrilliondaemon]

I know... I used to sit there and cut them with scissors and still struggle lol

[racinghamster]

When I had my chinese female, I fed her on Burgess Supahamster Harvest mix (not the dwarf version though as it`s boring apart from the millet they add to it!). I used the packet with the syrian pictured on the front of the packet and still do today for my syrian and my roborovski.

For a chinese, I removed the yellow whole corn, flaked maize and green pea flakes. I added back other shop bought grains to replace those with ingedients like:

Hemp seed
Dry jumbo porridge oats
Buckwheat
Mixed millet/canary seed mix
Dry mealworms
Fresh foods added daily in very small amounts like sprouted mung bean, a little piece of broccoli or tomato. Cucumber is also fine but it`s mostly water.

If you think along the lines of variety and look at seeds you can add, the diet becomes a lot more small seeds and grains and not so much large bland extruded biscuits, which are coloured and have raising agents added. They are like bricks! I`ve tried to break one with my teeth and can`t! I usually bin those aswell although I do offer one now and then but it never gets eaten...suprise, surprise....

I agree about the foraging that hamsters do and they will dig around in their substrate for a scattering of little millet seeds!

[TheFeldhamster]

All those colored rings, bisquits and similar stuff that you find in pet shop food is mostly junk anyway, so IMO, you should be glad she does not eat those anymore. These things are usually made from the cheapest things - corn or soy leftovers ground to meal, then glued together either with starch + heat + pressure or just heat + pressure, then colored up with colors (and be aware that the laws regulating what can go into a color for pet food are sooo lax they can put in almost anything, healthy or not) and often treated with some form of artificial flavor or sugar (eg. molasses) or salt to make them more appealing to the animal. Again, the laws regulating artificial flavors for pet food are a disgrace.

Meaning, there's almost no vitamins left in there (grinding + heat + pressure will kill the vitamins) but lots of potentially harmful colors and flavors/sugars that are not really declared on the packet - again, the laws regulating how ingredients of pet food have to be declared on the package leave a lot of loop holes so companies get away with the most amazing stuff.


I also think that the healthyness (is that a word?) of lab blocks is overrated. Labs use them primarily because they need to feed a standardized food where the animals can not eat selectively - otherwise their test results would not be valid! And because blocks are much easier to handle. Imagine you have a lab with 200-300 hamsters in lab boxes - you wouldn't want to deal with a loose seed mix even if you could use it. While lab blocks are probably made from better ingredients than pet shop bisquits I'm not convinced that they are better than a good seed mix. They would be good enough so that the animals stay healthy enough for the experiments but I don't think they are the best food you could give.


Ok, I just googled the ingredients of Hazel Hamster:
Flaked whole wheat, ground whole wheat, pelleted soybean meal, dehydrated alfalfa pellets, whole corn, flaked peas, flaked whole corn, sunflower seeds, flaked soybeans, peanut kernels, kibbled locust beans, soybean oil (preserved with BHT), peanuts in shell, pumpkin seeds, wheat middlings, salt, calcium carbonate, sodium sulfate, vitamins (vitamin E supplement, choline chloride, niacin, d-calcium pantothenate, pyridoxine hydrochloride [vitamin b6], vitamin a supplement, riboflavin [vitamin b2], thiamine hydrochloride [vitamin b1], folic acid, biotin, vitamin B12 supplement, vitamin d3 supplement), minerals (zinc oxide, manganese oxide, iron sulfate, copper sulfate, calcium iodate, cobalt carbonate, sodium selenite), added fd&c colors (yellow 6, yellow 5, blue 1).

I'll go through the groups of things I find:

1. Flaked whole wheat, ground whole wheat, wheat middlings = all processed wheat (btw look at wikipedia says about wheat middlings: "Wheat middlings is an inexpensive byproduct intermediate of human food processing, commonly referred to as floor sweepings (although such products are generally captured long before they would end up on the floor). It is an inexpensive filler in pet food")
2. pelleted soybean meal, flaked soybeans, soybean oil = all processed soy products with preservatives to boot
3. dehydrated alfalfa pellets - processed
4. whole corn, flaked whole corn = both corn; whole corn being the first "real" (=unprocessed) ingredient and only no 5 on the list (ingredient lists are ordered by amount, so the first real ingredient is only the 5th most thing in the feed)
5. flaked peas
6. sunflower seeds - hurrah, a second unprocessed ingredient
7. peanut kernels, peanuts in shell = both peanuts, at least not processed
8. kibbled locust beans
9. pumpkin seeds - not processed.

The rest is artificial stuff only, some, like the "added fd&c colors" even potentially harmful. And if you think artificial vitamins and minerals are good, think again. First, if you have to add vitamins and minerals artificially it's a sign of a bad feed. Because it means that the ingredients have been processed so much that they lost so many vitamins that they have to be added back in. Or that the feed is so unbalanced that it can not provide all the necessary minerals so they have to be added artificially. Second, when you process natural ingredients to death you not only lose those vitamins which are added back in but many more. Meaning in total you lose out. Because not all vitamins are added back in because some vitamins are way too expensive and also because some mechanisms are not even completely understood. This is one of the reasons pyhsicians advise you to eat fruit and veg and instead of fast food + vitamin pills. Same thing with pet food.

So looking at the ingredient list I see 9 "groups" of ingredients and only 4 non-processed ingredients and no source of animal protein at all.

IMO, a good feed should consist of a dozen or more unprocessed and different(!) things, some flakes in addition to that are ok because flakes can help older or weaker animals (the flaking process mechanically "opens up" the starch in grains and makes it easier to digest).


Your hamster is a Chinese, right? This is the recipe that one of the best German hamster sites gives for Chinese:

300 grams of small seed mix - several types of millet, canary seed, hemp seed, amaranth, etc. You can look for a budgie feed mix but be careful it should be a feed mix that contains seeds only. Often, bird mixes have other stuff in them like oyster shell or similar stuff (eg. "activity pearls"), then you can't use them. Look for a bird mix that's intended to be germinated then it'll contain seeds only.

150 grams of multi grain mix - look in a health food shop. It should be mostly full grains and only few flakes

150 grams of grass seeds - be careful, they must be without fertilizer and for consumption. Can be hard to find; if you don't find any, use more small seed mix.

150 g animal protein - meal worms, dried grasshoppers, etc

plus some things that are more optional:
100 g dried veg
200 g herbs and dried flower mix (can be replaced by giving a herb hay)
50 g optional mix of shredded corn, flaked peas,... stuff like that

Something like that (doesn't have to be 100% exact) is what I would recommend as a healthy feed.

[Silver]

Or if your in the U.K for a Chinese my dwarf Hamster Basic Dwarf Hamster - Basic - £1.38 : ratRations.com

Or My Dwarf Hamster Basic No Fish (If you can't tolerate fish) Dwarf Hamster - No Freshwater Shrimps - £1.20 : ratRations.com

[racinghamster]

Feldhamster, that all makes perfect sense and what I always thought about commercial hamster mixes. I buy the Burgess Supahamster Hamster Harvest (not the dwarf version the syrian version) and I pick out ALL of the extruded biscuits because I just don`t like the way they are processed and coloured. By the time I remove all the biscuits, the weight/volume of the food has reduced, so I have to add in other seeds and grains to make up for those in the form of hempseed, buckwheat, organic flaked porridge oats and mixed millets sold for birds (budgie tonic mix). But I feed my syrian and roborovski fresh foods aswell.

I`m seriously thinking about trying one or two of your mixes Silver because looking at the variety of ingredients, I feel my boys would benefit more from all the wonderful variety your mixes have, than to keep going with the mixes I currently buy because apart from the flakes grains I gain from the Superhamster, I seem to be looking at extruded biscuits, alfalfa and yellow corn.

My syrian is the more difficult one though as he isn`t mad keen on small millet seeds or anything that size, so he would probably prefer to have larger flaked grains, so I havn`t decided on which to choose at the moment. Decisions, decisions!

[Silver]

LOL

I know it is a hard decision to make. The Syrian mix's have far bigger bits than the Dwarf mix's. How about trying a small bag of each Syrian mix & a small bag of each dwarf mix & see what they think of them.

The Syrian mix's have the same ingredients as the basic but with added apple or banana , so the mix is tweaked to include the dried fruit.

Silver xxx

[Lucinda]

Highly recommend silvers mix on ratrations - my hams eat every piece and it has good variety

[Silver]

Thank You Lucinda

Silver xxx

[racinghamster]

That sounds like a good idea Silver. Buying a few smaller bags and do a mix up. I`m sure my boys would love that. I`ll have a better look at the mixes when I have time and see if there is anything else on the site I can buy at the same time to make up my order. With p&p being around a fiver, I will see how far a tenner goes and then perhaps add a little more!