Escaped hamster - hints and tips to get him back

**babyboos** · 03-20-2005, 04:21 PM

Close all doors and windows, and try to figure out what room your hamster is in. If you are having trouble, try placing a bowl of food in each room. The hamster is bound to get hungry, so you will be able to tell which room he's in by whichever food dish is touched. Or in each room of your house, count out exactly 10 sunflower seeds, and place them near a corner. Every few hours check to see if the pile of seeds in any given room is smaller; if so, then your hamster will probably be close by.

Once you have narrowed down your search, start looking under chairs, beds, in shoes... put yourself into the frame of mind of the hamster. Syrians are wall huggers tend to keep one side of their body to a vertical surface so check all around the perimeter of the room and especially corners. Also, put the hamster's cage down somewhere in that room - he might recognise it as home, and climb back in to his food and his nest.

You could get creative/inventive and devise your own traps. One of the best ways is to get some sort of deep bucket with a ramp heading up to it, with some food as bait. The hamster will fall into the bucket, and then cannot climb out. I use books for the ramps and apple in the bucket as it is nice and smelly - also a trail of seeds up the books seems to work well. Be sure to put some bedding material in the bottom of the bucket to soften his fall.

If your hamster's wheel is really squeaky, put it in the middle of the room that you suspect your hamster to have escaped into. Once you hear the squeaking, you can run over to the wheel and catch your hamster if you are very quick!

SnuggleHam · 03-21-2005, 07:00 AM

Good topic to add!!! I haven't lost one yet.. if I did I'd probably never find it due to my two cats...

It's true though they are wall huggers :P

amnerisryn · 03-21-2005, 11:49 AM

Provided I ever lost Tinky, I'd have the perfect way of telling which room he's in: my cat Max who is DEATHLY AFRAID of Tinky.

Seriously, he has a fit whenever they're in a room together caged or otherwise (i.e. Tinky in his roll about ball).

Emma · 03-21-2005, 01:01 PM

My old Mitzi escaped a few times, but every time she came to find someone to take her back again after a while! I was living in a large shared house with 6 or 7 other people, one day she made it down a flight of stairs and to the other end of the house before she crawled up my housemate's leg to be taken back to bed again. Other times she'll be out in her ball whilst we're watching TV or something, and she'd have escaped out of it without us noticing, and just march across the middle of the floor in front of the TV bold as you like. She wasn't the wall-hugging hideaway type! I've been quite lucky actually with escapee hamsters. Another previous one I had, Rosie, escaped several times but took herself back to her cage each time - we only knew she'd escaped by the trails of sawdust and stockpiles of food behind furniture, and the telltale open cage door, with a hamster fast asleep back in it's bed.

hammydude · 03-22-2005, 05:06 PM

Great topic Babyboos. I've never had mine escape or even try to escape that I know of. I don't think that he would try to escape, he likes his cage too much-I've sat the cage in the middle of the floor several times with the door open for about ten minutes while he was awake and he never tried to get out.......yet!

**babyboos** · 03-25-2005, 08:49 AM

Biscuits knows he is safer with you obviously Chris

than out in the big bad world of our "enclosures"