Ok, I'm going to do this as a bullet list because I've tried way too many times to write this and I end up rambling and not making much sense
My dwarf hamster, Cadmium, is about 17 months old now. Up until mid-March it was honestly easy to forget that she wasn't only a few months old any more. In mid-March, we had to take her to the vet for a respiratory infection, which fortunately was treated and cleared up, though we were reminded of her age at the time and advised to be aware of it. She picked up and was back to her old self for a while, but since then I've noticed a few changes:
- sleeping more and inconsistent about when she is up, when you used to be able to easily predict when she'd be up and about
- eating less, though she's still interested in her food: she'll jump on any mealworms offered to her, she just collects up less of her seed mix
- she's getting thinner (though she's definitely not worryingly skinny) presumably because she's not eating as much
- less interested in out of cage time or being handled (which is fine, I'm happy to do things on her terms) where she used to take every opportunity to come out and have a cuddle
- seems a little bit shaky at times
- seems a bit grumpier than she used to be.
These appear to be fairly common signs of ageing, and given that she's rattling towards 18 months, it doesn't seem unfair to consider that she's starting to feel her age a bit.
So my question is about cage set up. I've got Cadmium in a detolf which has been a really good cage for her. It's coming up to time to do more than a spot clean, and the last time I did it, she wasn't really showing signs of ageing, so I did her preferred layout of a deep end with her house on top for burrowing, sloping down to a shallower end with her wheel and sand bath. She's got bendy bridges and shelf-type toys that she's always enjoyed climbing on/over/under, as well as card board and wooden tunnels. (Amongst plenty of other stuff... bear with me)
I'm just wondering if I need to be levelling out her cage for her next set up, or taking out bridges. She's pretty clumsy at times and she loves to climb, so I've always made sure that anything she *might* fall off has plenty of soft substrate underneath, and limited the heights she can fall from anyway.
I don't want to take away the things she enjoys, but equally, I don't want to risk her hurting herself unnecessarily
I'm also reticent to go from scatter feeding to bowl feeding because she *always* ignores her bowl :/ I know it would make it easier for her to collect her food, but I'm worried she won't get enough food, so maybe scatter feed closer to her nest?
Any advice?