What am I doing wrong with my hamster?
Even with expensive upgrades, stress behaviors can persist.
I honestly don't know what to do anymore. I really don't. I spent the last month reading everything I could find about proper hamster care and I thought I was doing it right. I upgraded her cage to this huge bin setup that everyone recommended. It has literally ten inches of paper bedding in there. I measured it. She has the big wheel that cost me like thirty bucks, she has the sprays, the cork logs, the multi-chamber hide. Everything. I spent hundreds of dollars on this setup because I wanted her to be happy.
But every single night it's the same thing. She ignores all of it. She doesn't burrow, she doesn't run on the wheel. She just finds the one spot near the mesh cutout and hangs there. Chewing. The sound is driving me insane. It's this metal-on-metal scraping sound that just goes on for hours. And I can't stop her. I try to distract her but she just goes right back to it.
The worst part is I looked at her cheek this morning and it looks bruised. There's a little patch where the fur is thin and the skin looks red because she's pressing her face so hard against the wire mesh trying to chew her way out. It makes me feel sick. Like I'm keeping her prisoner or something. I'm trying so hard to give her a good life and she's hurting herself to get away from it.
I feel like I've failed her. I look at all these pictures on Instagram of hamsters sleeping peacefully in their hides or digging cute little tunnels and Pip is just... frantic. Always frantic. I thought the upgrade would fix this. Everyone said 'get a bigger cage and the stress behaviors stop.' Well they didn't stop. They got worse.
I'm just so tired. I don't have infinite money to keep buying new things. I don't know if she's sick or if she just hates me or if the cage is still somehow wrong. I'm staring at the cage right now and dreading the sun going down because I know the noise is going to start again.
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Has anyone else upgraded their hamster's cage and still had them act this stressed? I feel like I'm at a dead end.
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This entry is part of My Hamster is Still Stressed - I upgraded her cage and spent hundreds, but she still tries to escape.
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