Make your Own Mix

C. H. Keeling, a hamster fancier and keeper in England, makes his own hamster diet from bran, crushed oats, and soya meal, to which he stirs in a standard hamster mix that contains bits of rat blocks, sunflower seeds, dried corn, pea meal, corn flakes, dried peas, and wild bird seed. Keeling adds fresh foods to this admittedly dry diet, varying among apple si ices, carrots, and cabbage, which his hamsters only nibble on. His Chinese hamster families enjoy as a group (or may choose to ignore) grass, dandelions, cherries, grapes, and peas. It does sound like a lot of work.

The big pitfall with creating your own food is that unless you work at the numbers for protein, fat, fiber, mineral, and vitamin content, you're feeding your hamster food that may not provide what it needs. I found it easier to read and compare labels and buy the commercial mixes.

Snacks

You might be amazed at the variety and number of hamster snacks available for you and your hammie. Use them, of course, but cautiously, because they aren't complete diets. Most of them are very appealingly packaged, using bright colors such as red, which is an appetite stimulant in humans. Some of them look so much like human food that I won't tell anyone if you don't. Most of the commercial treats contain sweeteners such as sugar, honey, or corn sugar, and are brightly colored themselves. I was curious about some snacks that look like brightly colored sticks, and tasted them myself. They were sweet, so I checked the labe!. The main ingredients were flour and corn syrup, not much to offer, nutrition-wise. Hamsters will willingly eat more sweet treats than a balanced diet, so you'lI have to limit the treats offered.

Snack products fall into two basic groups-the mixes and the singleitem foods. The mixes combine such things as peanuts, molasses, papaya, apples, carrots, and su nflower seeds, usually compressed into nuggets large enough for a human to easily handle.

The single-food treats are generally dried fruits or vegetables. The small ears of dried corn look like they'd be fun as well as providing hours of disassembly time. Another manufacturer offers dried mango, papaya, banana, and pineapple. Compare the ones you can buy at your pet store, which in many cases are produced overseas, with the dried fruits you can buy at your local health food store. The pet items are packed in 50-gram packages for about a dollar a package, which computes to about 66 cents an ounce. Oried mangoes for human consumption cost about the same at my local health food store.

Are these snacks necessary? No, not at all; even though you may enjoy feeding your pet something you know it likes, you need to provide proper nutrition.