Types of Food

Chow

The hamster foods falls roughly into towo types, with and addendum. One type es the chow diet, where all the ingredients are ground up, miexed together, and compacted into uniform brown squares with all the visual appeal of cardboard. Although this diet donesn’t look very good to humans, it is a complete diet and provdes gnawing excersise for your hamster as well. Chaws, also called pelleted foods, when the food is extruded in smaller squares, can truthfully be said to be a better diet because your hamster can't pick and choose what it eats. It will probably come as no surprise to you that many animals want to eat foods that they like, not just foods that are good for them. Hamsters do it, and so do cows.

Mixed Seeds and Grains

The other type of hamster food consists of mixed seeds and ground grains. The mixed seed manufacturers' slant on mixed seed diets is that they are better for hamsters than chows, because the mixed seed diets provide activity opportunities; hamsters will snoop around in their dish of mixed seeds. This is in effect "foraging," just as a hamster would do in the wild, without, of course, the long walks between seeds. The hamster that finds in the wild what's put into seed mixes is one lucky hamster. One is tempted to say, on reading the ingredient list, "Oh, I could live on that. It's just a fortified type of loose granola." One mi x includes, in addition to the usuallist, almonds, dehydrated apple, and dried carrots, banana, and papaya. No wonder most hamster owners prefer the seed mixes!

Dietary Addenda

The dietary addendum is one most people won't think of, and that's hay, either timothy or alfalfa, or a mix of the two. Hamsters in the wild are grass eaters; they eat it in the field and they pack it into their cheeks and they take it home and stash it in their lardersuntil winter comes. It's easy to add this component to your hamster's diet, either by buying hay or by pulling fresh grass, if you have access to grass that you know hasn't been treated with a pesticide or herbicide.

Whether or not your hamster will eat it, depends on the hamster. My Chinese hamster woke up, moved out of his exercise wheel/bed to cautiously sniff the grass, seemed to shrug, and went back to bed. My Syrian hamster grabbed the grass and began nibbling. The winter whites were indifferent. I add a twist of timothy to my hamsters' cages every time I change them. Although my hamsters don't leap upon ¡t, they nonetheless nibble on the twist in odd moments. You can buy packaged hay, either in bread loaf-sized bags or compressed into browniesized cubes, at your pet store.