Treats for Your Hamster Straight from Your Pantry

• Offer once or twice a week:
• * Eggs-scrambled or hardboiled (but no salt!)
• * Dog biscuits-high in protein and the hard texture will keep the hamster busy (and his teeth worn down)
• * Milk - just a teaspoon or less, in a hard-to-turn-over dish
• * Mixed bird seeds-your hamster would like parakeet or canary mix
• * Nutritional yeast-the sort found in health food stores or sold in a tablet form as a food supplement for dogs and cats. Offer only a half-tablet once a week, and buy those without garlic.
• * Dry sugar-free cereal
• * Whole wheat bread
• * Uncooked pasta

During the breeding season, the diet of the female needs to include a higher percentage of protein. The normal hamster diet has only 12-16 percent protein, so add lab rodent blocks or a few mealworms to the female's food area. For breeding animals, look for a diet that has 15-17 percent protein and 7-9 percent fat. If the mix has a fat content that is higher than 7 percent, use that mix as a treat, or combine it with another food that's lower in fato One commercial lab block has a protein level of 22 percent, and a fat level of 5 percent; if you use this, add a bit of fat to the diet, such as sunflower seeds.

Vitamins

When you discuss food, you can't help but get into a discussion about vitamin supplements. Most adult humans take vitamins, as a preventive measure. Commercial hamster diets are complete diets, we are told, but at the same time those same food manufacturers produce and sel! vitamin supplements. What's going on?

Look upon a vitamin supplement as a form of insurance. Few hamsters gobble up every different type of seed put in their cage. The diet provided may be a good one, but what gets eaten may not be balanced, unless you feed hamster chow. Like humans, hamsters and hamster strains differ from each other genetically. Some strains are very susceptible to maladies such as diabetes or dental caries, which makes them ideal for research on these conditions. It is possible that a vitamin supplement can make the difference between a hamster that gets sick and one that doesn't. Since the vitamins are in a liquid form, designed to be added to the food or to the water in the water bottle, if you're worried about your hamster refusing to eat or drink because it doesn't like the way the vitamins taste, you may want to add a second water bottle, and put the drops only in that bottle.

Mineral Requirements

Interestingly enough, researchers admit that even after all these years, not much is known about the mineral requirements of hamsters. Nonetheless, there are mineral supplements for hamsters on the market. One of the newer items is a calcium tablet that's flavored with cricket bits. That may sound ghoulish, but if you've ever offered your hamster a live cricket, you've seen her make a fool of herself, leaping upon and crunching down the insect before you finish saying, "1 don't think she's going to eat that, ohhhhhh, yuck." These supplements give your hamster calcium, a necessary mineral, with the tantalizing taste of actual crickets. And you don't have to look at, buy, chase down, or hold a single insect.