Hamster Babies

One day, you look inside your hamster’s cage and see a little bundle of wrinkly, pink colored creatures with beady, black eyes. You’ve got yourself some hamster babies! This often comes as a surprise to most hamster owners, since pregnant hamsters don’t look much different than any other hamster. Hamsters are so furry and chubby that it can be hard to tell. Quite often, pet store workers won’t be able to tell you if you’ve got a boy or girl hamster, so if you were told you have two boys or two girls by a pet store employee, this might not be the case and you could have both a boy and a girl – which might give you some hamster babies.

For the first 2-3 weeks, you don’t have to do anything. Nature will run it’s course. The mother of the hamster babies (pups), will feed them her milk for about 2 or 3 weeks. You should not touch the babies because you will leave a human scent on them. Like many animals, a mother and father hamster would rather eat their babies than leave them for a predator to attack and kill. If they smell another species scent on their babies, like your human scent, the babies are very likely to be eaten by their parents in order to protect them from you. So do not touch your hamster babies for at least the first 3 weeks. Just let nature do it’s job. The mother will take care of her babies.

You can watch the mother do some pretty neat things with her babies during the next few weeks, while you keep from touching your hamsters. The mother usually carries off the babies one by one in her mouth. She will carry them to another location in the cage and bury them in the soft bedding or hamster shavings. Then, almost like she changed her mind about where she wants them, she will dig the hamster babies out, and carry them in her mouth, one by one to another spot in the cage, and bury them there! She can do this several times each day, and is sometimes quite fun to watch.

Do not clean your hamsters’ cage or touch anything inside the cage, except for when you feed the older hamsters. The mother’s water bottle should also have plenty of fresh water, and you should feed her lots of hamster food and fresh vegetables. If you don’t want anymore hamster babies, you should remove the father from the cage, being careful not to touch the babies or the mother. Hamsters can get pregnant again almost immediately after delivering the babies.

If you need to find your hamster babies new homes, they will be ready to go in about 6 weeks. Just be sure that whoever you send them to live with has all the proper equipment to care for a hamster, and is able to take very good care of them.