It’s perfectly normal for your hamster to sometimes have bulging cheeks, not because their cheeks are made that way, but because they naturally hoard inside their cheek pockets. But if your pet’s cheeks seem to be constantly large and bulging, something could be wrong, and you may need to intervene.
To empty your hamster’s cheek pouch, you can do the following:
- Determine the cause.
- Encourage your hamster to empty its cheeks itself.
- Manually remove the contents of its cheeks.
- Loosen up the debris with a saline solution.
- Bring it to the vet.
There are several possible reasons why a hamster’s cheek pouch would constantly bulge, and determining the cause is crucial for effective intervention. The rest of this article will discuss the possible causes of bulging hamster cheeks and how to empty them properly.
1. Determine the Cause
Before attempting to do anything, you should first determine what’s causing your hamster’s cheek or cheeks to be constantly bulging.
While hoarding food and other stuff in its cheeks is perfectly normal behavior in a hamster, it can sometimes be a sign that something is wrong.
Why Hamsters Stuff Things Into Their Cheeks
Hamsters stuff food into their cheeks as a survival mechanism. This is not simply to stock up on food because they’re feeling the hunger pangs.
Hamsters may be tiny, but they need to eat very frequently – every couple of hours, in fact – which means they have to be out looking for food often. This, in turn, also makes them an easy target for predators.
To lessen the time they are out in the open, they store as much food as their stretchy cheek pouches can handle. Amazingly, their cheek pouches can expand up to their shoulders.
Although we don’t often hear about wild hamsters anymore in the United States, this behavior is adapted for the wild.
Sometimes, hamsters also store other, non-food things. For example, storing bedding in their cheek pouches is typical for caged hamsters. Some mother hamsters may even keep their babies inside their cheeks as a way to protect them when they are out and about.
Read Why Does My Hamster Stink?
Common Causes of Bulging Cheeks in Hamsters
Although hoarding is normal hamster behavior, it can lead to mouth injuries or other health issues.
Here are some common reasons why hamsters have such chubby cheeks:
Impacted Food
When hoarding, hamsters may stuff their cheeks with too much food too frequently. When this happens, they are not able to finish much of the food they previously-stored before pushing in more food.
Doing this too often can cause the food to be impacted inside the cheek pouch, hardening it into a large mass that gets difficult to dislodge.
In some cases, especially when an impaction has remained long, the hamster’s cheeks can become slightly purplish as the skin gets too stretched.