So, you’ve brought your first pet hamster home, plopped it into its cage, and left it alone for a few hours. Then, you reach your hand in, but instead of running over and starting to sniff you, your hamster stays in the corner of its cage, shaking in terror. How do you get from that to the cuddly hamsters you’ve seen your friends have?
Here are 8 tips for training your hamster to cuddle with you:
- Start young or adopt a previously owned hamster.
- Take things slow.
- Use a lot of treats.
- Allow your hamster outside of its cage.
- Support their whole body.
- Stay low to the ground.
- “Groom” them.
- Pay attention to their body language.
How To Train Your Hamster To Cuddle
By reading this whole article, you’ll learn several tips and tricks that’ll help encourage your hamster to cuddle with you and make them feel safe while doing so.
1. Start Young or Adopt a Previously Owned Hamster
The single best thing you can do to get your hamster to cuddle with you is picking the right hamster. Hamsters, like all rodents, are most easily impressionable when they’re young.
They haven’t solidified their habits yet, so it’s going to be far easier to get a young hamster to cuddle with you than an adult hamster that has never had human interaction in its life.
Alternatively, if you don’t want a baby hamster or you can’t find any in your area, you should be able to find previously owned hamsters to adopt at local animal rescues, and pet stores will sometimes have them as well.
You won’t have been able to train these hamsters from the time they were babies, but it’s possible that someone else may have put the work in for you because they were previously owned.
If you choose to take the adoption route, then make sure that you’re able to meet the hamster and interact with it before you take it home. That way, if there are any behavior issues, you can find out about them then instead of discovering them once the adoption process is already complete.
Read How To Make Your Hamster Happy
2. Take Things Slow
When you first bring your hamster home, you’ll want to leave it alone in its cage for at least a couple of days. It can be hard to resist taking it out. After all, you got a hamster because you wanted to play with it, but it’s an important part of the training process.
This is your hamster’s first impression of you, and you don’t want to rush things to the point where you scare them. If you scare them, it can set the training process back by several days.
Remember that your hamster is a prey animal, and it’s skittish by nature, so you’re going to need to spend lots of time working with it to overcome this.
Predator pets, such as cats and dogs, don’t have the same skittish tendencies, and it can still take them several weeks to settle in. So keep this in mind when you start the training process with your hamster. It’s going to take a while.
Read Difference Between a Hamster and a Gerbil
3. Use a Lot of Treats
Hamsters, like most pets, tend to be extr