Sorry folks for my slacking and thank you for your patience on waiting for my article. Guess I need to come out with new articles over the weekend! Okay, to jump start the engine, I decide to do a "mini" topic on hamster bedding before moving on to more serious topics. I have decided to totally avoid the brands of bedding for non-commericalising purposes and just focus on the advantage and disadvantages only. Here goes:
What is a bedding?
A hamster bedding is a layer of material that you lay on your hamster's cage. Most common function of a hamster bedding is actually to absorb urine and freshen up the cage as most hamster owners only clean their hamsters and cages 1-2 times per week. Most of times, hamster owners buy hamster bedding commercially although DIY beddings are available.
- Normal Types of Bedding available on the market
- Wood Shavings/Chips
- Straw and/or Hay
- Corn Cob Bedding or similar
- Cat Litter or pelleted bedding
- Paper Pulp Bedding
- Wire Mash
- DIY Bedding
- Newspapers/Magazines
- Shredded papers
- Nesting Material
- Cotton
- Papers Material
- Bathing Sands
- Bathing sands are which a type of sands that help hamsters to get rid of its dirt/oil by rolling over the sand. Aside that, smarter hamsters can actually pee only in bathing sands while keeping the rest of the cage clean.
- Generally, bathing sands have 2 types of fineness - Coarse sand and Fine sand. Coarse sand are usually used for littering purpose white fine sand is used for hamster rolling purpose.
- There are some type of coarse sand that will turn into lump upon contact with urine and these type of sands are the type that work best with hamsters that tends to urine a lot.
- Aside of the fineness of the sand, there are also tons of sand that are scented with various flavors like apple and rose! Personally, I perfer non-scented sand as I use cucumber flavour deorderizer for my hamster cage. ^^
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The most common bedding available on the pet stores are Wood Shaving/Chips. Wood shavings are generally softer than chips but there's quite a few drawbacks despite the affordability. Sometimes rough wood shavings/chips might give your hamster a splitter on its limbs and wood shaving/chips, by itself, doesn't absorb urine that well and give off awfully smell after 3-4days of changing cages especially with hamsters that tends to urine very often.
However, please by all means avoid the following wood bedding by all cost: Cedar/Pine. Despite the fact that both cedar and pine give off nice fragrance. They are known to give your hamsters health problem as well. This is a well known fact within the community of rat/hamster owners. In case, you need more information, I also added a link here that touches on the toxicity of these 2 wood bedding.
- Another affordable bedding will be straw/hay bedding. Both straw/hay bedding can be used for hamster bedding but there's a difference between both of them. Hay are generally grasses that are cut while it is still alive and straw is a byproduct. Hay can be used as a feeding material on its own as it still maintain the nutritious value while straw cannot be used as a feeding material. As hay can be served as a fresh food/bedding by itself, interaction with urine from hamsters will make it stink very fast.
- One of the most affordable bedding but with tons of disadvantages. Corn cob doesn't not do absorb urine and smell that well but is relatively one of the cheapest bedding available in the pet store. Generally corn cob bedding needs to be change more frequently as compare the the rest as corn cob bedding will turn mouldy pretty fast upon contact with moisture.
- This is actually one of my favourite bedding due to the fact that pellated bedding can absord urine pretty well. There are quite a few pellets beddings out on the market with round or flat bedding being the 2 most common designs. However, pelleted bedding is well-known for its cost. 1 small bag of pelleted bedding is almost equivalent to a medium/large bag of wood shaving bedding depending on bands.
- Another favourite hamster bedding of mine! This paper pulp bedding is generally much softer/lighter than pelleted bedding and can control urine equally well. Paper pulp comes in large variety of colours andand turn yellowish in colour when in contact with urine. Personally I only like white bedding as I'm not sure if the colourful bedding available at the pet store are dye safe for hamster. However, its cost is equally matching to that of pelleted bedding or even higher, depending on the brands available.
- Some of the cages have wire mash that comes with it. This really save quite a substantial amount of money for the bedding and hamster's urine and droppings are drop below leaving the hamster cleaner than normal bedding. However, one major drawback of wire mash is that your hamster have to stand/walk/sleep on the wire mash over a prolong period of time.
- For hamster owners on shoes string budget, this is the cheapest DIY material available. However, most hamster website/owners/forums won't recommend this alternative due to the ink printing on the papers and hamsters might eat/chew on the newspapers.
- Personally used it without much of an issue with my hamsters when I first started out rearing hamsters but there are 2 main drawbacks from my experience.
- Firstly, newspaper and magazines do not have good urine absorbtion properties, and turns pretty fast into pulp like materials upon contact with water.
Secondly, my hamsters love to dig tons of holes in my newspapers bedding and it is really hard to find them at times. There was once I had a pretty sick hamster and it went into digging mode and I have to unearth the entire bedding just to find him.
- For folks who owns papershredder - you will love this method. All you do is stand in front of paper shredder and shred any amount of white/brown papers without ink for your hamster bedding! But this process is pretty daunting especially if your shredder is lite function by nature. Another point to note will be that papers don't absorb urine that well and frequent changing of bedding is recommended.
- Hamster owners usually will give their hamsters additional material to bulit their nest and one of the most common material will be cotton. Most of commerical cotton from Pet Store are natural cotton.
However for hamster owners who are on shoes- string budget, I recommend another alternative of buying 100% facial unbleach cotton pads from non-pet store. So far i dont have any issues from hamsters using facial cotton pads as I make sure they are 100% natural and have minimium processing.
- Other types of DIY materials for nesting materials includes tissue papers, facial tissue, toilet papers and even paper towels can be used as nesting material for hamsters.
I love give my hamster, Baba, 1 piece of facial tissue after another after changing the cage bedding and nesting material. Baba seems to have so much fun pulling all the tissues into his home while remaking his nest.
