Posts tagged "gerbil"

Gerbils are friendly, curious, active rodents who are very social; it's recommended that they're kept in clans of two to four. Males and females vary greatly, with females being more dominant and therefore more curious and aggressive. It's easier to introduce a new pup to a male clan.

Gerbil Habitat and Grooming
Gerbils, which usually live about two to four years, don't need much in the way of grooming. You'll need to clean out their tanks and change their bedding every two to three weeks, but, because they're desert animals, they excrete small amounts of (mild-smelling) urine and small, hard feces. Gerbils clean themselves daily, according to Small Animal Channel.com, so there's no need to brush or bathe them. As long as they're provided with plenty of toys and cardboard to gnaw on, they should stay entertained and happy.

Common Gerbil Health Issues
Gerbils are healthy creatures, with the most common ailment being raw noses from rubbing against their cages, reports A Gerbil Care Resource. Other possible health problems are missing teeth, scent gland tumors (in males only), external tumors from scratching, and strokes. However, generally speaking, gerbils shouldn't cost you too much in terms of veterinary care.

Gerbil Training
It's possible to train gerbils to use a litter box and respond to their names, according to Small Animal Channel.com. If your gerbil uses a litter box, you won't have to change the bedding as often. For this training and to teach them any other tricks, use only positive reinforcement. Train twice a day for short periods, 10 minutes at most, and reward desirable behaviors.

Gerbils and Children
Gerbils are very easy to care for, so they're great for busy families, according to Twin Squeaks. As long as children are taught to handle gerbils gently, it shouldn't be a problem to have gerbils as pets with children of any age. Of course, if you have other pets like a cat or dog, you'll need to keep your gerbils safe from potential harm.

What Gerbil Owners Have to Say
Ilona Peltz, who has owned a number of small animals, has fond memories of the gerbils she and her children raised. "They're lively and entertaining to watch," she tells Paw Nation. However, she cautions against keeping them in a home with small children. "Gerbils are also amazingly stupid," she says, "and are jumpy, nervous, fast, and not willing to cuddle, so small children are likely to drop and hurt them."

There are a lot of hamster toys out there, and that's not including the new electronic hamsters or even the home-made iMac hamster cage. With so many different toys to choose from, it's nice to know which toys are the weirdest and most interesting. We've compiled a small list for you of some of the wackiest, cutest, and most practical hamster products out there.

1. The Super Pet Critter Operated Chopper, the Super Pet Dazzle Hamster Carriage, and the Habitrail Playground Dragster are all glorified hamster balls that look like vehicles for stylish outside-the-cage adventures. Now your hamster can look as bad-to-the-hamster-bone as it feels.

2. The Habitrail OVO series of hamster habitats and products offers hamster habitats that aren't just practical and simple, but that look incredibly cool too, almost as if Apple had decided to make hamster products.

3. 8 in 1 Pet Products designed their eCOTRITION Snak Shak line to do double duty. The products are meant to provide both shelter and food. That means that with eCOTRITION Snak Shak edible hamster habitats, hamsters have habitats that change daily, are nutritious, and aren't too expensive. Our favorite: the Snak Shak couch.

4. The Flying Saucer Plastic Exercise Wheel by Ware Manufacturing features an innovative design that turns the dangerous qualities of a normal wire-mesh hamster wheel on its side, letting the hamster run around what looks like a spinning plate. That means great exercise that's completely safe.

5. Small-animal treats based on Disney's "Ratatouille" may not be the most original or cleverest invention on this list, but "Ratatouille" is one of the few films with which our furry rodent friends can identify, and feeding "Ratatouille" treats to your hamster might just make it feel like it's feasting on one of the gourmet creations of its computer-animated rodent cousin.

With all these options, your hamster has a lot to look forward to this holiday season!

Hamsters: They have their good days and their bad days.

There are some really obscure sports out there -- Curling, Bocce Ball, Jai Alai, Ice Hockey -- but today, Paw Nation has a sport so obscure that you'd think it was just made up by some bored Europeans in the eighties. Oh wait, it was!

Small animal agility competitions (for rats, gerbils, hamsters, rabbits, etc.) are growing in popularity every day. In fact, by the end of this decade, there may be as many as 20 people in the world who participate in them.

Small animal agility expert Marna Kazmaier, host of several animal websites, such as The Agilerat and Gerbil Agility, and owner of a kennel/ranch where she and her husband, Deron, train all sorts of animals including Siberian Huskies, spoke with Paw Nation about small animal agility.

So you've opened tabs for The New York Times, CNN, Perez Hilton, and ESPN. Your reader is overflowing with RSS feeds. You're getting thousands of e-mail updates and newsletters. But it's all missing something.

Where are the hamsters? What's going on in the hamsterverse?

You can now relax because we have found the perfect site for you. The Daily Hamster is a simple blog with a simple motto: "The kitten and puppy people have their daily fix; now it's our turn." That's right, kitten and puppy people. Step aside. Your time is over. The internet is entering the Great Hamster Era and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

The Daily Hamster is updated almost daily (hopefully more after this little article!) with cute pictures, drawings, and videos of hamsters. The creators of the site have a great sense of humor, which is something of a requirement when dealing with this often-ornery rodent. The site also has a great link section to satisfy all your other hamster needs.

Considering the similarities between hamsters and gerbils, you'd think there'd be The Daily Gerbil somewhere out there. Well, there isn't. You'd better get on that, gerbil people.

Remember the hamsterdance -- those singing, dancing hamsters filled us with joy and ineffable hamsterness? It was one thing when hamsters were on your computer, but did you ever think they'd be inside your computer?

eBay vendor ak_drummer, a person with too many old electronics and too much time, has given us a hamster cage for the new millennium, in that it's from the last millennium: a hollowed-out 1998 iMac. Now your hamster will be up-to-date on things like the Monica Lewinsky scandal and that brand-new show "Dawson's Creek"! Not to mention how computer-savvy your hamster will become: soon he'll be downloading *NSYNC songs from Napster, burning them onto a CD-ROM and playing it on his trusty Walkman.

The ever-expanding Pitt-Jolie clan must have missed the memo that Guinea pigs are all the rage. While shopping at a pet and garden shop near their chateau in the south of France this weekend, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie let sons Maddox, 8, and Pax, 5, pick out gerbils and goldfish, Us magazine reports.

According to Us magazine, Jolie, decked out in a black maxi dress, reached into the cage to pet the gerbils while Pitt strolled the aisles for rodent gear.

With Brangelina throwing their celebrity weight behind gerbils, will a new pet craze sweep the nation?

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