Private Moxie's Pets Corner: Raising Pups : The Importance Of Healthy Diet

When you found out that your hamster is pregnant, it is important that she must be given with enough and nutritious food in order to make sure the pups born later are healthy. Female hamster with not enough nutrients in her food while pregnancy may resulted the pups born small and maybe die later. The mother is lucky if the number of the pups is small such as 2 or 3. But if the number is big like 7 and more, she maybe in trouble because she has many mouths to feed and her pups may die one by one.

Last night, my friend asked me to take take care one of her mother hamsters. I've made her case as an example of the importance of taking care of the mother hamster while during and after her pregnancy. Her case is compared with my female hamster, Lizzy :

1. Lizzy - As I've written in my earlier post, she has given birth to 2 pups and manage to raise them well and healthy, and cute too. During the time, I make sure she's been taking care of well. She's not much of a problem because this is her fourth pregnancy.

2. Mother 2 - The hamster is my friend's. This is her first litter and she has 3 pups. They were born on the same day as Lizzy's litter.

3. Mother 3 - This one gave birth to 5 pups, on the same day as Lizzy and Mother 2 too, but sadly she died four days later. I've asked my friend to mix her pups together with Mother 2's. Luckily, everything went well except that the mother had to feed 8 pups.

After I brought home Mother 2, 3 of her original babies were mixed with Lizzy's. At first I was afraid of Lizzy attacking the 3 babies but she treated them like hers too. The images below show the obvious difference of the size between Mother 2's babies and Lizzy's, even though they were born on the same day. And I think this is because of the mother's diet while pregnancy and also while raising the pups.