Comments | hamsters: Boy or Girl?

typicalfemale in hamsters

Boy or Girl?

Jun 11, 2012 13:10

Can someone please tell me if my hamster is a boy or a girl? He was younger than our other hamsters when we got him so it was hard to tell, and now it's been about 3 months. We always assumed he was a boy but yesterday while shopping at Petsmart we saw some boy hamsters with some pretty pronounced genitals so I guess it can be obvious that young. I ( Read more... )

Comments 10

darkladyvamp June 11 2012, 18:42:12 UTC

You have a little girl :) Her belly and nose looks like my Andi's did. Their fur so velvety soft!

typicalfemale June 15 2012, 22:01:51 UTC

Thank you! I'm sure my husband will be delighted to know the women now outnumber the men in our house, haha!

Was Andi a black bear hamster too? This is my first of the so-called "black bear" kinds. She seems tamer than some of my other hams have been and is really social too.

darkladyvamp June 16 2012, 07:44:05 UTC

Yep :) I called her my Andi-Bear.

She was an evil genius though. I once looked up from my computer to see her wander into my room, to show off her escape XD There was chicken wire on the top of her cage and she managed to wiggle through.

dream_chaser023 June 12 2012, 04:45:42 UTC

Looks like a little girl to me too! The picture is a bit dark, so If you want to be completely sure, just check the space between the vulva and rectum. If they appear almost right next to each other, then female. If they are spaced quiet a bit from each other, then male.

typicalfemale June 15 2012, 22:04:58 UTC

After I saw your comment I checked and they are very close, and I can see an opening too that looks like a vulva. I had been really confused because I thought that skinless dot in the pic was a penis, and she was so small when we got her that I assumed it was a he and that the testicles would descend eventually.

Thank you for your answer, it's such a relief to be sure about it now! Now that we know she's a girl, we've been hamming it up with her (pun intended) and saying, "Look how pretty you are Ricki, what a PRETTY GIRL!" I swear she knows we goofed up, because she's been in a better mood since we started calling her a she, haha!

component June 15 2012, 20:51:09 UTC

I had the exact same confusion! I bought my long-haired Syrian hamster, Mochi, from a small local petstore. The people in there had always seemed very knowledgeable in the past, so I assumed that they would be able to tell me if the hamsters were girls or boys. The guy checked each hamster individually and claimed they were all male. Later I went to Petco, which had all male long-haired Syrian hamsters as well (for twice the price O_o) and they all had HUGE testicles! I was so baffled, that now I'm thinking the guy at Pets R Us must have been misinformed about deciphering sex lol At least Mochi seems like a gender neutral name too XD I wonder if maybe there is a way to breed them with smaller testicles because clearly the stores got them from different breeders, or if the guy was just plain mistaken. So weird lol Mochi had a rounder face than the others, and was slightly smaller, but none of them had huge testicles.

typicalfemale June 15 2012, 22:09:44 UTC

Wow, you're lucky Mochi didn't get pregnant! Maybe she fended off all of her admirers, haha. My first 2 hamsters were girls and the last 3 were boys. My last girl hamster died more than 10 years ago so I'd forgotten what a girl ham looked like down there!

Ricki definitely looks like a boy, I'm starting to get used to calling her a she but one of the reasons we thought she was a boy was that she's not dainty at all and is crazy athletic. Not to be sexist and say that girls can't be like that, but she's stronger and rougher than any of my boy hamsters were! We've decided she's a little gymnast and we even toyed with calling her Nadia but it's been "Ricky" for months so it looks like "Ricki" will stick with just a change in spelling.

component June 15 2012, 22:37:59 UTC

Actually, I've heard that females are far more aggressive than males. That has also been my experience. If you read this post I just wrote, Kiki, my dwarf hamster, was the meanest most energetic hamster in the pet store and attacked all the other hamsters. http://hamsters.livejournal.com/2649671.html... )

dream_chaser023 June 16 2012, 15:45:40 UTC

She was likely acting that way because dwarf hamsters are territorial, not because she is female. :) If the pet store had recently received a shipment of hamsters, she could very well have been trying to proclaim dominance with the others. They tend to do this at random to (ex. when others are sleeping, running on a wheel, ect.) . These territorial traits are why many dwarf owners recommend having a decent size cage with double everything when having a pair or more. Dwarves do live in groups naturally, but when presented together in a small space and having to share everything, they can be a bit grumpy. lol

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