{"id":22279,"date":"2016-12-12T21:16:28","date_gmt":"2016-12-12T13:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=22279"},"modified":"2017-02-21T21:54:22","modified_gmt":"2017-02-21T13:54:22","slug":"the-pet-project-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2016\/12\/12\/the-pet-project-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pet Project \u2013 Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Stacy &#8211; our family Syrian hamster &#8211; is now four months old. She&#8217;s also grown noticeably larger from about 8cm when we first got her, to 13cm long from snout to her stump tail. From what we&#8217;ve read, this is supposed to be nearly about her maximum size already, but I reckon we didn&#8217;t expect her to grow up quite so fast!<\/p>\n<p>Though she&#8217;s comfortable with either Ling or myself holding her, she&#8217;s still quite shy socially and can be easily startled by movements around the house. She&#8217;s otherwise pretty fearless, and spends a good amount of time every night climbing the bars of the cage. On several occasions, we&#8217;ve seen her hanging precariously at the top of her cage with just one paw. Occasionally, she&#8217;ll be able to swing herself up so that her feet can grip the cage bars. More often than not though, she&#8217;ll fall right down, dust herself off, and try again LOL.<\/p>\n<p>One habit we&#8217;re trying to break of her though is her chewing of cage bars. And that&#8217;s despite her cage having about six different types of materials she can chew &#8211; apple sticks, mineral chews, ropes, wood blocks, dog biscuits, and even toilet rolls. It got so bad that she chewed through the coating of the cage bars, and we had to physically fastened chew sticks there to block her from getting near the cage bars.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_22283\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-22283\" style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-22283\" src=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMDC0736-syrian-hamster.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMDC0736-syrian-hamster.jpg 640w, https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMDC0736-syrian-hamster-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-22283\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left to it, she&#8217;d probably gnawing through the bars and onto freedom!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"attachment_22284\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-22284\" style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-22284\" src=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMDC0795-syrian-hamster.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMDC0795-syrian-hamster.jpg 640w, https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMDC0795-syrian-hamster-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-22284\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">She lets us carry her now, though she won&#8217;t remain still even then.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"attachment_22285\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-22285\" style=\"width: 480px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-22285\" src=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMEC0878-syrian-hamster.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"640\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMEC0878-syrian-hamster.jpg 480w, https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMEC0878-syrian-hamster-225x300.jpg 225w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-22285\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Hamster with spider genes!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"attachment_22286\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-22286\" style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-22286\" src=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMEC1068-stacy-at-play-swing.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMEC1068-stacy-at-play-swing.jpg 640w, https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMEC1068-stacy-at-play-swing-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-22286\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The two feet cage has plenty of toys for her to interact.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stacy &#8211; our family Syrian hamster &#8211; is now four months old. She&#8217;s also grown noticeably larger from about 8cm when we first got her, to 13cm long from snout to her stump tail. From what we&#8217;ve read, this is<\/p>\n<div class=\"entry-read-more\"><a class=\"read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2016\/12\/12\/the-pet-project-part-4\/\">Read More<span class=\"cleanwp-sr-only\">  The Pet Project \u2013 Part 4<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,7],"tags":[581],"class_list":["post-22279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquarium-pets","category-at-home","category-children-blues","tag-hamster","wpcat-5-id","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-7-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/blog-2016-pets-OMDC0736-syrian-hamster.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}