We got 4 chinese dwarf hamsters in july last year......we were told they were all male and that dwarf hamsters were communal animals that love the company of their own kind.......everything was going great untill they all started fighting one another......we tried seperating them on different levels of their cage, but that didnt work.....and when we were saving for another cahe to really separate them we found one of them dead,,,and half eaten by the others, this really upset me as i was just waiting for the money to sort the problem out...... fortunately we have 3 cages for them now so they are all separate from one another and they are all really healthy etc..... has anyone else had any problems like this?

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This is my dog Jasmin......

hamsters do eat the dead bodies of their house mates as they like to keep their cages 'clean'

We had a simular problem with roborovski's, we only had two though and they just had little squables.

Problem with more than two is they can "gang" up on one of the others and it often ends in them killing the "picked" on one and eating it.

I had two Robo sisters for a while, until one escaped at night and died by accident (long story!), so we went back to where we got the girls from and we got another two of my ones sisters. They were fine but one seemed a little off and unfortunately died in the night. Her sisters never touched her though, they didn't want to be near her.

The thing with rodents is that most will pick on one that isn't doing too good or has something wrong with it (thats still healthy though) because they know its "different". My gf had this problem with two female rats who were sisters. One was blind and deaf and the other would pick on her a lot, so they had to be seperated.

For them, its life. Its instincts and you can't take that away from them. For us, its weird and upsetting