We love ice cream, especially in these hot summer months! Ice cream helps us stay cool and tastes good as well! What a delicious treat for a human to eat, however, can hamsters eat ice cream? We love it, but can they eat it? The answer is sad no, they can’t. Ice cream can be dangerous for our furry friends to eat and it can cause unfortunate health consequences. This means that you should stay away from ice cream if you want to keep your pet safe.
In this article, we’ll be going through what ice cream is and why hamsters can’t eat it. The main reasons are: It’s too cold, it isn’t nutritious, it has too much sugar and it is hard for them to eat it. We’ll then finally look at alternatives that you can give your furry friends! Read on to find out more!
Ice Cream is delicious food that we love! It’s made from cream and milk and is eaten all over the world! It’s produced all over the world as well, you can even make it at home. You can have vanilla, chocolate and so many different flavors of ice cream. It’s usually eaten with some form of topping, such as a sweet sauce. The Italians are known to have the most delicious form of ice cream. It’s such a shame that hamsters cannot eat any of it.
There are unfortunately plenty of reasons why hamsters cannot eat ice cream. We will be going through all of them in this article. Please remember that this only means that you can’t feed your hamster ice cream on purpose. If your hamster has just licked a bit of ice cream accidentally from you, then they should be fine. What we mean is that you shouldn’t make feeding them ice cream a habit!
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As the name suggests, ice cream is extremely cold! It has to be below 0C to maintain its strength, and that isn’t good for a hamster. Hamsters often find it hard to regulate their temperature, which means that any dramatic drops in body temperature can cause them serious problems. This obviously can happen with ice cream as cold food can rapidly lower their body temperature and result in all kinds of problems. Warm ice cream wouldn’t cause this problem, but who wants to eat warm ice cream?
Ice cream isn’t known for having a nutrient balance. True, it may have calcium, but this isn’t enough considering how much it will fill up your hamster. Feeding ice cream as a treat to your furry friend will fill them up and mean that they don’t have enough room for anything nutritious. This in turn can lower their lifespan by making them more susceptible to disease. You need to stay away from the ice cream and stick to the greens, your hamster will love them all the same!
So we know that ice cream doesn’t have much of a nutritional balance, but it gets worse! Ice cream also has sugar and fat which can seriously hurt your hamster. Sugar can cause diabetes in hamsters, this is due to how weak their body is and how much sugar impacts their body. We can handle the amount of sugar in ice cream but that’s because of our size and the ability of our digestive system to fight off problems. Fat can also cause problems for your hamster by making them obese. These two reasons are why hamsters really cannot eat ice cream!
Hamsters are not massive fans of eating the food that they are given. They love to pouch it up and save it for later. You might have already figured out that this can be a bit of a problem when it comes to ice cream. It can easily melt in their poach and this could cause problems for them later on in life. You should therefore avoid feeding ice cream to your furry friend.
See also Can Hamsters Eat Kiwi? – Petsbent 
So, what alternatives can there be to ice cream? For this, we are mainly going to look at dairy products, as these are the most similar things to ice cream!
Cheese is a dairy food that hamsters can eat. Check out our article on cheese here!
Yogurt is another dairy food that is very similar to ice cream. Check out our article on yogurt here!
Greens are the best thing to give your hamster. This is stuff like broccoli and carrots. These are healthy and have lots of nutrients!
So in conclusion, can hamsters eat ice cream? Sadly not. Why? It’s too cold, devoid of nutrients, contains lots of sugar and fat and it is too hard to eat. Feeding this to your hamster could cause serious health problems for them sadly. Cheese, yogurt, and lots of greens can be a fantastic substitute for your pet.
