A Potentially Fatal Problem

Something that I feel is an extremely serious part of hamster care is whether dwarfs should be kept in pairs or not.

At the moment I have 2 hamsters living together in relative harmony with only the occasional argument. However this pair has been whittled down from 4 due to bullying and fights between them all.

It does worry me that it is recommended dwarfs should be kept in pairs or more as overall I have found only male-female pairings do not end in tragedy. I have tried various combinations of same sex pairs; uncle-nephew, father-son, mother-daughter, sisters, brothers as well as totally unrelated pairs all ending with me having to rescue hamsters from death or worse, finding them dead in the morning.

Dont get me wrong, I have in the past had same sex pairs happily live together til the day they die but compared to the number Ive removed badly injured or dead, these hamsters are definately in the minority.

The level of aggression does seem to differ between species with Winter Whites being the worst, I have had Syrians being friendlier towards other hamsters than these guys.
Campbells and Chinese seem to be roughly the same with Chinese possibly slightly more aggressive.
The Roborovski hamster can end up having the worst ends to their fights purely from being so elusive and during fights and arguments, they keep completely silent meaning you may be in the same room as them but dont intervene until its too late.

It will be interesting to hear any views on this matter, especially regarding same sex pairings, and whether male or female pairings are worse.

My hamsters are 6 weeks old , brothers , I acquired one on last sunday , then last night we got his 2 brothers , the 2 brothers picked on the one we got nearly a week ago so I took Casey out the other 2 brothers seem to get on , but I am not sure if I should seperate them now before they start fighting .What do you think? They are lovely have lovely temperaments , I just don't want any to die in fights .So should I keep the brothers together or seperate them now ???

The two brothers have each others scent and recognize the each other as a group. The one who was separated first is concidered an outsider. His scent is now unfamiliar to them. The longer hamsters live together the longer they will remember the scent. If you separate them after a few weeks of life that scent will not stay in their memory of their collective family scent. They may be able to get used to a newcomer related or not however I would carefully observe them and if there is any animosity between them do not leave them alone together. Better safe than sorry. They can commune through the bars if they want to but they won't be able to kill each other from separte cages.