When we first got hamsters I wasn’t expecting to spend my evenings and weekends sniffing hamster bedding for hamster piss but this is what we do now. For a while Bella was peeing in a sand bath which was great as I didn’t need to go searching for her toilet but she’s stopped doing that and Daisy has never done it. Daisy just pees in her bed which is usually buried deep in a cave under 10cm of bedding.
Elizabeth and I have just redone Daisy’s home today which involved scooping out huge piles of bedding, sniffing it for piss, then either discarding or putting it in the “to be reused pile”. You’re not meant to change all a hamster’s bedding in one go as it’s stressful for them plus the stuff is expensive so you wouldn’t want to anyway.
We try to be artistic but we can never get it to look as good as Kashi’s rainforest cage. Here’s our effort:
Daisy has a little tunnel at the very back which goes into the far left corner where she had a cave. I destroyed the cave cleaning it out but I doubt it will take her long to rebuild. Here she is peering out of the tunnel entrance.
Last time I cleaned out her cage I gave her a dandelion in dirt as hamsters love dandelions but she consumed it in its entirety in less than a day. The dandelion did look quite pretty there while it lasted though.
rachel.blog 
More to having a hamster than meets the eye 🙂 Like all companion animals, I guess. My own experience with a couple of past boyfriends who got dogs was that they thought the only thing required to look after an animal was to feed it (which I mostly actually did in both instances, as they thought it was okay to make the dog wait all hours until it occurred to them to feed it), and take it out occasionally when it suited them to do so. Yes, it was me who took the dogs out for regular walks, and looked after them in pretty much every way through not wanting them to be neglected. I believe my exes honestly thought that they could get a dog and just park it in the back yard.
Wow that is really hopeless. Thank goodness you were there to prevent neglect!