My daughter Leah 9 insisted on getting 2 hamsters, like her friends have. I am an animal lover and always trust my instincts about pets. We had just lost our second pet rat. I had never had rats as pets but now adore them, trouble is they don’t live long and we seem to troubled with ones getting sick and my hubby suspects they were once upon a genetic line used in lab experiments, Who knows? Anyway my daughter wants hamsters. I feel they’re too small, too nervous, not smart enough to interact with.
So April 7th we go to the Pet STore and there’s a bunch of baby hamsters. The owner who I trust thinks they’re a bit young but we pick out one, a furry one. Then we say we want 2 and we pick out a little grey one who looks like a mouse.
Fine and dandy. Cage is set up, they’re so small they can fit into my daughter’s hand, and they grow like crazy. Very nervous about human contact though.
The fuzzy one gets huge. Everyone likes the like short haired grey one. Then it dawns on us that we didn’t think about male or female and oh oh, what do we do now?
The little tykes carry on in their beloved wheel all night and most of the day running side by side and creating a grating noise. They should harness these things as a source of power. Thousands of hamsters could power up a whole city block I bet. They run on the wheel so hard they break it.
Worried about what to do with the supposed breeding problem, we think we’ll take the furry one back, but procrastination and too busy lives delay us from following through.
May 7th for some reason I wake up at 5:30 am. I come downstairs and notice that the hamsters water bottle is on the floor. Hmm, lights not turned on yet but I wonder how that happened. Pick up water bottle, feel something’s wrong when I go by the cage and see one of the hamsters only moving around. I turn on the light and see the little grey one still by the side of the cage. Oh no, he, we suspected that he was a he, is bloodied, still and has part of his head eaten off! I am horrified! Shaking and crying I wonder what to do. I am glad that I got the message to wake up early because I don’t want my daughter to see this.
I can’t believe it. The large one, who has always acted a bit strange, hissing, and what not, has killed the little one, our favourite and cannibalized him. I pick up the poor little grey one’s body in a napkin and put it into a carton and take it outside. I am furious at the other one.
I can’t believe it. This is my first run in with having hamsters. My hubby and I once worked on the famous canadian TV cult hit Hammy the Hamster.
Seeing everything in my life as symbols, the meaning is…The age of Innocence is over. They’ll eat you alive.
P.S. a few days before this, my neighbour’s kids call us over because in the cage of what they thought was 2 girl hamsters they have found babies. This unexpected news, has my neighbour Debbie, who is an I Love Lucy Freak,look identical to Lucy caught in one of her espisodes.
And hamster culture continues.
What do you do with a flesh eating hamster?
May 5, 2008 at 1:36 pm
My hamster just did that same thing that yours did, it ate part of the head of a older hamster in the cage. I came downstairs in the morning and discovered the older hamster not moving, and figured, oh well, he probably died of old age. Little did i expect half his head was missing!!!! It throughly freaked me out!! I haven’t even cleaned the cage yet because I’m too freaked out. Why do they do that!?