The Why of Hamsters

Bill of the Birds asked, “So. What’s the point of this animal?”

I’ll admit that Bill of the Birds is not alone. That the whole idea of hamsters eluded me for a long time. Regular readers of this blog know that I really don’t need a whole lot more to care for. I won’t bore you with a list of current denizens. Two hamsters threaten to tip our house into the realm of menagerie. I’ve never been that enamored of the idea of a small rodent that runs on a wheel. But Chinese dwarf hamsters are really, really cool.

To start with, they’re cute in an undomesticated way. They look most of all like a young white-footed mouse who’s had a tail-abbreviating incident. They’re a gorgeous smoke gray with a dark racing stripe down the back. They are not as bug-eyed as Syrian hamsters or mice.

They’re unexpectedly fun to watch, especially in pairs. Our sisters—Phoebe’s Vetiver and Liam’s Verbena—get along very well. They even do tandem runs on the Silent Spinner. The technology of small animal keeping has improved quite a bit from the squeaky metal cage wheel days when the critters had to be kept in the basement lest they keep the whole house awake. Silent Spinners are the bomb!

They give a young boy something small and helpless to look after, to feed and clean up after.
But most of all they cuddle spectacularly well. Being nocturnal animals, they get jiggy somewhere around 11 PM, and they’re still going strong, streaking around their tank like lightning bolts, when Phoebe leaves for school at 6 AM. But when the kids get back from school, dog-tired, the hammies are sleeping, and are perfectly happy to go on snoozing in the warm hands of a child. Oh, they’ll wake up briefly and do cute things like clean their whiskers and feet while sitting in the palm of a hand
Which is disarmingly adorable, just seeing this creature going about its private grooming regimen in your hand.
But mostly they sleep.

Please.

How can a little animal be this adorable? How can it trust me, this enormous carnivorous primate, so completely as to fall back to sleep while I cuddle it, stroke its belly with a gentle fingertip? Dunno. They just do. And that is the magic, the point, of Chinese dwarf hamsters.

I have other ideas about the point of hamsters.

What About Those Hamsters?

It is time for hamsters. Magnificent scenery has its place, but so do small furred rodents in this big old goofy world.

It’s not often that one gets to track a pet from conception, but our acquisition of two Chinese dwarf hamsters was a premeditated thing. Phoebe found an Ohio breeder on Oobly.com and began a correspondence. As a result, Kacie introduced Sage, her female CDH,

to Lil’ Man and a romance blossomed. Lil’ Man was obviously well-equipped to become a father. I would call him Lil' Big Man. What IS it with those rodents and their wedding tackle?

The hamsters were quite compatible and began sleeping together and it wasn’t too much more than a month before we got an excited email from Kacie with a picture of Sage looking, as she put it, like a furry ping-pong ball. The next day she was blessed with five pink squirmers.

Here they are on Day 3.

On Day 4, they looked like tenrecs. (hamster is facing left, fyi.)

By Day 9, they were looking more like rodents.

That is some seriously fast development, from what was basically an embryo to this in nine days!

Day 19. Proper cute and furry.

All hamster photos courtesy Kacie.

Although Phoebe started out as the hot and heavy hamster lover, when Liam found out there were five in the litter, he asked if he could have one. Of course, since Phoebe would be getting a female, he wanted a boy. Nuh-uhhhn. I explained that if there were going to be two hamsters in the house, they’d both have to be the same sex. There followed a discussion of the dangers of inbreeding. Liam got it before I had to invoke McKenzie Phillips and her Papa John.

I met Kacie in East Liverpool, which wasn’t far from West Liberty, WV, where I was working for the week. She was so sweet--she tried just to give me the hamsters, and this after breeding them special for us, and putting daily work into civilizing them, acclimating them to handling. Amazing. She brought all four girls along and let me pick. I picked two who seemed friendliest and didn’t nip me right off the bat.

After waiting since Easter, Phoebe was over the moon to finally be cradling her own CDH. She has named hers Vetiver. Liam was completely charmed. He's cuddling Verbena, his choice of a name.

Any misgivings I had about having two more creatures to care for dissolved as I watched my babies welcome their babies. I am all about encouraging tenderness in children, and there is nothing better for that than giving them little pets to care for. Well, now, a baby brother or sister is real good for that, but this mare's out to pasture.

And there was someone else who turned out to be very into hamsters, too. He was so into them, he couldn’t get to nothing else.

As I write, Chet Baker is shuttling from sunspot to shade, sunspot to shade. He's like a little black soapstone carving, radiating heat. There. I snuzzled him for you. Never fear, more Bacon adorability is just ahead.