2001-03-02 - 23:59:36

New Hammie

The recent spate of hamsters dying has left the Hamster Palace at sort of a low ebb. When I started this journal I believe I had eleven hamsters and I think I was at twelve or thirteen shortly thereafter. Now, I am down to seven. They are, in age order: Snowy, Jenniham, Winky, Partly Cloudy, Linda, Sweet Mo and Small Fry. It's a hamster crisis!

Obviously it is high time to have a litter of baby hamsters, maybe two. I've been meaning to breed Linda, but she is nearly a year old which means that I have to get moving on that very soon. Once a hamster is more than a year old, it's not good to breed them.

I also need to buy a new female hamster. Right now I have three gray hamsters in the house (Linda, Partly Cloudy and Sweet Mo) and if I want to have more I need to buy some new breeding stock. Hamsters are already terribly inbred (every hamster in the world is probably descended from a litter of hamsters found in Syria in 1920) so it doesn't make sense to breed hamsters that you KNOW are related to each other.

So Lily and I went out looking for a new hamster. There were three criteria: she had to be female, long haired and healthy. It would also be nice if she was intelligent and sweet tempered.

The first pet store I went to is my local favorite. The people there actually seem to care about their little animals, not like most of the chain pet stores around here. I usually sell my extra hamsters there myself. To my surprise they had a number of cute young hamsters, and right off I found a female that fit the bill.

She looked to be about two months old with cinnamon colored fur. No, not Sinnamon but Cinnamon. It's kind of an orangy brown. In a burst of amazing creativity I decided to name the new little girl Cinnie.

On the way back from the pet store, Cinnie sat in Lily's lap, housed in the little cardboard cage that they give you when you buy a small animal at a pet store. Every so often her little pink nose would poke out of one of the air-holes and she'd give the box an experimental chew. Note to self: next time we go to buy a hamster we should bring a holding cage. If she'd been a bit more dedicated, Cinnie could have chewed her makeshift cage to bits before we got her home.

Currently Cinnie's cage is sitting on my desk, right next to my computer. I've been trying to tame her, but she is a wild one. So far she won't let me pick her up. Obviously I have to cleverly find a way to get her out of the cage without panicking her. I should be able to figure out a way to do this. After all, I'm supposed to be smarter than the hamsters. That is the theory, at least.