2001-06-10 - 11:41 p.m.

The Problem of Baby Hammies

The baby hamsters are now 40 days old. They are still a good deal smaller than their mom, but they are easily old enough to live on their own. In fact very soon they SHOULD be living on their own, or Linda will be an instant grandmother, if you catch my drift.

Baby hammies are always fun, but after a certain point they present a problem. I can't keep them all. I suppose that everyone who has a litter of cats or dogs faces this problem. I'd run out of cages in a heartbeat. My biggest litter ever was sixteen hamsters, for heaven's sake!

What I usually do is take them to a pet store that I like in Colonie. I buy supplies from them and I have bought hamsters from them. In fact, I bought Snowy there and I got the impression that the help there had been spoiling him rotten. He was tame when I got him home.

The fact that it's in Colonie, which is a half-hour away, is a pain in the ass. However the plain fact is that any place I could sell my hamsters to is at least a half hour away. Frown Town is not a pet store Mecca.

However, the time of year is a problem. I'm not sure why, but it's almost impossible to sell hamsters during the summer. One pet store guy I talked to theorized it was because kids were out of school and maybe away for the summer. The whys aren't really important, the fact is that hamsters are hard to sell in the summer, so I avoid having litters in the late Spring. However, this litter was a now-or-never proposition: Linda was almost too old to have babies as it was - that's why there were only four in the litter.

One of the thing that annoys me about this particular pet store is that they keep giving me the runaround. I've talked to the owner, and he's told me that he likes buying hamster locally, because they tend to be healthier, and probably cheaper, but he didn't say that part - I surmised it.

But whenever I have hamsters to sell and I talk to his employees, they act as if they never heard of the idea of buying hamsters. It's annoying.

Worse than that, when I called them up this afternoon they told me that they had plenty of hamsters already but I should try them again in a week. Uh oh, this was bad news. It was likely that the answer in a week was going to be "no" also. So I started calling other pet stores. This didn't make me happy because most of the other pet stores were part of chains and didn't seem to want to buy hamsters at all.

Therefore, I was surprised when the next place I called said they'd be happy to take my hamsters, and they'd pay me double what the other place usually did. Cool! I'm on my way!

I decided to sell three and keep one. I knew I wanted to keep one of the ones with dark eyes, because I was looking for a hamsters that carried the gene for gray fur. Two of the babies in this litter have ruby eyes, and gray hamsters never have ruby eyes.

I was debating with myself what sex I wanted to keep when the decision was made for me: both of the dark eyed hamsters were female.

I haven't decided what I'm going to call the remaining girl. Usuually if I think about it for a few days, a name will suggest itself.

I sold the three baby hamsters for $2 each in merchandise. I usually get $1, so I was happy. However, I can't kid myself that this is a moneymaking operation. Baby hamsters eat like it's going out of style.

So, I managed to sell a litter in June, but it was a near thing. Probably the next litter is going to happen in September.