2001-08-13 - 11:56 p.m.

Two Little Hammies

Since today is Lily's day off from work, we decided to have a little outing. We'd get some lunch and then look for an interesting new game for the Playstation, then we'd find a young female hamster to replace poor Cinnie.

My intent was to wander around one of the local malls, pick up a video game and then head over to my favorite pet store, which was on the same road, to see what they had.

However, before we left the mall we decided to check out the small pet store there to see what they had. The last time I'd been in that pet store I'd sold them Ince's brothers and sisters.

In the entry mentioned above I'd mentioned that hamsters sold slowly in the Summer. Well, the proof of that was right in front of me: one of Ince's sisters was still there, and it looked like she'd had a litter of babies. In fact she looked like she might be pregnant with ANOTHER litter as well.

I did not like the way these hamsters were being kept. There were too many in each cage and the cages did not seem clean.

However, looking in the cage with Ince's sister, I saw that there was a little gray baby hamster! Those are very, very rare, in fact I have not seen one in this area in over a decade.

And that's what gave me the idea that this litter of babies belong to Ince's sister. This hamster was a daughter of Linda, who is a gray dominant spot hamster. You can't tell she's gray from looking at her, but she is, and this daughter of hers had to be too. This means that Ince is very likely gray as well and will have gray children.

The gray baby was absolutely adorable, so I had to buy her. However, this meant I needed to buy ANOTHER young female hamster to breed with Sweet Moses. The reason for this is that Sweet Mo is a gray hamster too, and you cannot breed two gray hamsters. Well, you CAN, but all purebred gray hamsters are born dead, due to a flaw in their genes. Hamster that appears gray is, in fact, only a half-breed gray.

So I needed to find a young female for Sweet Mo. In the case next to the little gray baby there were some longhaired banded hamsters, those seemed ideal since I prefer long-haired (or "Teddy Bear") hamsters. However once I started poking around in the cage I made a distressing discovery - there was a dead hamster, half-buried under the wood shavings in the bottom of the cage. That's another sign, and a pretty obvious one, that the hamsters are not being well taken care of.

Well, mall pet stores are notoriously bad at taking care of their livestock and this store seemed to be entirely staffed by 16-year-old girls. The girl who was helping us confessed that the hamsters came to them packed in cages like sardines.

There were several different colors of banded longhaired hamsters in the cage, but Lily thought the black and white banded were the prettiest and one lively one especially caught her eye. I tried to grab it, but it eluded me. The girl pet store employee was letting me do all the hamster handling. I finally picked the hamster up, but then I had a devil of a time finding out what sex it was because it was wriggling so. Eventually I determined it was a girl, and we put it in its little carry-home box.

One of the things that must discourage hamster sales in the Summer is the heat. I was rather afraid that the heat would be unhealthy for the little hammies. However, it was in the low 80s, as opposed to the 90s of the days before so it wasn't quite so horrible. However, hamsters were originally desert creatures so the heat didn't seem to faze them.

I thought ahead and brought a holding cage to bring the hamsters home in, and to keep the little girls cool Lily dumped in some ice from a soda we were drinking.

However once we got them home and put them in their new cages, we became aware of how very, very tiny they were. I'd guestimate that they couldn't be more than five or six weeks old, but their small size may be because they haven't been fed enough.

Ironically, a pet store would never consider buying hamsters that young from me! Any hamsters I've sold have been substantially bigger.

We also named them on the way home from the pet store. The little gray one is named "Leet" (an IRC term meaning "Elite," and what could be more 'leet than a gray hamster?) and the black and white one is named Pookalooka, or Pooka for short. That last name may change.

In the evening the new hamsters proved to be a welcome addition to the household. I decided to put Leet's cage on the kitchen table. This is the first time that there has been a hamster in the kitchen since Cleo died back in February.

While Lily and I ate dinner Leet was being absolutely adorable, trying to run in a wheel that was far, far too big for her. She seemed to be enjoying her new surroundings - the wide-open space, the plentiful food and the clean wood shavings to burrow in. Hopefully she'll be awake when I eat my breakfast in the morning.

Later in the evening after Lily went to bed, Pooka came out from her little hidey-hole and also began running in her wheel. It's odd how baby hamsters seem to instinctively know how to use a wheel, even if they've never seen one before.

So we have two new little hammies, and Lily seems quite taken with them already, our happy addition to the Hamster Palace.