2001-09-08 - 11:59 p.m.

Hamster Dramas

It was the evening and I was sitting here working at my computer. I heard Lily call me from the Library.

"Uber, could you come in here? Something's wrong with Snowy."

I went and I took a look in Snowy's cage. He was laying on his side, panting as if he had just run a marathon. He did not look at all well.

Snowy is the oldest hamster in the house by far. I would guess that he's about 26 months old.

Until recently he was very healthy for his age, still madly running in circles as was his wont. However recently he's been looking a little bedraggled.

There was also something wrong with one of his eyes, it seemed to be sealed shut by sleep gunk and I couldn't get it open. Now, looking at him I saw that the other eye was sealed shut too. Snowy is blind.

He also looks a good deal smaller. Before he was the brawniest hamsters I'd ever seen, thanks to his incessant running. Now he looks old and shriveled.

Poor Snowy is dying, and it looks like a hard death.

I never know what to do in situations like this. Am I supposed to "put them to sleep?" I don't think I could actually kill a hamster, even a sick one. That's if I could even figure out how to kill it.

So all I can do is try to make him comfortable, and make sure that he has food and water at hand.

Snowy's situation reminded me that it was time for a litter of baby hamsters, past time in fact. Cinnie's untimely death kind of threw me off schedule. Pooka is still too young to breed, but Ince is just the right age.

The trouble is that the only hamsters that it would be possible to breed Ince with are related to her. Sweet Mo and Smallfry are her cousins. Ince's father is Winky, while Jenniham, his sister, is the mother of Mo and Smallfry.

Well, I don't like inbreeding, but hamsters are all about inbreeding. In fact, every hamster on the planet is directly related to a litter that was found in Syria in 1920. In the past I've bred mother to son, father to daughter and brother to sister with no visible ill effects.

Well, that's not exactly true. Closely inbred hamsters tend to be a little more nervous and weaker than your average hamster, but this is not always true. Also, it's all but impossible to check the pedigree of a hamster bought at a pet store. Since I sell to pet stores myself, any hamster I see at a pet store could be related to one of mine - for instance I think poor Leet was the daughter of one of Ince's sisters.

So the logical choice is to breed Ince with Smallfry. Sweet Mo is a gray hamster, and so is Ince (I think) and that is definitely a bad genetic mix: purebred gray hamsters are always born dead.

However, I've been a slacker - Ince is not really tame. I like to have hamster mothers be tame before they have babies - it generally makes for a calmer mother. I spent a lot of time taming Cinnie, alas.

Lily was already in bed when I decided to take Ince out of her cage. I took the top of and reached in to get her. It was clear that she did not want to be picked up, so I went very slowly and carefully. It looked like I was about to be able to scoop her up when Ince did something I'd never seen a hamster do before. She attacked me!

Hamsters generally only bite when you grab them, but Ince started chasing my hand around the cage, trying to bite me. She went bananas! Luckily I was too fast for her.

Eventually I got her out of the cage by herding her into the plastic teacup that I use as a scoop for hamster food. Once out of the cage Ince seemed much calmer - only a little jumpy.

However, she was not in the mood for love. I put her in Smallfry's cage and she immediately started fighting with him. Oh, well. Better luck another time.

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