2001-11-15 - 11:25 p.m.

Buddy the Hamster

As I mentioned some weeks ago, I've been having trouble getting a litter of baby hamsters out of the current gang of critters hanging around the house. This is very annoying because it looks like the line of gray hamsters is going to die out, yet again.

There really must be something wrong with the breed for them to be so delicate and hard to reproduce.

I tried one last time to breed Pooka with Partly Cloudy and Ince with Smallfry and it just didn't take. Well, I guess that's the end of that.

However, the other day something else occurred to me: maybe the problem with Ince and Smallfry wasn't Ince (who carries the gray gene) but with Smallfry.

Smallfry was the runt of his litter and is still smaller than your average adult hamster. He may have troubles reproducing, too. I've seen it before in smaller hamsters.

Besides, Ince and Smallfry are related. I'll spare you the geneology, but they are cousins: Smallfry's mother and Ince's father are brother and sister. Best to avoid inbreeding if you can help it.

So, I thought: suppose I get another hamster to breed with Ince? I could still get gray babies that way.

What I needed was a healthy adult hamster. Such a thing might not be easy to find because pet stores nearly always have babies.

Actually, I lucked out. At my favorite pet store they had a hamster that was ideal: he was almost three months old and as a bonus was banded with long fur. I'm very fond of that coloring - Pooka is also a long-haired banded hamster.

A "banded" hamster has a fat white stripe around its middle.

The girl who worked there, while she was trying to coax the hamster out of the cage, kept calling him "Buddy." One of the reasons I like this pet store is that the people who work there actually seem to care about their animals. On occasion I've bought hamsters from this store that were already tame because the employees had played with them. Dear departed Snowy was an example of that.

The girl admitted that Buddy probably hadn't been played with for a while, and as a result he was kind of wild and wooly. He was very hard to get out of his cage, but eventually we succeeded in getting him in a box so I could take him home.

Buddy is a very jumpy hamster, but hopefully after I get him tame, he'll calm down. He's also my last chance to get a litter of babies out of Ince.

No pressure, Buddy. Not much. I'll let all of you know how things turn out.