2003-08-12 - 11:11 p.m.

Whatever Happened to Madame Mao?

I have to admit that last entry sounded more downbeat that I intended it to. Basically things in my life are going well - Lily and I have just celebrated our birthdays (she 24, me 44) and also our three year anniversary. Why, one more anniversary and we'll have been together longer than any Bush has managed to stay in the White House! Imagine that!

I also realize I left people hanging with my last entry back in July. Sorry Kathy! Madame Mao the hamster had escaped - what happened to her? The sad fact is I don't know. She has not turned up. I was pretty certain that she'd gotten out of the apartment within 48 hours of her escape - one of my downstairs tenants mentioned hearing something in the ceiling around that time. I tried setting non-fatal traps around, to no avail. It looks like the little escape artist is gone for good.

This is quite a surprising development since in the 35+ years I've been keeping hamsters, this is the first successful escape I've had. Hard to believe, isn't it?

Hamsters are simultaneously very good and very bad at playing hide-and-go-seek. On the one hand, if a hamster doesn't want to be found, you won't find them - they are incredibly skillful at getting into places that you can't get them out of, like under the dishwasher, under the stove, etc. On the other hand, while I love them dearly, they are dumber than a bag of hammers. Nearly always the hamster will do something foolish like run right in front of me and I'll catch them. Often times I'll catch them before I even knew they were out of their cages.

One time I remember hamster escaping and I used my typical technique of sealing off all the rooms and then checking them one at a time. I looked every day for a week with no success. Finally, I looked in the wooden waste basket in the room the hamster had originally escaped in and there she was, looking up at me. Apparently she'd managed to turn this harmless waste basket into the perfect death trap by climbing into it, then not being able to climb out again. Luckily the hamster was dirty, bedraggled but still very much alive, albeit very hungry and thirsty.

Sadly, a number of other escape stories have not had such happy endings. A couple weeks or a month after the escape I'll find out that the hamster died somehow, for instance by falling from a great height. One time two escaped hamsters got into the heating system and made their way down to the furnace. That was not a happy day.

Every book you'll buy on hamsters will warn you about their escaping, and about how they could become nuisance vermin if released into the wild in the proper climate. That's true in theory, but in practice hamsters are so clueless that their chances of survival in the wild are almost nil. Either a predator will find them or they'll freeze or starve to death or they'll find one of those inverse-genius ways to kill themselves that only a hamster could find. I'm sure that thousands of hamsters have escaped from homes all over the U.S. in the last 60 years, but they haven't managed to secure a foothold in the wild yet.

Face facts, little guys. You may not like being in those cages but without them you'd probably be very dead, very quickly. The outside world is not for you.

So, I have given up on Madame Mao. I'd like to think that she is enjoying all the weird and exotic (to her) plants there are available outside, but that probably isn't the case.

Since she was my breeding female, I had to go buy another one. I went to the same store where I bought her, and found another sweet-tempered longhaired female. This one is all black, instead of banded like Madame Mao. She is tentatively called Sable, but I'm not so sure I'm happy with that name. Perhaps a better one will occur to me later.