How To Breed Hamsters (Part 2)

***Caution… Don’t read the italic bits if you are squeamish***

This looks like one of my litters

At one point I remember having 16 hamsters from my breeding projects, even after giving my friends a few (as in they got hamster cages ok, not cooking pots).

Sometimes, like Mary’s four-legged friend, our hamsters attended school. Because they’re nocturnal, you can get away with keeping one in your pocket during class – they usually just curl up and sleep against your body warmth. Once, our teacher confiscated one. When my friends and I went to get it back after school, we found her entertaining it in her open desk drawer in the staff room, as it scurried about and chewed on pencil erasers.

Every night when she got home from her day job, my mum would clean hamster cages. I helped, but not that much – she shooed me off to tend to my hamster project or study. Later, it made outstanding show n tell.

(But one of my friends discovered antlion larvae behind the school compound so everyone thought he was pretty cool too… He gave me some to keep for awhile, in tupperware, feeding them large ants and termites… They would eventually grow up and fly away, leaving behind the empty runs… I’m still in touch with the friend, now he’s a doctor in the UK who recently bought a black beemer with red leather seats… Dude, so happy for you – and what you do for guilt-free shopping everywhere 🙂

My dad traveled frequently while we were stationed in Sandakan, I was an only child who didn’t get that many playdates around music, taekwondo and later on lotsa tuition, and my mum was extremely active at her own school, even after hours – she liked doing things like giving free tuition to any underprivileged kids who might want to attend. Especially in times of stress or unhappiness, she liked to throw herself into teaching and social work.

But early on my mum had decided I would grow up with as many animals as she could manage. It had something to do with the experience of learning the care of other living things, especially delicate ones (obviously Honey Bunny was a total FAIL – she was a pit bull in bunny ears), and though my mum never intended for me to have more than 2, I was allowed to keep the hamster colony. (In case you’re wondering why they didn’t just get me a goldfish, my dad did have a fishtank – and I had a catfish in it that nibbled on my fingers every time I put them in – I stopped when my fingers started to hurt.)

Hamsters can be quite fragile. They catch cold, they die. They fall off the furniture (which they do a lot, they have zero respect for heights) the wrong way, they die. For no apparent reason they die. Sometimes they got cancer. Once, one had maggots. That was gross. We watched the vet spray something on and then pluck the emerging grubs one by one. Apparently this is not that much of a biggie to the hamster unless there are too many of them. But apparently it will still hurt a bit to have grubs plucked out of you.

(The vet’s daughter btw, was the same age as me and sometimes assisted her mum – today she’s a surgeon-in-training at a hospital in the UK.)

Some hamsters went blind in a really gross way – their eyes popped and crusted over – one day they’d be fine, the next they’d come out of the nest with bugged-out eyes. No one knew why, not the local vet, not the pet shop, and the blind animals behaved perfectly normal after a few days.

All-in-all, if the hamsters looked like they were really suffering, we erm, “euthanized” them. The first time that happened I was 11, I think. My mum asked the science teacher for some kind of chloroform they used for dissections, and we’d put the hamsters down by placing them in a large bucket and putting lotsa drug-soaked cotton in it, then covering the top. Obviously for high school dissections, the animals are knocked out with uh, quite a bit less drug than we used, in a matter of minutes. But we were so paranoid about burying anyone alive we often left the bucket for hours or even overnight.

I read somewhere hamsters loved to get out of the cage for exercise, so we would stuff newspapers in the cracks under the door before letting them out at night to run all over our bedroom floor. They took turns, the females all at once in the communal cages, the males one at a time – and we’d have to pay closer attention because they’d climb up to where the other males’ cages were and pick a fight thru the bars. And most of them would dig at the newspaper under the door, somehow they knew there was more adventure to be had beyond, if they could just squeeze under there.

Commando Ham

We’d lose hamsters all over the house as well as in the mattress, the sewing machine, outside where the “bunny” was, and once down a toilet. Strangely, I don’t remember losing any permanently, though some went missing for days, and the one down the toilet (hamsters can swim quite well), eventually died of a cold.

My mum and I would sit on the floor and talk sometimes, and it wouldn’t be long before our hamsters scurried into our lap, up our t-shirts – little scrabbly claws grabbing the fabric – and onto the bed. We were convenient climbing frames.

We’d shampoo them about once a week and blowdry them with a hairdryer.

They smell like wet dog.

We’d feed them baby vitamin (in retrospect probably not a good idea).

When we moved from Sandakan to Penang, I brought one with me – on the plane in an ice cream tub. In case you’re wondering, a hamster comes up on the x-ray as a grey blob, not a tiny skeleton.

It was my mum’s way of erm, “building character”. She once told me it was to “teach (me) to love”, especially the little things… especially if I for eg saw examples of humans being mean to each other, I guess… She is very much not a Christian, but I was just thinking how Christians believe animals have no souls, only humans have souls. I take it as humans having the capacity for evil that an animal never will.

I can’t imagine what my childhood would be like without pets, I think all kids should get to keep some…

(Though maybe not 16.)

Rockstar got a Zhu Zhu Rockstar (it's a hamster on wheels that sings) last Christmas from one of my friends!