Hamsters are rodents belonging to the subfamily Cricetinae. May all the hamsters of the world be as happily homed.Roborovski hamster ( Phodopus roborovskii) Goldie, renamed Golden Beauty, is thriving now and runs laps nightly on her big wheel. Whew, I thought, as I placed her in the cage to take to my friend’s house.
#Biggest hamster maze in the world pro#
I didn’t understand why, but I wasn’t about to get the hamster pro wound up again.īy the time I got home, Goldie had chewed through the first two boxes and was gaily running circles in the bigger box, looking for a way out. Goldie, as I started calling the hamster, was placed into three boxes nested inside each other. “Please, may I just purchase the hamster? It will have a healthy, happy, wonderful home.” It was getting late, and the interrogation was getting old. I screamed and shook my hand, but it was still attached, and it flew off into the next cage.” I half-chuckled because this had happened to me with one of Greta’s babies. When I was putting the last batch of hamsters we received into their cage, one bit me.
She questioned me about what type of feed I had and the size of the cage, and warned me, because I only wanted one, that “they need plenty of socializing.” As she spoke, she reached over, grabbed a sunflower seed, held it out to a hamster and almost got bitten, but smoothly pulled her hand back.Īnother clerk remarked, “Boy, you are brave. Out the door I walked, wishing I loved running as much as hamsters do.Īt the next pet store, I met up with yet another hamster expert. I headed toward the door with the clerk close behind, advising me to think carefully about getting a hamster for a friend as a gift. I was learning a lot from the hamster clerk, but I was also in a hurry to find the right-size hamster, and she didn’t have one. Not hamsters, though-they seem to love it, and given a choice between a wheel and a maze of tubes extending to various rooms, they will always come back to their wheel. If I went out every night and ran almost 6 miles I’d be a lean, mean, tired machine. I did learn that hamsters, nocturnal in nature, can run 5.6 miles each night, which gave me a whole new respect for the tiny creatures. But she ranted on about the importance of the wheel, even though I assured her my friend already had a large one. Okay, I was thinking, I need to leave and get to the other pet store. Nevertheless, she expounded on the fact that a Golden hamster could easily get stuck inside a tube and that the smaller wheel wouldn’t work for the Golden’s larger body. Mind you, she’d already told me she only had dwarf hamsters in stock, and I had told her I didn’t want the bite-size breed. The clerk also questioned me about the size of the cage and the wheel and whether there were any tubes. My request triggered a lecture on the slight differences between Syrian and Golden hamsters. I wanted what I called a Syrian hamster because that was what Greta was and what my friend had previously owned. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why I was only buying one hamster for my friend, and not a dwarf-size one. The gestation period is only 16 to 22 days, and she can become pregnant again within 24 hours of giving birth. A female hamster, such as my Greta back then, goes into heat every four days. Having grown up with a mom and pop hamster, I can also assure you their reproductive cycle is on a par with rabbits.
But after hearing a 30-minute lecture on hamster care and breeds, I learned they had only the dwarf variety, or what I refer to as “miniature master escape artists”-the kind that can flatten their tiny bodies and slip through the bars of any cage. I walked confidently into my favorite pet shop in La Crosse, planning to purchase the hamster and then drive straight home. So you could say I’m a certified multi-generational hamster owner. My daughter also had a hamster-a compromise over the horse she wanted. When I was growing up, my family had many of them-more than we intended, when one of the two “females” we’d purchased turned out to be a male.
I swear they wanted to run a background check, do a lie detector test, and take my fingerprints. Times have changed in the hamster world-for the better, I’m sure, but I had my doubts while shopping recently for a replacement hamster for a young friend.
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