"So after wanting a hamster for months and buying books on hamster care and lurking on hamster owner online communities and message boards and occasionally dressing up like a hamster and roaming the streets of Makati while making loud squeaking sounds (okay, that last bit may be untrue) -- I finally did it. I got a hamster." (Read the rest here.)
The hamster in the picture isn't Thurber, by the way, though it does look a lot like him -- I just found the image on flickr. Can't post any pix or videos of Thurber yet, as my main camera these days is my cellphone, and Nokia, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen NOT to include a USB cord or any sort of way for me to connect it to my PC with its packaging. It has to be bought separately. And it's not cheap. Bastards.
"I started musing philosophically about how much there was to learn from Billy's simple life. All he did was eat, sleep, run in his wheel, and amass a pile of worthless seeds. Yet that was all it took to make him happy. If only my own life could be like that, I said to myself. Then I realized... hey, my own life IS like that. It doesn't do to think deep thoughts about hamsters." ~ from the excellent Hamster Tales
Posts
4 comments:
man, that was really sad, luis. *flowers for thurber*
Thanks, Indira...
Aww! I feel for you man.
My brother and I had a hamster Sparky, who we loved very much. He lived a few years but the end is always inevitable. I'm still broken up about it.
Thanks, Kristine.
A few years is a long time, for a hamster -- the life span of a syrian is about two years, for dwarf hamsters a little longer -- so I'm glad you had Sparky as long as you did. :)
Am thinking about getting a new one eventually, but I don't know where else to get one aside from a pet shop. And apparently pet shop hamsters are a bad idea:
"Hamster mills are threatening the life of hamsters as we know it. They are selling hamsters that are undersized, bad colors, shorter life spans, carry disease, inbred, bred too young, sold too young, traumatized, unsocialized, bad temperaments, and much more. These are the hamsters you see in the stores." -- from The Future of Hamsters, an essay on Critterscoop
Thurber already had Wet Tail when I bought him. My sister says that a friend of hers who works with animals says that she has never heard of anyone buying an animal from Bio Research that didn't have some sort of problem.
I tried to find hamster breeders but the ones I found in my area on the Net didn't answer my texts. :p The only breeder I know personally (Ene of The Ronnies used to breed Roborovskis) has stopped. Ho well.
Post a Comment