Phthursday Musings: Good Night, Sweet Prince

The evening of January 12, we got Hamlet out to change his bedding, and found him in bad shape. He looked really ragged. He had poop smeared on him.

Oh, this was still Hamlet. He ate a chunk of banana. He still made a couple of vague attempts to scamper away and explore.

Mostly, though, he was pretty still. This was the one and only time that he actually just kind of hung out with us, the closest we came to having a hamster who wouldn’t just be constantly attempting to roam, to flee. It took being at a point where he would just start dozing every couple of minutes, but our prince had finally turned into a cuddle prince.

We knew.

Some time in the early hours, Hamlet went to sleep.

Our consensus is that Hamlet was crazy.

We have a floor enclosure and at first would put Hamlet in the enclosure with some things to climb and so forth. He would spend his entire time trying to escape.

So we modified the guest room so that he would have run of about one-third of the room, using the enclosure as a gate. He would spend his entire time trying to breach the gate.

So we just went ahead and gave him full run of the guest room, except that we used the enclosure to cordon off a corner of the room around the bookcase. This all worked out better, but he would spend much of his time trying to break into the closet.

So we opened up the closet doors and put enrichment materials in the closet. This helped a lot, but he would spend time trying to climb the walls of the closet. And also trying to bust through the enclosure to get to the inaccessible corner of the room.

We finally got rid of the enclosure altogether. This led to him finding a hideout under the bookcase. This was all better overall. But he would spend a lot of his time trying to chew his way through the door to escape out of the room.

This is the what the bottom of our guest room door looks like:

Now, I don’t watch all of the Victoria Raechel videos, and I haven’t read up in detail on the differences between breeds of hamsters and so forth. What I do know is that this particular hamster’s basic everyday mien was very simple:

Hamlet seemed to spend his entire waking existence thinking: “hmm?”

This combination of endless curiosity, and seemingly having little to no long term memory, was totally fascinating. It gives so much cause for contemplation about how humans approach their surroundings.

But it’s not just curiosity and lack of memory. It’s also that a tiny little mammal is capable of hoarding. We had to pull half of the books off of the bookcase so we could move it, and when we did, this is what we found:

All of those baby food puffs that Hamlet pouched for the last three months? All stored under the bookcase. Two whimsys? Under the bookcase. Tissue stolen from the closet? Under the bookcase. It even looks like he’d pouched flax from his enclosure and brought it with him just so he could stash it under the bookcase. And with what little material was available in the guest room, he had done his damnedest to forge a second habitat.

So was he really crazy? In a human sense, he absolutely was. But in a hamster sense?

Maybe a zoologist would beg to differ. But given that at least one hundred times I had to make him stop chewing on my door, I’m going with an emphatic yes.

I have shared this photo before, but I share it again, even though I have a lot of others to choose from, because to me this encapsulates so much:

Hamlet is literally sitting right next to a cake composed of multiple of his favorite foods, and instead of immediately recognizing it, he is just sitting there thinking: “hmm?”

After this photo he wandered around the table. He did not immediately turn his attention to this amazing little cake. He tried to escape from the table. Not quickly. Not just for the purpose of escape. But due to a compulsion deeper than the compulsion to eat banana and strawberry, he just did not focus on the cake.

It took picking him up along with the cake to focus his attention. When we did that, he devoured it.

I’m sticking with: Yeah, this was one crazy creature.

It is now time to let you all in on a little secret:

We are not actually sure that Hamlet was a boy.

Generally speaking, when trying to determine the gender of a hamster, you would expect a boy to have pronounced testicles, and you would expect a girl to have pronounced nipples. Hamlet definitely didn’t have pronounced testicles, but we were also never able to see pronounced nipples.

Hamlet also behaved more like a girl hamster than a boy hamster. Girls tend to be more difficult to please… say, unsatisfied with their space and constantly trying to get at more.

Hamlet was a rescue hamster though. He came with a nominally male name and we kept it. From day one we spoke about Hamlet as a he. So even though we had strong reason to suspect otherwise… we never changed his pronouns.

There’s neither defense nor judgment here, though. This was, you know, just one of those things. Things that make you go “hmm?”

By noon that Saturday, we had put laid Hamlet to rest. By the end of the day, the enclosure had been cleaned out, the wooden hamster furniture had been baked (yes: baked), and the under-the-bookcase haven had been cleaned up. We were super efficient.

With Hamlet gone, with Christmas passed, with the enclosure empty… January felt kind of weird. As you all know, I didn’t write META-SPIEL all month. And it was January, so we didn’t really go anywhere or do anything once school kicked in. There was… weird… space? To fill?

I wound up spending the month reading a lot, and running a lot. I’ll get into the reading next week, and I’ll get into the running with a new Running Around Illinois hopefully this weekend.

But I spent the entire month getting up from reading in bed to refill my glass, and checking the vacated enclosure. I had trained myself to always keep an eye open for Hamlet at night. The house felt… incomplete.

When our beagles passed (Sara in 2013, Murray in 2014), the feeling they left behind included grief and emptiness, but not incompleteness. What I mean is that I didn’t feel like there was a specific void that needed to be filled by new dogs. It felt like change. But Hamlet’s passing, although of lesser immediate impact, nevertheless left me with that feeling that something was missing.

This is Felix:

Felix came home last Friday. He’s about 4 months old. There is - how should I put it - absolutely no ambiguity about his gender.

Felix has some ver ver tiny - but important - shoes to fill. We think he’ll do great.