Phthursday Musings: Hamlet

This is Hamlet:

Hamlet arrived home at the end of December. He’s about a year old, but you’d never know it from his level of activity:

Hamlet emerges nightly at around 9:00, which means he gets play time. At first this was in a play pen, and, well… now his play space is an entire bedroom!

How did all this happen?

Hamlet is a rescue hamster. He wound up with a foster caregiver temporarily as his owner was forced to give him up when she moved back to Morocco. We found him on a rescue website and it all came together in a couple days at the end of December.

We unexpectedly lost Stewie earlier in December. META-SPIEL readers will remember Stewie’s story from back on September 1:

We had waited a looooooong time for Stewie, as we’d chosen to go to an ethical breeder, and she had a long waiting list. We weren’t prepared to wait another six months. And over the course of time, we’ve learned a lot more. While ethical breeding is still absolutely the way to go, if you can find a good small animal rescue, that’s also a very good route. While on the one hand you don’t want to support mass breeding (like how hamsters wind up at large pet stores), and this is in part because they’re less likely to bred well for temperment; we can vouch that very good hamsters can originate from such places, because that’s where Hamlet originally came from.

So why does a hamster need the run of an entire bedroom? Let’s just say that a lot of the things you learned about hamsters in 1983 were… small-minded.

This guy might not look like it, but if he lived outdoors, he’d be running somewhere on the order of five miles a night. I’ll bet that’s a lot more than you!

This is why there are things like hamster wheels. These creatures need to run, especially when confined to a small terrarium where running is otherwise impossible. But it’s not simply about running-as-exercise. They’re used to running because they’re used to foraging. It’s part of who they are, so having a hamster at homes means you should set them up with opportunities to be a hamster.

Hamlet made it very clear to us that he wanted to… well… whatever exactly it was that he wanted to do:

So we just set up the third bedroom as a place for him to run around. Even this didn’t satisfy him, as he just kept trying to break his way into the closet, any which way he could…

So we opened up the closet too and put more stuff for him to play with.

If it all sounds a little intense… it is, but also, it isn’t. The room was available to be used like this, so why not? The closet was full of bins which could be moved, so why not?

No, having a hamster around and taking very good care of him is not quite the same thing as having a dog. For one, he weighs 6 ounces, not 30 pounds, so he just doesn’t eat that much. For another, he’s nocturnal, so we’re only really spending about an hour a day with him, if even that. It’s actually a good setup for us as a family, because we’re not likely to get another dog, for a number of reasons (allergies being a significant one.)

Fortunately, Halmet seems to agree. Friendly might not quite be the right word, but he’s at least very amenable to hanging out with the humans, especially if he’s rewarded for it:

We also learned that originally Hamlet was named Hamtaro, and so named because of… Hamtaro!

For all the hamster videos and knowledge accumulated by various members of this household, somehow we’d all missed that there was a Japanese animated show starring a hamster named Hamtaro and his friends. Luckily for us - and for you, because now you have to too - we can watch most of the episodes in English!

Hamtaro is mischevious and so too is Hamlet. Even with the run of an entire bedroom he will suddenly start chewing on a door to try and get to the other side. The whole experience is coloring having had beagles in the house for over a decade and having lived through some really strange behavior.

Non-human animals are, well, non-human, and we often err by over-anthropomorphizing them. At the same time, our understanding of behavior is couched in human terms, so of course we’re going to think about animal behavior in terms we can understand. Dogs, cats, hamsters, they don’t think like us, but we don’t think like them, either.

So when I see Hamlet drag tissue out of his little mushroom house and drop it on his food dish… well, that’s just a weird, weird hamster.

Wait, you say: Little mushroom house?

My point is that a hamster, while maybe not having a person-sized personality, nevertheless has a unique personality. And when you expand and think that if even a hamster, let alone a larger mammal, let alone a human being, truly is unique… it can help give you a certain better perspective on people.

Hamlet is a little spoiled, truth be told, what with the flax sprays and all. But we are rewarded with the various cutenesses:

See, there are studies about this, aggregated into articles like “How cute things hijack our brains and drive behaviour”, which you know has to be good because a) it’s from Oxford and b) there’s a u in behaviour.

Hamlet’s evening emergence, which was a little earlier but has recently settled in to just before 9:00, has become what I’d consider a structured part of a daily winddown. This wasn’t by design, but it so happens that it provides a sort of buffer between big screen time and bed time, where the main activity is… sitting in a room and making sure a rodent doesn’t gnaw on your doors.

Admittedly I’m in a distant third place in the house in terms of watching hamster videos and being up on the latest hamster enrichments. It seems though that we’ve settled into a nice place as a hamster house.

My concern is that they’re going to start watching House Hunters with an eye toward houses having good hamster rooms…