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My mother insisted that we didn't have to give hamsters water -- that they would get their water from their food, and that if we gave them water, they would stink more. We were kids, so we couldn't argue. Three hamsters in a cage. Within a week, two hamsters in a cage. Within another week, one hamster in a cage, eating the other one. I don't remember precisely how long it was between when we found the cannibalism and when we finally gave the survivor a water bottle, but he nearly died too. Spent a long time drinking. Lived another two or three years after that.
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Jul 6, 2015 20:19
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:39 |
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Bicyclops posted:On reconsideration, I'm actually wondering if this isn't referring to the hamster at all, and if Parahexavoctal died of misery a couple of years after mom invented Operation Desert Hamsters. Most of our other pets lived very long and healthy lives, fortunately. Even the gerbil who escaped from his cage, and was then retrieved by the cat, lived 4-5 years after that. (Although he always had a limp, from that day forward.) Rover was a black hooded rat. She'd been found unmoving on the sidewalk in the middle of summer by someone who thought she was dead; he picked her up to toss her in the garbage, and she twitched. So he did the right thing and brought her to the animal shelter. My mom brought her home the next day. One of her top incisors was badly broken (Rover, not my mom). We did our best to take care of her, to pet her and groom her and give her lots of water and let her climb on toys and give her food that wasn't too hard but also not too soft. But she was pretty old when we got her, and (as I understand it) a broken incisor is really not something rodents can recover from without extensive treatment. Plus, who knows what happened to her in the interval between (being someone's pet, which she had clearly been) and (being found half-dead on the sidewalk)? Rover lived maybe three weeks after we got her; for the first two, she was pretty happy, but then became more and more wobbly and unsteady. We realized she was on her way out, so we sat with her, and held her, and talked to her, and told her she was a good girl, and she died while being gently patted and stroked. My mom was quite sad.
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Jul 7, 2015 02:44
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