Old age, all of them

My first hamster, Lucky, died of old age and was, as best I could tell, happy and pleasant to interact with. He was somewhere around 4-5 years old. Given that later hamsters did not fare so well, I’m surprised my first one had such a peaceful life.

My dad put their cage in our sunroom during the night because they were making too much noise. Eventually the sun came out.

One day I noticed he hadn’t moved in like, a while. I opened the cage and went to pick him up, and he was hard as a rock. RIP Teddy.

I let mine walk over a keyboard, and he practically typed out his suicide note.

My sister wanted to hug it, but it was too tiny to use her arms, so she used her hands. I watched Sunflowers eyes popout…

Hampy was a vicious little bugger so we only noticed he had died about a week after when mum went to clean out his cage. Little Russian White Winter super fast, you’d open the cage and he’d be attached to your finger before you could swear at him.

I stepped on my hamster which not only ruined Christmas but led to my parents eventually breaking up. It wasn’t a deliberate stepping, of course. Nibbles, bless his tiny, furry heart, had a habit of darting underfoot, a furry landmine in the living room. This year, he chose the precise moment Aunt Carol was launching into her annual monologue about her “special” sauce – a concoction that looked suspiciously like regurgitated beets – to stage his daring escape. My foot connected with his minuscule form with a sickening crunch, a sound that echoed through the suddenly silent room, louder than any Christmas carol.

Aunt Carol, mid-sentence, froze, her face a mask of horrified fascination. Nibbles, sadly, was no more. A tiny, crimson stain bloomed on the Persian rug, resembling nothing so much as a particularly abstract Christmas ornament. My mother, a woman whose love for small, furry creatures bordered on the obsessive, let out a wail that could shatter glass. My dad, ever the pragmatist, muttered something about “collateral damage” and reached for the brandy. The air, thick with the scent of pine needles and impending doom, crackled with unspoken accusations. It was a Christmas tableau worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

In the ensuing chaos, as people scrambled to salvage what remained of the Christmas dinner, Dad, still clutching a corner of the tablecloth, lost his balance. He stumbled, tripped over my outstretched leg (I swear, it was an accident!), and fell. And, in a move that defied all logic and physics, he somehow managed to grab my leg on the way down.

The last thing I saw before the world dissolved into a blur of pain and panicked shouts was my father, sprawled on the floor amidst the wreckage of Christmas dinner, holding my leg like a prized Christmas roast. “Gotcha!” he yelled triumphantly, while pulling my leg. Just like I’m pulling your leg now.

Not a hamster but when I had gerbils, one had eaten half of the other. Not long afterwards the cannibal developed a severe middle ear infection which killed her even during treatment.

Me or my gram left the windows open and freez to death

My sibling’s class was having a biology lesson on the circulatory system that day and they were supposed to open up the little hamster to watch his tiny heart beat inside its cracked ribcage. The teacher asured them that because of chloroform, the hamster wouldn’t feel a thing. Sibling, horrified, bought the critter from the kid who brought it to school for the experiment for a quarter so when mom pivked us up that day from school, we had an extra passenger. Next day we went and got all the hamster paraphernalia we could pay for with our savings and set her up in my sibling’s room. Two days after this, the hamster gave birth to a whole litter. Mom was very angry and disgusted, but it wasn’t for long because, out of stress I think, the hamster started eating her young. She ate them all and next morning we found her dead stuck between the cage wall and the exercise wheel.

I was a sensitive child and this whole event added to my already exisiting CPTSD.

It got out. My parents thought it was a rat, so they called my dog to get it. He did so gladly. When I woke up they told me the “bad news.” I was happy with it. That hamster bit.

My honorary hamster (a green anole lizard) escaped and was presumed dead. We found him and recaptured him over two years later, living on the spiders and other insects in my brother’s basement bedroom and bathroom. He lived for several more years in captivity, and I renewed efforts to give him a variety of wild-caught food instead of just store bought feeder crickets. He died fat and happy of old age.

Not to be a killjoy but they’re such delicate creatures and people keep giving them to children while doing zero research about their needs. No wonder they keep dying weird deaths. 😭

She escaped into the ceiling and refused to come back out. We left food out for her, and she would eat it, but we never saw her again. We heard her though, yipping and scuttling about on various ceiling adventures. Rest well Frank Zappa the Second.

She was a replacement for my son because his other one (Frank Zappa the First) got sick and died while he was on holiday. His mum swapped them before he found out, but when she did so she forgot what colour the original hamster was (mix of dark/light brown). We had to convince my son that hamsters shed their baby fur and grow back a completely new colour (ginger/white).