Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The Tragic Tale of Carlos and Mari

(there is a video here, RSS subscribers)


I used to have two Siberian dwarf hamsters just like these when I was in college. My boyfriend and I bought them together. It was his idea and when we broke up, not long after we bought them, I retained custody of them. They were named Carlos and Mari. They were both very cute but they met bad ends.

Carlos died during winter break while being watched by my sister, and is buried behind the dorm I lived in at the time. I paid my friend to clean out the cage and bury him for me, because he had been dead a while apparently, before I had been made aware of his demise. We used a spork to mark his grave.

Mari had a stroke sometime the next semester, I think (though I am not veterinarian), and I released her into the wild to enjoy her freedom as an act of kindness, and also because seeing her dragging herself around her cage in circles made me sad. My family likes to tell me that she was probably promptly eaten by a hawk the moment I set her free.


This is part and parcel to why I don't own pets anymore and why I don't think having children is a good idea for me either.

5 comments:

  1. Siberian Dwarf hamsters are carnivorous. I had a friend who had two and they bred faster than rabbits. She didn't know what to do with all of them, so she just let them go in the woods at the edge of town. Not too long after that we were at the local pet shop which a friend of ours managed and there was a guy in buying rats for his snake, and he happened to be in pest control. He told us about having just been on a job where he was in an attic looking for a rat infestation. The owner had heard scrabbling noises and there was a smell that she thought was dead rats in the wall. Turns out the smell was actually a very large dead raccoon. The scrabbling noise was about 40 siberian dwarf hamsters that had smelled the rotting corpse too and had moved in for a feast. He said it was the weirdest thing he had ever seen.
    Our pet store owner friend said that wasn't really weird at all as they will often times cannibalize other hamsters.

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  2. Or she lived for years free in the forest and had many baby hamsters!... and threw of the local eco-system!!

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  3. You set her free? No, no. The poor hamster could not possibly fend for itself out there, in the wild. Yup, the fear produced by being released surely gave it a heart attack.

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    Replies
    1. OMG what are you doing!? I'm neurotic! You're not supposed to make it worse!!!

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  4. wow, I never thought to set any of my hamsters free, that probably would have been better then the horrible deaths they faced once they escaped the cage and were found months later in various states of decay trapped in various major appliances. Go you.

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