REAL LIFE

The House of Hamster Horror

Essential reading before purchasing an off-brand rat

If you thought that hamsters were adorable creatures who love nothing more than to munch on veggies, sleep in a sweet little ball and perform acrobatic stunts while hanging from the bars of their cages, I’m here to set the record straight.

Hamsters are savage cannibals!

Do not let their cute, furry faces distract you from their quest for world domination. Behind those beady little eyes is the mind of a killer.

No What to Expect When You Have a Fucking Stupid Pet book could have prepared me for the macabre scenes that have occurred in my House of Hamster Horror.

Nemo

Nemo (not a fish) was our first foray into the world of rodent ownership. We wanted a pet we didn’t have to walk or invest in emotionally. A hamster was the perfect choice for our two young children to learn about pet care and responsibility, and for us to fuck off and do nothing.

We chose a sweet brown and white dwarf hamster that we picked up from a 10-year-old girl, who would mate her own pet hamsters and then sell off the evil spawn. Adorably entrepreneurial (sadistic little twat).

We knew very little about hamster care at the time, but we felt confident we could handle a piece of fur the size of a large testicle. Nemo was an easy pet who enjoyed being held and played with (not unlike a large testicle).

However, he was curious and mischievous, as all tiny, stupid creatures tend to be, and he got out of his cage one day. We are still not sure how. Whatever he opened, he closed and locked behind him.

I’m telling you…world domination! We’d never see it coming!

I digress. I set up little booby traps around the house: food-laden ramps leading into inescapable cardboard prisons, and plastic grocery bags on the floor, so we could hear when the little fucker walked over them.

For three days, I had to pretend to care every time one of my crotch goblins lamented the missing off-brand rat. When we finally located him, thanks to my ingenious plastic bag idea, he looked sickly and deformed - the way one would, after dining on carpet fibers and loose baseboard paint.

Despite my desire to be rodent-free, we gave him lots of love and extra lettuce and he seemed to perk up a bit. But sadly, Nemo died only a few days later, obviously traumatized from being a fuckstick.

Jumpy and Slick

Undeterred by the first loss, we found another family selling shitty not-dog pets. Thus, two more stupid dwarf hamsters, Jumpy and Slick, came to live with us. When we went to pick them up, not one of the dickhead breeders informed us that there could be issues with having two hamsters in one cage — they told us they had kept the entire litter together as a family prior to us adopting them.

Their lies led to our first massacre.

Jumpy and Slick were both feistier than Nemo and brought a lot of entertainment to our home. Except that they didn’t. Hamsters are nocturnal, so they slept like assholes all day long and turned into raging shit stains at night, working tirelessly as a team to escape their goddamn palace of a cage.

However, there was no fighting, no food hoarding, and no indication that things were about to go very very wrong!

After having these little guys for about 6 months, I went to feed them one morning and could only find Slick. No Jumpy. Assuming he had escaped like the late, great, not-a-fish Nemo, I immediately set up my booby traps and waited. Not a sound.

Suspicious of the silence, I went back to the cage to look for clues, and that's when I saw it. A tiny pile of bones and blood-matted fur, camouflaged into the greyish bedding.

I blinked my eyes hard a few times to be sure of what I was seeing, but there was no avoiding the truth of the matter…Slick had eaten Jumpy. Sorry, not eaten. He fucking devoured him.

I often wonder what Jumpy was thinking while his brother ate him whole. Was he like “Dude…WTF? That is my left leg and I’m still fucking using it!”?

However it went down, it was thorough. Not an iota of hamster meat remained. We removed the remaining Jumpy bits from the cage and gave Slick our most disappointed look.

Two days later, we woke up to find Slick had expired. Perhaps “brother” should be on the list of contraindicated food items for hamsters. Serves the fucker right.

Stripey, Spazzy, and Fudgey

After a few months of mourning the living room murder-suicide of 2015, my (then) husband, who clearly has the learning capacity of a goldfish, called me to ask what I thought about getting another hamster.

Not being a fucking twatwaffle, I advised against it. When he informed me that he was already at the pet store with the kids in tow, I had two choices:

• Be the mean mommy who took away the hamster that daddy promised (I could have strangled him), or
• Give in to yet another shitty, useless pet that would likely kill us all in our sleep.

What could I do but agree?

I told him to ask the staff about hamster care and explain our previous experiences, so we could mitigate our chances of adding another chapter to this dark tale. But the key point I want you to note is that I agreed to get “a” hamster. He came home with three.

Are you fucking kidding me???

And these guys weren’t dwarf hamsters either. Nope, he brought home three full-sized Syrian (Teddy Bear) hamsters. Each one is about the size of a large, closed fist, far bigger than the nut-sized rodents I was used to. (If your wrinkle-purse contents are this big, please see a doctor!)

The instructions from the obviously-Oxford-educated, pimple-faced teenager at the pet store were clear: two hamsters could absolutely live together. As long as they were opposite genders, they wouldn't fight. We were encouraged to keep the other male in his own cage. I hope that kid made manager.

My brilliantly gifted loin spawn came up with the names; Stripey had a long white stripe down his back, Spazzy, the lone female, was a tweaked-out crack addict in animal form, and Fudgey just looked like a furry piece of shit. Such geniuses. I’m so proud.

On the first night, Spazzy attacked Stripey, who broke the hinges on the cage and escaped. Being a two-time veteran of this experience, we found him pretty quickly, chucked him back in his cage and zip-tied the broken hinge. Feeling bad for Stripey’s ordeal, we moved Spazzy over to Fudgey’s cage.

We heard little hamster cage matches going down with those two, from time to time, and even followed up with the pet store to make sure they were safe. Oxford-Pimple-Face assured us that it was normal hamster interaction, and was possibly related to mating, but nothing to worry about.

Is it too on the nose if I say our Ivy league friend was dead wrong?

We came home one night after having been out for a few hours. I could see from far away that Spazzy was lying in the middle of the cage, on top of all the bedding. Not normal behaviour, even for this particular shithead. I led with some Oscar-worthy concern and followed up with a brief investigation.

At first, I was very confused by what I was looking at, which was about 2/3 of a hamster. I won’t sugar coat this Hallmark moment; Spazzy was covered in bright red blood and was missing everything from her lower jaw to her mid-torso.

This wasn’t some non-descript pile of organic material, indiscernible from garbage, like Jumpy’s final form. This was unadulterated hamster snuff.

Fudgey was comfortably asleep in a ball in the corner. I Googled “what to do when your crack-whore hamster is cannibalized by her sociopath brother.” No results.

As we already learned, hamsters suffer from some fatal combination of sadistic glee and indigestion after feasting on their siblings, and Fudgey relieved himself of this earthly plane within a few days of his murderous escapades. Two down.

The end of an era

Stripey lived out his days in my daughter’s bedroom, seemingly oblivious to the Wes Craven-style nightmare that had taken place on my street. After another year, he too was running on that big hamster wheel in the sky and I was once again rodent-free.

Committed to staying that way, we unceremoniously began to take apart the palatial hamster habitat, recycle the last of the bedding, and give away the running wheels and cage to other families just beginning their hamster journeys. (Suckers!).

After throwing the last remaining shithead hamster carcass in the organic waste bin beside the house, we got a fish.