Please tell us more hamster lore
My hamster Mo, the one who learned how to open his cage, also reliably came when called. So I woke up very early in the morning on Thanksgiving when I was like nine or ten and thought I saw movement so I said "Mo?" and he came running and beamed up at me from the floor next to my bed like "look at me! I'm out!" because he was a little shit.
Mo also knew how to open a hamster ball from the inside. I had another one later who chewed the tabs off the lid so it no longer closed, but Mo didn't do that, he just figured out how to unlatch the lid from the inside and he was a bigger hamster so he could get the job done physically. I kept leaving him in a room in his ball while I was cleaning his cage and coming back to find him running loose unsupervised (which was not safe, even in my room, and he was often in the ball in even less hamster-proofed rooms) and my mom kept chastising me for not latching the ball securely and telling me I had to pay closer attention while I insisted I was. We started having my dad sit in the room while Mo was running in the ball to supervise him so he was getting chastised too for not watching closely. And then finally one night we caught Mo in the act of opening the ball and I had proof he had been framing us. My mom did apologize to me lol and to be fair, it's much more believable that a 10-year-old didn't latch a ball correctly than that a hamster was just routinely opening it.
Mo was a genius but he would periodically go insane and stuff his plastic tubes with tightly packed bedding. He had two habitrail cages connected by a fairly long tube system because the space I had for the cage limited the layout a little bit. The two cages were parallel and thankfully connected by a tube on each side, so he had two routes, but he did periodically stuff both of them at the same time and we'd have to empty them out at 6am before leaving for school. And then one time he somehow managed to Cask of Amontillado himself in the middle of a tube with tightly packed bedding both in front of him and behind him. My mom recently saw an X-ray video online of a hamster turning around in a narrow space and sent it to me like "that's how he did it!!!" Fortunately I noticed what he'd done pretty quickly so we were able to free him before he like got dehydrated.
At the same time as Mo I had Snowball who was pure white and looked exactly like a small Snowball when she was curled up. Mo and Snowball had to be separate because they were a male and female and also because Syrian hamsters are solitary and will be aggressive toward each other. The only reason I had two at the same time is that I had seen both of them at two pet stores and had trouble deciding and when I was looking at Snowball at the worse pet store the employee tried to get her out to show her to me (competent employees always use a box for the smaller animals, she just grabbed her with her hands) and dropped her. Snowball was a teeny tiny baby hamster who fell four feet onto a concrete floor and she was stunned for a bit but alive and started to regain function after a few minutes. The manager (who felt bad about the whole thing and was generally doing her best) didn't want to let me take her but I was insistent and, well, see how well you hold up against a tiny 9-year-old with round glasses and long pigtails lecturing you about how if the hamster is going to die she deserves to die in peace and quiet while the mom just kind of looks at you like 🤷♀️
I knew there was a chance Snowball wouldn't make it but I believed in her. My parents were convinced she was going to die so they took me back to the better pet store to take Mo too, since I'd been attached to him too and they figured having another hamster already would be better when Snowball inevitably died. But Snowball was a survivor so I had two hamsters which is twice the work because they needed totally separate habitats but #WorthIt. Snowball grew from teeny tiny to a good sized female Syrian hamster and was the most athletic hamster I ever had. They all climbed the bars on the cages but she literally did pull-ups. I swear she did it on purpose. She was buff. The only lingering physical symptom was that her urine was always weird, but it didn't seem to cause her any pain and she lived to be two years old which is good for a Syrian, the normal lifespan is 18-24 months and 18-20 is really more common. I think she probably had traumatic damage to one kidney from the fall but had enough function to get by. Her traumatic beginning did understandably make her hate most humans. I was very gentle and patient with her and in time socialized her to be a totally friendly pet with me but she never liked anyone else. She tolerated my mom enough that my mom could take care of her if I wasn't there and could pet her when I had her out but she was a one-person rodent because I was the only one who believed in her and saved her life.
A couple weeks after Mo escaped Snowball also popped the cage open. She was smart but I don't think she understood how opening the cage worked quite as well as Mo did but she did it and she got out of her cage, off the dresser it was on, across the room, and somehow climbed up into a child-sized wooden chair and used the (fairly precarious) stack of books and stuff to get onto the table Mo's cage was on and then climbed up the outside of his cage and went to sleep on top of it. I woke up it the wee hours of the morning, saw a blurry (my glasses were not on) white shape on top of my hamster's cage and was so confused. I went over and realized it was Snowball and she was so still I thought she was dead but I touched her and she woke up and I was like hello???? At this point I had been through enough incidents like this that despite being like ten years old and extremely groggy I had the presence of mind to put her in the hamster ball until we could figure out how she got out of the cage in the first place so I did that and went to wake up my parents who didn't believe me and kept asking if I was dreaming. After a few minutes they realized it was real and my mom to this day is like "can you blame us? that was insane" and I'm like can you blame ME for being offended that you thought I was dreaming when I just lived through all that?? Also later I found out Snowball had stolen an entire box of treats while she was out and stashed them in the back of my closet.
We came up with the miniature bungee cords after that lol.
It wouldn't have been good for Snowball's health to breed them and also hamsters have litters of up to ten and finding good homes for them is really hard so it wouldn't have been responsible but I always wanted to breed Mo and Snowball because their offspring would have been super hamsters.
This is already super long but next time I'll tell you about my first hamster Sunny who's the reason I knew how to act in the event of a hamster escape.
