How Long Can a Hamster Survive Without Food

The Dark, Disturbing Truth Of Hamsters

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Hamsters are incredibly popular pets, especially as "starter pets" for kids whose parents don't experience they're ready for the responsibility of a larger, more difficult pet that would cause more than of an uproar with the neighbors if the kid does a bad job taking care of information technology. The nigh mutual domestic hamster by far is the Syrian or gilded hamster, also chosen the fancy hamster, if you want to gild the lily a niggling. Various species of dwarf hamster are too common as pets, including the Roborovski hamster, known colloquially as the Robo, despite non being a cool cybernetic hamster of the future. The Chinese hamster is less common every bit a pet, partially because of the male's large and conspicuous genitals, which tin can grow to be as large as their head.

Enormous business organisation notwithstanding, hamsters are famed for being beautiful little balls of fuzz who just run on their wheels or in their plastic assurance and lap beads of water out of their little water bottles and dig around in forest fries and what take you. Only underneath that cute exterior lies a miserable pile of dark secrets. Hamsters, it turns out, are blind, alcoholic, inbred, murderous, cannibalistic cranks. Read on to acquire the horrific truth of these sinister rodents you voluntarily welcome into your dwelling house.

Cannibalistic Hamsteroid Hugger-mugger Dwellers

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For humans, one of the strongest natural emotional forces is the protective instinct a mother feels toward her children. Information technology's what drives the entire humming "Mama Bear" motorcar decal manufacture. So that'southward why information technology's so shocking for many people to find out that it's really not all that uncommon for a female parent hamster to impale and eat her babies.

There are a number of reasons why this might happen: stress caused by the size of the litter, fear of the environment (especially if some goony human pokes too close or too oftentimes around a hamster cage with a litter of pups in it), a human being'southward odor getting on the babies and confusing the mom so that she doesn't recognize her own offspring, insufficient nutrient, or just because the female parent feels overwhelmed and worries she won't be able to provide for or protect her babies. It'southward an act of mercy, non just some case of sudden cannibalistic munchies. In that context, it'due south much clearer that a hamster female parent eating her babies is really a unlike manifestation of that same protective maternal instinct that human mothers experience, and it's maybe a little easier to sympathise. Simply all that understanding falls away again when yous read about how hammy moms sever their pups' heads. Respect and agreement, man. They are hard won, but sadly tin can be lost by something equally pocket-sized and inconsequential equally eating your own child'due south caput.

Well, the teeth beginning growing and they don't stop growing

Hamsters are rodents, and at that place's ane thing that ties all rodents — as well as related species similar rabbits and hares — together, and that's the fact that their incisors (front teeth) abound continuously over the span of their life, like some kind of terrible tooth nightmare. Only, similar, an infinity of teeth, forever. Normally, the teeth stay a normal length because rodents champ at their food (the give-and-take "rodent" means "gnawing") and they're naturally ground downward in that process. Yes: that is also gross, and non a great alternative to the mental image of infinity long teeth.

Just what happens if their teeth don't go properly ground down in the normal eating process? As Spruce Pets explains, the teeth might become overgrown and curve into their gums, get caught on things, cause drooling, hyperventilating, and crusade issues with swallowing. These are all terrible and gross things to imagine, and then how exercise yous fix it? Well, with some other terrible and gross thing: trimming your hamster's teeth. The good news is that this is a simple horrific process you tin practise with simple tools y'all already have in your house whose retentiveness will be forever tainted past this foul dental deed. No need to use a dremel tool similar you lot might with a larger creature like a rabbit or chinchilla (blargh), but use suture scissors or a pair of fingernail clippers and attempt not to think about the amateur veterinarian dental surgery you did next time you prune a hangnail.

Bullheaded as bats

The hamster is a crepuscular (meaning active during the hours of dawn and dusk), burrowing animal that lives underground. As such, a good sense of sight is about as useful to them as a neverending pasta laissez passer at Olive Garden. While hamsters can see okay in dim low-cal, in bright low-cal they're basically blind. Baby hamsters are blind at birth, and as adults they can only e'er see a few inches in front of their nose. A hamster's master methods of getting around are using their other senses, such every bit hearing, odour, and bear upon via their whiskers.

The bad news is that this bad vision poses a number of dangers for pet hamsters every bit well as their owners. These Mister Magoos of the animal kingdom are known to walk off loftier surfaces or jump out of hands or off shoulders and injure themselves or worse. (The lesson hither is don't perch your hamster on your shoulders or hold them in your mitt while standing upwardly. As well don't buy them multi-level cages or, y'all know, put them on high surfaces, fifty-fifty if you recollect it would be cute to put them on the ceiling fan blade, fifty-fifty if the fan is on low.) Hamsters' poor vision is also the main crusade for biting, as sudden moves frighten them, and if they don't catch or recognize their owner'due south scent, they might seize with teeth defensively at the unknown giant blob trying to shove them into a ball.

They're like chocoholics, merely for booze

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Despite the clear classification of hamsters as rodents, the Syrian hamster seems to take a piffling canine Deoxyribonucleic acid in its genome equally well: they're half hamster, half booze hound. According to the New York Times, hamsters are popular with booze researchers because those petty dudes are nuts for hitting the sauce. Given the choice between drinking from a bottle of h2o and a canteen of booze, they will choose the alcohol 100 percentage of the time. They beloved it.

How did hamsters develop their adorable, pocket-sized version of dipsomania? Information technology's related to their instinct for hoarding. They coffin fruit to store all summer, and when they come back to it in wintertime, the fruit has fermented and the hamsters become turnt in their hibernal bunkers. Equally a result, they've come to prefer and even seek out the smell and taste of fermented fruit because that fruit is easier to observe by smell.

Information technology turns out they can handle their liquor amend than humans, though. Their liver is developed enough to metabolize large (well, large relative to their size) servings of alcohol. In terms of size relation to their other organs, a hamster's liver is five times the size of a human being'southward. Yous know, proportionately. Non literally, as that would exist both weird and impossible. Simply a little mouse-sized dude dragging effectually a fifteen-pound digestive organ? It wouldn't fifty-fifty fit in their niggling exercise brawl.

No trespassing

The popular early 2000s manga and anime Hamtaro centered effectually the titular Hamtaro, a hamster who would meet up with his hamster friends the Ham-Hams in their special hamster clubhouse and accept absurd hamster adventures. Bad news, anime fans. If the show were more realistic, Hamtaro would murder each Ham-Ham he encountered in gild to accept the clubhouse all to himself.

It turns out hamsters, especially Syrian hamsters, are super mega territorial. While it's not uncommon to see hamsters caged together at pet stores, information technology's because hamsters in stores are normally really young. Once hambos striking about 8 to x weeks of age, yous have to go on them apart or they will fight it out until one or both are dead, like those guys with switchblades who strapped their wrists together in the "Beat It" video. Even if they don't fight, close proximity between adult hamsters will crusade enough stress to significantly shorten their life spans. The but fourth dimension developed Syrian hamsters should be together is when they're mating, basically, only even then it'southward an uneasy truce that is brusque-lived at all-time. If yous have multiple Syrian hamsters, you have to keep them in dissever cages and they should have their own toys.

Not all types of hamsters are detestable solitary hermits, though. Dwarf hamsters can get along with same-sex roommates if they're paired together from a young enough historic period. But even this is unreliable. They're just grumpy old coots, man. Loners, Dottie. Rebels.

Despite all my rage

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Hamsters are past and large solitary, territorial creatures who like to spread out over their own personal territory, exploring and foraging and burrowing where they and then please. It turns out, then, that they don't ...dearest it when humans coop them upwards in tiny cages and exit them there to rot in their tiny plastic Shawshanks without fifty-fifty a Rita Hayworth affiche for visitor. Keeping your hamster in a too-small space can pb to a fake-sounding-but-existent condition known as "cage rage," which can crusade your hamster to basically hulk out and smash puny human.

Symptoms of cage rage include hr-long sessions of biting at their cages, biting and attacking people who get besides close, peeing everywhere to mark territory, increased aggression and attacking literally anything, destroying their ain toys, berserker rage, squealing and spitting, restlessly climbing effectually their cage, ruined teeth from all their stress biting, and just, like, full general anxiety. Syrian hamsters, beingness relatively large and extra territorial, are most at risk of cage rage; Robo hamsters are small enough that they're at relatively low risk, but even they can endure from stress itching if their surround is likewise minor. In bad enough cases, a hamster might never recover from cage rage, and yikesamundo. That's no fun for anyone.

The solution is to brand sure your hamster has a suitably large living infinite with lots of toys and gets plenty of fourth dimension in its hamster ball to explore and exercise. A Rita Hayworth poster probably couldn't injure, though.

At that place'south no off switch on the baby-making machine

If you have a hamster and feel like that isn't enough, having two hamsters is a good style to get a meg hamsters because these beautiful piffling fluffs are actually unstoppable babe-making machines. A Syrian hamster can become preggo at just four weeks old, and then a female hamster will come up into rut — that is, become receptive to mating — every four days. For comparing'due south sake, near dogs come in heat 2 or 3 times a year. You can tell your hambo is in heat because she volition give off a stiff, hormonal odour that will serve as a musky and unwanted reminder of your tiny month-old friend'south budding sexuality.

If a male child hamster and a girl hamster gather long enough to mate without killing each other, you can await a litter of hamster pups in nigh 18 to 22 days depending on the variety of ham you have. The litter volition likely exist between 3 and 12 pups, depending on the hamster type, though a Syrian hamster uterus can hold up to 24 trivial miracles. If this isn't plenty babies for you, great news! Dwarf hamster females come back into heat immediately later giving nascency, so just refill that furry fiddling mama like a PEZ dispenser total of babies and yous'll have some other dozen pups in less time than it takes for an issue of Southern Living magazine to come up out. (Absolutely do not breed your hamster two cycles in a row, you monster. Also adopt, don't breed. There are enough hamsters.)

Bad marketing

If you were to wait up fun hamster facts online — a cool, normal style to spend your weekend — 1 you'd probably encounter repeated on diverse sites is that the word "hamster" comes from the High german verb "hamstern" meaning "to hoard." Nope! It's the other fashion effectually. The verb comes from the proper noun of the animal, like to how in English we refer to people "squirreling something abroad." Imagine being then associated with hoarding that an entire language named it after you. "No, don't go to his house, he'due south a real Davider. There's newspapers everywhere." "Coming soon to TLC, Rachelers Season 12. How many commemorative Spock plates tin can one woman Rachel?"

Co-ordinate to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the truth is that the give-and-take "hamster" likely comes from a blend of Eastern European words indicating a small footing rodent, including the Russian chomiak, pregnant, well, "hamster," and a Baltic give-and-take such as the Lithuanian staras, meaning "ground squirrel." And then, alas, nada to do with pigs or amateur radio. Alternatively, the give-and-take might come from a Persian word meaning "oppressor," which seems like an over-the-top kind of thing to call a cute, blind-ish, furball, but if yous cause enough trouble for Western farsi farmers, who knows what they might phone call you.

Just wildest of all, they weren't even always called hamsters in English language. The former common term for them was "German rat" due to how plentiful they were in Europe. Presumably the proper noun was changed to its cuddlier modern incarnation for marketing and PR purposes.

It's Adam and Eve, non Adam and Mister Saddlebags

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Hamsters — specifically Syrian hamsters — are ubiquitous as pets at present, but they were only really domesticated in the 1930s cheers to the work of Jewish biologist Israel Aharoni, who wanted to give Hebrew names to all the animals of the Holy Land, matching them upwardly to names of animals in the Torah when possible. Every bit Smithsonian magazine explains, in 1930, he went searching the hills of Syria for a small, golden rodent that he had heard rumors of, which was known in Arabic by the truly embarrassing proper noun of Mister Saddlebags (this is a translation, of course).

Aharoni's motivation wasn't just to replace the ridiculous-if-endearing Mister Saddlebags with the relatively sedate sounding Hebrew oger, yet. He and his colleagues also thought that Mister Saddy-B might be shut plenty physiologically to humans to exist of utilise in medical research, then when he uncovered a mother ham and her ten pups, he took them back to Jerusalem. Well, long story short, afterwards a serial of hilarious and horrifying antics that involved most of the hams eating each other and Aharoni drowning the female parent in cyanide, he had a single mating pair left who before long blessed him with 150 more ham babies, who then themselves bred and gave ascent to tens of thousands of offspring. And every domestic Syrian hamster on World arose from this brother and sister hamster Adam and Eve pair in a laboratory in Jerusalem. Every hamster owner has a descendant of the original Mister Saddlebags rolling effectually their house.

Sometimes, the Hamster Dance is a crime

Everyone knows that hamsters' most marketable skill is their penchant for forming trip the light fantastic toe crews. Once you lot run across a hamster dance, you lot'll never get it out of your caput. So it only makes sense that somewhen a hamster trip the light fantastic toe crew would hit information technology big promoting the Kia Soul, a sensible five-door subcompact crossover multi-purpose vehicle. The only surprising part is that somehow these hamsters were big plenty to drive a human being-sized hatchback. Maybe they shrunk the cars with CGI or something, who knows.

Anyhow, as with any sufficiently meteoric rise to fame, a fall was sure to follow. Every bit the Los Angeles Times reported in 2016, i of the humans behind the dancing Kia hamsters, Leroy Barnes, was sentenced to electronic monitoring, community service, and over $24,000 in fines for insurance fraud and making simulated statements. Barnes was injured in 2010 when a piece of ceiling fell on him and a md put him on temporary disability benefits, which were supposed to last for thirty to 45 days. Barnes, however, kept extending the benefits past challenge to exist hurt and failing to report whatsoever new income, even every bit he and his hamster buds were kicking sick windmills for Kia Motors. During that fourth dimension, he also danced backup for Madonna, Kelly Rowland, and Chris Brownish, which seems like really positive progress for hamster representation in the arts, so it's really a shame Barnes had to cast a shadow over all hamster kind with his shameful fraudulent behavior.

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Source: https://www.grunge.com/135742/the-dark-disturbing-truth-of-hamsters/

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