How a tumble in the wheel gets hamsters high
In this excerpt from BBC Earth’s Pets: Wild at Heart, we get a dizzying look at the hamster’s obsession with running and learn that it’s more than just a survival skill, it’s an athletic lifestyle in pursuit of the same “runner’s high” that humans feel.
Move over, you lazy bast…I mean hamster.
Hamster fight!
I half expected one of them to be flung out of the wheel into a water dish.
Too bad it ended with a family brawl. Senseless brutality 🙂
It reminds me of the 2 sphynx kittens fighting, it was one of the best Cutetropolis posts.
That may be the best YouTube still of all time.
The inter net is packed with videos of robo’s getting the wheel spinning as fast as possible then stopping cold and being flung out at high velocity.
It does sort of sound like fun.
I had no idea two of them ever got on a wheel at the same time. On the one hand, they need a wider wheel, on the other hand, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun that way. One of them running with his nose buried in the other one’s butt is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. I was prepared to say they always run the same way and speculate it’s up to whether they are right or left handed — then one of them ran the other way. But only briefly. When I had a hamster as a child I was worried about how fragile their tiny legs look. I’d have been terrified if they went flying through the air like that. But they do it for FUN. Fascinating. Just fascinating. And a motion X ray, how the heck?
I’ve had MANY hamsters over the years. Robos are my fav for watching. I have seen young hamsters SIX on the wheel, flipping and flying off and then running to get back on! Robos have a LOT of energy to expel.😁 I know they seem fragile but it’s amazing what they can do. I’ve had them climb on top of structures, get themselves on the wire of the lid and CRAWL ACROSS upside down! They love to climb the water bottles. I had one who would climb to the top of his little wooden house, looking up to the lid, and JUMP, then land on the floor only to do it all again. You are never bored with dwarf or Robo hamsters!👍🏼😁💜🐹
I had to look up what a Robo hamster is. I figured it wasn’t a robot; turns out the full name is Roborovski, so I can see why it’s shortened. Till I watched this video, I had NO IDEA hamsters traveled long distances; I figured they had a burrow and grazed a perimeter around it. If they have a huge range (as might be necessary in the desert, once I thought about it; not much to eat) that explains the long distance running (not just a sprint to escape a predator). I still feel guilty about my hamster, these 60 years later; we built the cage (didn’t buy one); it had a wire top, and he, too, climbed up the side and across the top, but he kept falling into his water bowl (which, being a do-it-yourself cage, substituted for a water bottle). He got a chill from being wet at night in my bedroom (defective heat; long story) and died of pneumonia. Years later we had gerbils, commercial cage, water bottle, lived forever — in gerbil terms. Poor Duffy, though; still feel bad about him. It’s not like we couldn’t AFFORD a commercial cage; I can’t remember WHY we decided to build one. (The defective heat, OTOH, was blocked pipes cast into concrete floor slab; we never DID fix that. I did NOT miss that bedroom after we moved.)
Now see, my sister and I had MANY gerbils before I sorta switched to dwarf hamsters after college. My sister bred them so we had a LOT of cages down the hallway.😁
Regarding your hamster, we do what we can with knowledge we have.💙 If you had your hamster 60 years ago, people definitely didn’t know then what they did know about small cage animals when I started with my gerbs in the late 70s.
I’m 56 and I’ve only been without gerbs or hammies for a couple years since I was 13! Love them!🥰
My brother had three hamsters (consecutively) when I was in high school. The first two were named Penfold and Penfold II; the third was Headache, in “honor” of his on-again/off-again girlfriend, because that’s what she gave him.
🐹🐹🐹
If you read what I said to 6Rabbits about the same-sex gerbils who weren’t, my mother (a trained actress) named them Hamlet and Ophelia. It’s like she was DARING them to actually be opposite sex (and they took her up on it). Of course, we got it wrong (I think we named the big one Hamlet, and maybe it’s normal in gerbils for the female to be larger; not sure) so then they were Hamleta and Ophie. We could have just switched which one we called what, but that would have felt wrong.
Thanks for soothing my conscience about Duffy. Our gerbils (which we took because a relative couldn’t keep them) were guaranteed to be the same sex, so of course they weren’t. They ate some of their babies (shudder); of those they didn’t, the first litter or so we tried to find good homes for, but by the end we’d take them to the zoo to see if they’d like to feed them to their snakes. Rodents without predators are a population nightmare. And apparently they’re too small to neuter; I think we asked the vet and he just stared at us.
I’m 67 and have never had a pet of my own (after I left home). I enjoy other people’s. The thought of having a living, feeling being totally dependent on me scares me. (No, I never had kids, either.) I admire those who take responsibility for a life; I’m not mature enough to trust myself with it. Scary thing to say about myself, but at least I know my limitations.
This has been an enjoyable conversation, 6Rabbits; thank you.
My pleasure!😊