I once had hamsters as pets. I’m still not sure why. They were cute and relatively friendly. Also, they didn’t bark. They rode the little wheel like crazy, but that’s okay, because my friend Steve, who is not a hamster, but a darn good lawyer, rides a stationary bicycle. But this is about all he has in common with the creature we know as the hamster. Or is it?

The longer I had hamsters the more involved I got in creating a perfect living space for them. I became obsessed. At first I bought a glass aquarium cage then a month later decided it wasn’t big enough so I bought bigger glass cage. Then I bought the Habitrail system, a series of tubes, which has nothing to do with the series of tubes that Senator Ted Stevens (R-Asshole, Alaska) said the Internet is made out of. Different subject. Anyway, these tubes were lots of fun for the hamsters, and at first were fun for me as well. I could sit for hours watching my furry little friends jog through the golden tubes high above their cages then run round and round and end up in a completely different section of his habitat. My hamsters had the east wing, the west wing and the Oval Office. Essentially, I was giving my hamsters an urban adventure in the corner of my bedroom.

The Habitrail tubes could be connected and expanded, so I bought more and more. And more. I had collected $532 in housing, which at today’s market comparison, would be something like $1941.50. My hamsters ran through whatever new attachment and structure I erected. I bought more and more of the smaller cage dwellings with exits and entrances coming and going. The hamsters traversed bridges and turns and elbows and u-turns and oblique angles and they climbed vertically then down again and all over the fricken place. My hamsters were well traveled. I put the television set in front of them and played Rick Steve’s travel show so they would think they were jogging through Venice and seeing the art of Paris and crossing the London Bridge. My hamsters were convinced they were in Sweden and in a pub in Ireland and hovering over the Heidelberg castle. They loved the Eifel Tower and Big Ben and were awed by the Taj Mahal and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They couldn’t stop thinking about Picadilly Square or the Colisseum. My hamsters were hip, man. They had it going on, travelwise.

Then I discovered something else about my hamsters. It’s the thing that makes hamsters hamsters. They are like pack rats. Okay, maybe it’s a trait they learned from pack rats. Who am I to say where things originate? I realized that hamsters love to take stuff and stick it in their cages. So when I put stuff in one of the sections of their Habitrail they would pick it up with their mouths and travel across they tubes and deposit it with their tiny feet where their main abode was situated. Interesting indeed. I was amazed and raced off to the pet store, enquiring to the pet shop owner, a tall, skinny guy with an unusually large head named Fred, what it was that the hamsters were doing. Fred had the answers to all my hamster questions. He was an encyclopedia of hamster lore and habits. He was the hamster-meister.

Fred said, “Hamsters are collectors.”

That’s it. He said no more. Fred said this thing to me and walked away to help a portly lady select a puppy for her grandson whom she said had a social problem and needed a pet to come out of his shell. It struck me odd. Was her grandson a turtle? A clam? Why did he have a shell? No mind, I had more important things to think about. Hamsters are collectors!

That’s when it hit me. All of that television; the travel shows. Maybe I had undue influence upon my hamsters. Maybe I gave them ideas. I turned them into consumers and world travelers. I brainwashed their tiny brains and inspired them to decorate their living rooms. They even had their own bathrooms. They would use one corner of their abode to make numbers one and two, while choosing to sleep in the opposite corner. I admired that about hamsters. They were particular about this and had the sense to keep their rooms as neat as possible, which is more than I can say about any roommate I ever had in college.

In this hamster experience I realized that, like people, they will keep on collecting. There’s no end to it. They never get tired of bringing stuff into their houses. I never forgot this hamster lesson. It stuck with me always. After 22 years of therapy I have come to realize that I am a hamster. Or at least I live with one. Or we both are, me and my wife. And I know a lot of hamsters, or rather hamster-like persons. Yes, so the way it goes is that you have an apartment, right? And you get a bunch of stuff. You own it, a chair, maybe a couch, a TV, some clothes and dishes. Then you have too much, so you buy a house and fill it to the brim with more stuff. Stuff that never would have fit in the apartment. You have kids and they have stuff. Your house is too small and you move into another and another. Pretty soon you have a big house with lots of square footage, a lawn and a big garage. And it’s still too damn small. You know why? Too much stuff. And in your exercise room you have a stationary bicycle. Why? Because it’s the closest thing a human being has to a hamster wheel. With all that storing and living at home, we need some exercise. We forget that we have the entire outdoors, but instead we choose indoor exercise. We work out in gyms, have the indoor bicycle with no front wheel or no back wheel, we go to indoor yoga, play basketball in a gym (the guys who do this outside are an exception) and now you can even play golf inside. Kite flying is the only exception to this. Even when you go camping you end up under a tent.

Hamsters do not live indoors by choice. They generally prefer absolute freedom. And they love all kinds of habitats, none of which consists of Habitrails, glass aquarium tanks or wire cages.

Wikipedia says,

“Throughout dry, open country they inhabit desert borders, vegetated sand dunes, shrubby and rocky foothills and plateaus, river valleys, and mountain steppes; some live among cultivated crops. Geographic distribution varies greatly between species. The common hamster, for example, is found from central Europe to western Siberia and northwestern China, but the golden hamster has been found only near a small town in northwestern Syria.”

This is very curious, especially the last part. They don’t specify the name of the small town in northwestern Syria. But I can imagine it’s like the Catskills for Hamsters. Maybe this is why they don’t divulge the name. The hamsters want it that way. You give out the name and before you know it, the neighborhood is filling up with mice, gerbils and the kangaroo rat and his damn boomerangs and dingos. Clever fellows, those hamsters.

I think we can learn these things from hamsters, based on all that I’ve written:

• Hamsters use the cage wheel not because they like it, but because they think it’s the only way to escape.
• Hamsters should not watch television because it’s a bad influence. Violent cartoons are definitely wrong, as are daytime soaps.
• Hamsters collect stuff when you deprive them of their native habitat and give them artificial an abode. What’s our excuse?
• Hamsters like Rick Steves
• Hamsters are very secretive about that town of theirs in northwestern Syria

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