My Traumatic Rodent Stories
Everybody has a traumatic hamster story, or so I've heard. After all, those endearing little critters have a bad habit of escaping when you least expect it.
My little brother, Daniel, had a series of tan hamsters, all named Sam. I held Sam occasionally, but it was Dan's job to feed him regularly and keep his water bottle filled. I don't remember if Sam had a cage, or if he lived in an aquarium with a top on it, but I know that he escaped at least once. We looked for him all over our apartment, and watched for him for several days before we discovered that he had taken up residence inside my dad's recliner. Getting him out of the recliner was an exercise in patience, but he was eventually placed back into his newly-reinforced home, where he stayed after that, for the most part.
I don't remember if Erin and Meagan had a pet hamster, but they had a couple of pet mice who were both males, according to the pet shop. So, when we left them with one of Erin's grade school friends while we were vacationing, their temporary caregivers were quite surprised to find a large litter of pink, hairless baby mice in their aquarium. The sheer number of mice caused quite an odor, which was a problem in itself, but they were horrified when one of the adult mice was caught in the act of eating a baby. After that, the mice were relegated to the garage until we arrived back home to deal with them.
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| Kindergarten Mice |
I knew a lot about pet mice because, when I taught Kindergarten at Trinity Lutheran School in Traverse City, Michigan, one of the dads made a deal with me. He worked at a college lab, which raised mice to use for research. He brought me three or four cute, furry young mice, with the instruction that I should let him know when we accumulated too many for our classroom aquarium, so he could come and get the excess mice. My classroom was home to dozens of mice over the two or three years of our agreement. They were definitely hand-raised, since we often had enough for every one of my students to hold one at the same time. The kids learned all about the color variations and the life cycle of mice (and so did I.) We only lost one baby mouse, when a student accidentally dropped it into the heating register. My principal was a little worried about that...
Years later, when I was teaching preschool, a parent gifted us with a pair of hamsters in a cage that had a built-in wheel. Those frenzied hamsters ran on the wheel constantly, day and night, for the two weeks we had them, until we came into the room one morning to find both of them dead on the bottom of the cage. They had literally run themselves to death. Thankfully, we were able to remove the deceased hamsters from the classroom before the kids arrived for the day, but several of the adults were traumatized, just the same.
My youngest daughter, Victoria, raised a succession of pet mice and hamsters, including some of my classroom pets that stayed at our house for the summer. She kept them in her room, where she handled them daily and enjoyed showing them to her nieces and nephews. Every death was heart-wrenching for Victoria--small rodents only live a year, or two at most--so we have a small pet cemetery in the backyard, next to the garden.
Pet rodents are one thing, but wild ones who make their way inside, when we least expect them, can produce the most trauma of all.
I remember the day when our extended family was staying in a large old house at Fort Robinson. Seven-year-old Meagan had been nursing two very wiggly front teeth, when her Aunt JoAnn volunteered to pull them out and, for some unknown reason, Meagan actually agreed. JoAnn extracted them easily, but when she handed them to her niece, Meagan dropped both teeth onto the kitchen floor. Everyone got down on their hands and knees to look for the missing teeth, without success, so someone got a broom and began to sweep the floor. You should have heard the screams when a frightened mouse darted out from behind the stove in an attempt to escape the broom! We never found Meagan's lost teeth, so she wrote a letter to the tooth fairy, explaining the situation, and was quite surprised at the amount of money she found in place of her note the next morning. I think I still have that letter somewhere...
Another time, when Mom and Dad were spending the night in our new house, I checked Meagan's bedroom to make sure everything was in good order for them to get to bed. As I stepped into the room, I was startled to find three or four baby mice scampering around the floor. I summoned Bill to catch the mice and dispose of them before Mom and Dad noticed, and he hammered a piece of tin over the hole in the garage that had provided their access to the house. If Mom and Dad were aware of the commotion, they were gracious enough to say nothing about it.
The first December in our house, Meagan and Erin and I returned from Christmas shopping to find a squirrel sitting on the kitchen counter, eating the nuts I had put out for us to snack on. That squirrel climbed the living room curtains, staying just out of our reach until Bill was able to sweep him out the front door. Sometimes, brooms work to our advantage.
Whether wild or tame, hamsters, mice, and even squirrels, can make things exciting. However, unless they are securely contained inside, I prefer to watch all of God's little creatures outside, in their natural habitat, where they belong.
Amen...where they belong indeed.
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