Saturday 19th August 2000
Maty the Hamster reports on a new educational experiment being initiated by the GFO


For many years, people have debated the proper way to care for a hamster's physical needs, with the emphasis mainly on nutrition, housing, exercise and, occasionally, breeding. Some have denounced cages of various shapes and compositions with little or no verifiable data while others have insisted that certain foods be avoided for health reasons. As readers of the RW will know, outrageous arguments over these issues are common place amongst hamster owners and the lower one's morals, the more sordid the accusation will be.

But, to date, little or nothing has been contributed to the discussion concerning the intellectual needs of hamsters.

Hamsters, particularly Syrians, are solitary creatures, spending most of their lives living alone - except for the post-birth period in the life of the female, when she spends up to five weeks nurturing her young. However, except for music coming from stereo systems in the homes of many hamsters - or debates and dramas played out on television sets (something which can cause insanity to begin in humans) - they often lack proper intellectual stimulation and thus rarely reach their full potential.

However, an experiment is underway in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where the GFO with whom we all live is presently hamsitting six, mature hamsters belonging to a friend. Noticing that they seemed out of place lined up on the floor of the living room (in a small flat such as this, we have drastically limited space for shelving and for everything else), she decided to try to get them interested in their new surroundings by providing some academic input into their lives. And so for the past few mornings (as bed time for the hamsters approach) she's given them lectures in hamster history, hamster political movements, and hamster philosophy.

The accompanying photograph shows the GFO reading to these hamsters from a collection of classic rodent literature written between 1750 and 1950. By the third day, the hammies had become very much interested in the essays (you can see the one in the front row, who has a hearing problem, standing forward to better hear what the GFO is reading).

The hamsters all have somewhat different tastes in reading material, of course, but are definitely broadening their horizons and learning to appreciate new things. Among their favorites so far is an essay comparing the family life of various rodent species written by a philosopher rat who lived in India during the late 1880s. Another is a humorous commentary by a Siberian hamster on "creatures with exposed skin", which ridicules the relatively low state of development among humans in the early 19th century when the treatise was first published. Another well-liked selection was done jointly by two anonymous Syrian hamsters living in the United States in the late 1950s and early 60s, which ridicules popular entertainment for humans during that period (such as "Leave it to Beaver" which doesn't even have a beaver in it). They have so far shown slightly less interest in accounts of rodent roles in historic events such as the French Revolution (which, unknown to many, was started by a small colony of mice miles outside Paris) and the launch of Sputnik (one of its minor parts was designed by a Russian dwarf hamster).

However, the experiment has proved that hamsters want, appreciate, and deserve an intellectual dimension in their lives. And our study, though admittedly conducted with a small sample group (six) and over a short period of time (so far, three days), nonetheless demonstrates that hamsters are eager to learn and that they benefit greatly when they have suitable books read to them by GFOs.

Maty the Hamster doesn't write very often for the Rodent Weekly.
This article appears courtesy of that paper.



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