We all know that hamsters only have one purpose, and that is to teach children about the concept of death. You get your hamster at age five, then it dies at age seven and your parental figure needs to explain that sometimes things go away forever; your hamster is probably burning somewhere under the earth. Then you both go and try to bury it outside but it’s winter so the ground is too hard to break and you end up just loosely covering it with dirt and snow for a raccoon to eat when spring rolls around.
Most people have a messed up hamster story because a child’s learning device does not have the privilege of a dignified death. Maybe yours was found dead in the wall after some time away, or maybe it chewed on some wiring and started a small electrical fire, either way, it probably wasn’t pleasant. I have taken the time to personally collect some of the best hamster-death stories from campus and compiled them here for your reading pleasure:
“This kid I knew in elementary school wanted to see if his hamster would survive if he threw it at the ceiling. Spoiler: It did not.” – Tedi Buffett
“When I was a kid I had a friend who had a hamster, and one day we thought it would be a good idea to take the hamster outside. Somehow it didn’t get lost or eaten, what happened was we got called in for lunch and we kinda forgot about the hamster. It was a hot summer day right, so we go in to eat, realize we forgot the hamster, like, an hour later, then when we went to go get it and we couldn’t find it, [we saw] a dark splotch on the street and I swear it looked like the hamster, man.” – Divine Tissera
“My brother was two and tried to give my hamster a hug with his hands… when asked what he did, he responded ‘I SQUEEEEZED it’… R.I.P Louis, you were a real one.” – Skylar Côté
“When I was a kid I had a hamster who escaped overnight and got lost in the walls of our house. How he got there? I don’t know, but we’d hear him at night scratching in the walls. I don’t know what he ate or how he moved throughout our whole house, but he was everywhere. It was a weird feeling because he wasn’t missing y’know he was just around, we could never see him but we could hear him. This went on for about three months until one day we just… stopped hearing him. Rest in power, Gilbert.” – Dawson Cormier
“I had a friend who had a hamster when we were kids and I remember going over to their house every day after school and the cage was in the living room, we’d just kinda look at it for an hour then I’d go home. One day I went over and the hamster wasn’t there, turns out, it had escaped its cage. It climbed up to the top of this person’s bookshelf. It was tall too. I don’t know how it got up there, like it was maybe nine or ten feet up. But it climbed up to the top and from how his dad described it to us, the hamster “took a leap of faith” off the top of the bookshelf, walked about 20 feet into the kitchen and then never woke up again.” – Alex Black
