Trawling the blogs and finding hamsters

In preparation for the A-Z challenge I did a small amount of blog crawling yesterday.

Starting with myself, I just worked my way through as many blogs as I could.  Got to number 300 and discovered some truly fascinating niche markets on the way.

Hamsters.  Who knew?  There is a rich seam of material for lovers of small rodents out there.


Inky the hamster mommy
Animal Tails
Confessions of a hamsterholic

As a former rodent owner, I can empathise.  When I was small, we had a long succession of hamtsers, gerbils, rabbits, guinea pigs and mice. 

Scamper the hamster was inappropriately named.  She was vast and did nothing but sleep.  When doing neither, she bit people.  She attempted to lumber her way to freedom when my sister put her on the sofa and wandered off.  With most hamsters, that  would have been more than enough time to stage an escape, but Scamper's size and disinclination to move far or fast made it easy to recapture her.  The ensuing lecture on keeping pets safe was met with a blank stare.  "You mean most hamsters aren't like this?"

You have to remember that at this point our only connection with rodents as a family had been via Tales of the Riverbank and Hammy the Hamster.  He was also not very representative.

Hammy Hamster's bijou riverside cottage

Later excursions brought us to guinea pigs, via Olga da Polga.

Here, as it turned out, fiction got it right.  Olga had much in common with Blanche and Josephine.  They were a chatty pair, extremely friendly and much the most personality packed of our childhood rodents.  

Since we are currently the possessions of a 16 year old cat who regards it as her duty to rid the world of anything small and squeaky, we don't have any rodents at the moment.  Unless I can finally fulfil that childhood dream and own a capybara.