Loving animals is a core part of Kiki’s identity—one of her go-to t-shirts reads “Be kind to animals or I’ll kill you.” (I bought it for her.) The number of times we’ve risked adopting an animal is so high that it’s a wonder we’ve actually gotten so few.
Last year, a butterball of a hamster snuck past the defenses, so to speak. It all started with an act of Big Government that would make Ron Swanson grumble: The Netherlands banned certain non-native species as pets, among them the Russian dwarf hamster. Our local pet shop had one who’d been available for awhile, but nobody wanted because he was a biter. Kiki asked them: What will happen if you haven’t sold him by the deadline? Oh, I’m sure they’ll give us a little more time. But what then? Awkward silence on the line
Moments later, my phone rang: “Can we adopt a hamster?”
Thus Glen Hamsterd abruptly entered our lives. He was my very first hamster (unless you count MC Hamster and Vanilla Mice, our classroom rodents at Grapevine Junior High). Like those legends, Glen was also named for a musician.
He was a pure white cottonball who unexpectedly started going gray within weeks of arriving home. As advertised, he was a biter, but preferentially so. Kiki got proper chomps, the kind that send parents storming back to the pet store for a refund. (No good deed goes unpunished.) My bites were usually more affectionate, gentle tugging nibbles. Many times he seemed to be trying to drag me into his cage in total violation of Euclidean space.
We’ve all seen Instagram videos of cats and hamsters getting along as fast friends. Glen seemed fine with the idea, displaying not a trace of self-preservation instinct. Percy meanwhile preferred the natural way of things, which is to say he wanted very much to eat his brother.
The tables were turned when we gave Glen outings in his ball, where he seemed to intimidate Percy.
At some point, we also got a ball python, giving us two pets who would LOVE to eat the third. Glen lived a more dangerous life than he ever knew, happily bulging in size, breaking the scales at over 70 grams, always with a snack stored in his cheek pouch.
But what felled him1 was much more mundane than a predatory sibling: a tumor that we found rapidly growing on his front left leg, causing him to drag that paw around sadly. (Or not sadly! He continued to navigate his cage and use the hamster wheel even when he was down a limb.)
Still, Glen’s interest in his favorite snacks (spinach and dried mealworms) was noticeably lower, and it was better to send him off with some dignity. On Saturday we put him into his tiny carrier for the last time and sent him across the teeny-tiny rainbow bridge.
Hamsters don’t live too long; that’s the way of things. But Kiki’s act of charity gave Glen a longer, happier, fatter life than he could ever have gotten elsewhere. RIP Glenny. You brought delightful chubbiness to our lives.
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