Beth Meadows, age 10, of Franklin, North Carolina for her question:
How long do hamsters live?
Hamsters are short term pets. We cannot expect them to live much longer than two and a half years, for this is their average life span. However, they usually leave us plenty of replacements. A mother hamster may produce as many as 50 furry babies during her first year. And the youngsters are weaned and ready to go at the age of two weeks.
Various hamsters live wild in parts of Europe and Asia. But the ones we know best are the beautiful little golden hamsters. Millions of them live as laboratory animals and millions more are pampered pets. And all of them are descended from one little mother. She was found in 1930 near Aleppo in Syria. With her brood of 12 golden babies she was dug from a burrow, eight feet deep.
Her assorted wild cousins come in various shades of brown and grey, with patches of black and white. They range in size from large mice to large guinea pigs. This rare Syrian hamster was six inches long. Her loose, fluffy coat was reddish gold with white patches under her chin and on her chubby tummy. Her tiny legs and feet were white.
Aside from being so pretty, she turned out to be tamable, neat and clean. And so were her babies. In true hamster style, they were grown up in a few weeks and started to multiply at a great rate. The females had litters of 12 to 15 or more. In 1931, some were sent to England as lab animals. In 1938, some were sent to America. Soon the surplus hamster lab population was sold as pets.
Lab scientists claim that some of their golden hamsters have lived as long as eight years. But this is very unusual. As a rule, the charm
ing animals are old at the age of two years. Most of them live for two and a half to three years. But while they live, the busy little mothers are busy producing babies and more babies.
A mother hamster may have a litter of 15 when she is about two months old. Six weeks later she may have another litter of 15 or so and six weeks later another litter. This multiplication goes on and on.
The baby hamsters are born naked and helpless. But their golden and white fur coats start to sprout in a couple of days. For two weeks they are fed on mother's milk. Then the little charmers are weaned and ready to leave home to live separate lives of their own.
A pet hamster needs a well caged box with two to four square feet of living room space. The floor should be packed with dirt and in one corner the dirt should be several inches deep. A hamster is a born hoarder. In the wild, he may store a whole bushel of surplus food in his underground burrows.
Your pet hamster feeds on cereals, bits of lettuce and potato and almost any kind of plant food. His cheeks are pockets, where he stuffs his leftovers. The little hoarder digs a pantry in the deep end of his box to store his surplus food. What's more, he stores grains of cereal in one pantry and bits of potato in a separate pantry.