Ginger the Houdini Hamster

by Tramp Pawpette Purr

A fluff of white, ginger, and green was my first impression of the energetic rodent. Two bright eyes glinted up at me from her stubborn poof of a head as she determinedly crisscrossed the top of her cage, monkey bar fashion. "She got out and destroyed our couch. I can't live with this!", the desperate woman pleaded with me, her foot already halfway out the pet store's sliding glass door. Having just bought my first hamster, I eagerly adopted the castaway on the spot. Ginger had been housed in a cage with no exercise wheel, and chlorophyll dye bedding which her silken fur soaked up like a sponge. My boyfriend's deep sigh finalized her adoption, "Well, I guess one more isn't going to make a difference at this point..." Ginger defied all odds when I adopted her, and continues to bend the limits to this day. Our first mission was to give her an exercise wheel and return her tragically green, pudgy body to her natural sleek, white hamster self. Having lacked a wheel ever since her purchase, my resourceful hamster had discovered the art of monkey bar travel from one end of the cage to another. Gripping the slender, white metal bars, she would pull herself from one bar to another until she had monkey barred hundreds of feet in the period of a few hours. When we first put a wheel in her cage, she didn't know what to do. She would climb on top of the rotating cup, and end up on her head as it rolled her back down to the cage bedding. As she got the hang of hamster wheeling, she began to design innovative ways of exercise. She would grip the cage bars with her hind paws and roll the wheel with her front paws. She would wedge herself between the wheel and cage bars, slowly rolling herself down the small crevice until she was wedged under the wheel. Then, she would roll herself back up. Transforming her unnaturally green coloring back to her birth colors was more complicated than teaching her to exercise. We didn't want to poison Ginger, so we tried washing out the dye with baby shampoo. If you thought a drenched kitten was cute, you have never seen a drenched hamster! Despite our repeated assaults with the baby shampoo, Ginger remained green as a martian. Those first months with Ginger were full of efforts, both successful and amusingly unsuccessful, to turn her back into a normal hamster. Once we had taught her how to run, groom, tunnel, and burrow like a normal rodent, Ginger naturally adopted more annoying rodent habits. Ginger didn't like to stay in her cage. She would sacrifice whole nights of prime wheel time to gnaw at the cage bars, pleading with us to let her roam. We bought her a rodent ball, but she wanted to be free! She wanted to roam and burrow into the walls like a wild girl. Her Christmas present, a cage complete with tunnels and burrows, turned out to be her key to satisfying those nagging instincts. It all begun when she discovered the little burrow atop her cage, accessible via a tunnel. At first, she used the burrow as a toilet, climbing through the tunnel to deposit her waste far away from her normal living area. As time progressed, she began carrying bedding through the tunnel in her cheek pouches. We thought it was cute how she spent all her time up there. Then, one strange day, we came home to find a perfectly sealed hamster cage with no hamster inside. I was crazy with worry. What had happened to her? We searched all over; we looked under the furniture and in piles of clothes. In desperation, I called out, "Ginger, where are you?", whereupon she waddled sleepily towards me from her hiding spot and looked up with a cranky, "This had better be good", expression on her face. Despite our efforts to secure the cage, she continues to sneak out, and has even gnawed a hole in her food bag so she can feed herself at will. Luckily for us, Ginger is a loving girl and always comes waddling up when we call her. Ginger wasted no time once she had a chance to develop her hamster instincts. Today, we are blessed with a robust tan, white, a little less green behind the ears hamster who astounds and entertains us with her independent antics. We were given a hamster fed up with her unfair housing. We thought we knew how to teach her to be a hamster, but she is the one who taught us how a hamster acts. She has the run of her room, a space not limited to the cage bars no matter how hard we try, and the run of our hearts. I'm so glad we are blessed with little Ginger and her huge personality.