|
When I saw Knight in the pet store, all fluffy and white, I fell
in love with him. I thought he would make a perfect father hamster. Knight had
a wonderful, sweet personality and was so fuzzy that I loved to cuddle with him.
We first mated him with Queen, who had
already had one successful litter with Rook, in September
of 1995. So in August of 1996, at the age of 17 months, Queen
became pregnant. Unfortunately, we didn't realize that she was probably too old
to give birth. She had one large stillborn baby and then, sadly, Queen
died too.
At this time, we still had another female, Bishop,
Queen and Rook's daughter, whom
we thought about mating with Knight. But we had recently had returned to us a
sister of Bishop, named Fluffy, who looked a lot like
her mother. She had been a class pet for a kindergarten class and, unfortunately,
had earned a reputation as a biter. We were very happy to have her back, and with
lots of TLC, she became sweet-natured once again. Since I loved the idea of black
and white babies, like Queen and Fluffy, who might also
be long-haired, like Knight, I decided to mate Knight with Fluffy (see above right
photo).
Knight and Fluffy had four adorable
babies. Tragically, one of the babies, Oreo, had a birth defect on her leg, causing
the others to attack her when she was 2 weeks old. It was probably just an instinct
to eliminate a "defect" in the group. The vet fixed her up and we isolated
her from the family, but we couldn't prevent Oreo from chewing on her own leg
until she bled to death. Again, tragedy struck, because somehow, Fluffy, seemed
to wither away until she died. It was as if the babies sucked the life out of
her. Despite the tragic circumstances, the remaining 3 babies were healthy and
took well to being hand fed from a dropper. In fact, they thrived and were especially
tame, because they were used to being handled. We nicknamed them Vanilla (white
one), Chocolate (black one) and Swirl (black and white). It was especially hard
to give them away, but we had promised them to 3 new owners already. We didn't
even have one left for ourselves to keep.
Knight died in February of 1998 at the age of 2 years.
|
