I love fluffy things. And if you think about it a hamster is a ball of fluff
that moves around (okay it can bite you more than normal fluff and you also
have to feed it) but other than that it’s fluff that moves. So as a kid I
wanted a fluffy hamster. My parents agreed (one of the happiest moments in my
LIFE!) and so off we went to buy the hamster, I picked the fluffiest hamster in
the pet shop, he was so unbelievably fluffy (see picture below – it’s quite accurate although it seems that drawing hamsters isn't my best ability) I was thrilled! Like most things that move
and have teeth I was a bit scared of him, but he was very very cute. I used to
comb his tufty fluffy hair. I named him Cozmo Anne Dibbs, I guess really he
should have had the same last name as me but I really like the surname Dibbs
and so I game him my middle name instead (Anne), I suppose that’s quite a
feminine middle name for a male hamster but no one ever uses middle names
anyway, especially not for hamsters…in fact do normal people even give their
hamsters middle names??
 | |||
| The late Cozmo Anne Dibbs (that's right he dies eventually) |
I know the drawing above is a bit poor but if you compare it to my initial attempt below it's pretty good, turns out I really struggle to draw hamsters in the standing up position... it looks more like a scary (yet quite endearing) old granny in a cape).
 |
| Cozmo standing/Scary granny in a cape |
He was a lovely hamster, so as you can imagine the first time he died I was so upset.
He’d been doing mini hamster sneezes all evening and then he just went limp and
stopped moving, I thought he was dead, but we decided let’s wait until morning
and deal with it then. Next morning we woke up surprised to find Cozmo alive
and well, what a relief- so I guess on that occasion he didn’t really come back
from the dead, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. A few months later however, he
got really ill, he was slow and sleeping all the time and then my parents broke
the news to me one morning that he was dead.
This time he was clearly dead… we didn’t really want to have a dead
hamster in his cage all day so my dad put him in some soft fluff and put him in
a cardboard box, he wrapped the box tightly with string, then he had to go off
to work, so we decided that later that day we would bury the hamster in the
back garden. I went to school and told my friends the sad news and slowly came
to terms with it.
However, that day my mum had popped out, on her return she
found what must have looked like the ghost of Cozmo sat on top of his cardboard
coffin box! He had woken up and nibbled his way out of the box! My mum is
scared of animals such as hamsters so she panicked, but managed to heroically scoop
him into a tea towel and return him safely to his cage. As shown below. GO MUM! what a hero!
When I got home I was prepared for an emotional hamster
funeral, so upon seeing Cozmo alive in his cage I was thrilled and also
confused! We were all confused! Until we stumbled upon the fact that hamsters
hibernate when they’re cold, and when they hibernate they go hard and don’t
move, i.e., they look and feel dead! This information should be better
circulated!! That’s right you’ve now got that horrible sinking feeling that you
buried your pet hamster alive haven’t you!!? no?
Just think, if we had buried him that morning he would have
nibbled out of the box and would be chilling in the back garden (that gives me
an image of him chilling on a miniature sun bed with a gin and tonic - actually
his prospects wouldn’t have looked great with the foxes and cats out there), in
fact that realisation of what really might happen to your pets when you bury
them in the garden has just dawned upon me, oh dear.
So I got to enjoy Cozmo for a few more months until the next
time he died. It took a lot of convincing for me to really believe he was dead…
I asked my Dad many times… ‘are you really sure he isn’t hibernating!??’
Turns out he was dead that time and so we buried him in the garden and
that was that. Though come to think of it, how can I really be sure that he
wasn’t hibernating again? Maybe my Dad just wanted to get rid of him?
I did have a dream a couple of months later of a giant Cozmo
arising from the ground in my garden and running toward my house :-/
No comments:
Post a Comment