A Hundred Slower Evenings

Questions and Answers About Life With an Older Hamster

Before We Begin

For most of her life, our golden hamster Clementine ran her wheel from dusk until nearly dawn, and the soft rattle of it was as much a part of our home as the ticking of the hall clock. Then, one winter night, the wheel went quiet. I am the grandfather in this family, the one who is home in the daytime, and so the questions came to me: from my daughter June, from her husband Ravi, and from my grandchildren Mira and Otto, who had never known the house without Clem's busy nights. This book gathers those questions and the answers we found, one evening at a time, as Clem grew old. It is written for people who already love animals and want to understand the late part of a small life, the part that comes quickly and asks for patience, curiosity and a little rearranging of the furniture.

Each lesson follows our family through one set of questions and ends with points to watch. Two things belong at the very start. If you are concerned, see a vet; a vet who knows small animals can look closely at your own hamster and help you understand what you are seeing. And if you are thinking of bringing a pet home, check the rules that apply where you live, such as local registration or rules for animals in rented homes, with official information before the day the cage arrives.

Part 1: The Evenings Change

This part begins on the night a family first notices that their hamster is not quite the animal she was. Nothing dramatic has happened. A wheel is quiet, a bowl is a little fuller than usual, and a small golden body sleeps a little longer into the dark.

Here the questions are new and slightly worried. What is changing, why it might be happening, and which changes belong to an ordinary older life and which belong in front of a vet are the threads these first lessons follow.

Lesson 1: The Wheel Went Quiet: The Night We First Noticed

It was a few minutes past midnight, and I was standing in the dark living room with a glass of water in my hand, listening. The house had settled. The fridge hummed in the kitchen. Somewhere upstairs a radiator ticked as it cooled. And from the corner by the bookshelf, where Clem's cage stands on a low wooden chest, there was nothing at all.

I had grown so used to the sound of her wheel that I no longer heard it. It was like the clock in my late wife's hallway, which I only noticed on the day it stopped. For more than a year the soft, steady whirr had run under every late evening in this house, a sound so ordinary that it had become part of the walls.

That night the wheel did not turn. I waited. I counted to a hundred, then to two hundred, and I felt a little foolish, an old man in slippers holding his breath for a hamster. Then the bedding shifted, a pink nose appeared at the door of her house, and Clem looked out at the room for a long moment before she turned round and went back to sleep.

First: Why did the wheel go quiet?

The honest answer, that first night, was that I did not know. I knew only what I had seen. A hamster who used to run for an hour or more after dark had come to the door of her nest, looked out, and chosen her bed instead. One quiet night is not a pattern. But I had a feeling, the kind you get when a car you have driven for years starts to make a new and very small sound, that this was the first of many such nights.

Over the following week I paid attention in a way I had not done before. The wheel turned, but less. Some nights it turned for ten minutes and stopped. Some nights it did not turn at all. When Clem did run, she ran more slowly, and she stopped to rest in the middle, sitting in the wheel as if it were a hammock rather than a road.

Several things can make a hamster run less. Age is one of the most common, and Clem, at about twenty months, was at the age when many keepers begin to see the first signs of it. But a quieter wheel can also come with discomfort, with a room that has turned cold, or with something that needs a professional eye. Only a vet who has seen her can tell those apart, and that is the person to ask. If you are concerned, see a vet.

So the answer to the first question became a kind of double answer, and I think it is the right one for most families in our place. The wheel probably went quiet because Clem was growing older. And because "probably" is not the same as "certainly", the first job was to watch carefully, write things down, and let someone who knows hamster bodies take a look at her.

Second: Who is Clem, and who looks after her?

Clem is Clementine, a golden Syrian hamster with a pale belly, dark bright eyes and a habit of stuffing her cheeks so full that she looks like a small, serious bank manager. She came to the family as a young animal from a reputable breeder and was named after the orange colour of her back. Nobody calls her Clementine except when she has escaped from a hand.

I am Arthur. I moved into my daughter's house after I retired, and somewhere in the first winter the daytime care of Clem became mine. Everyone else is out by eight. I am in. I fill the water bottle, check her corners, and sit with my coffee near her cage in the late afternoon, when she sometimes wakes and makes her rounds.

When she was young, Clem kept hours you could set a watch by. She woke at dusk, washed her face with both paws, drank, checked every corner of her cage as if counting the furniture, and then ran. She ran until well past midnight, rested, ate, ran again, and was usually still busy when June came down to make the first tea of the morning. I used to think of her as the night shift of the house.

My daughter June does most of her thinking at the kitchen table, where her laptop sits between a fruit bowl and a dozen faint ring marks left by years of tea mugs. She is the one who reads the small print and asks the sensible question. When I told her about the silent wheel, she put down her mug, added a new ring to the table, and said, "How long has that been going on?"

Her husband Ravi lives, in spirit, in the narrow shed at the end of the garden. It has a workbench, a radio that only finds one station, and rows of jam jars full of screws sorted by size. Ravi solves problems with wood and sandpaper. Within a day of hearing the news he had already started measuring something.

Mira, the older grandchild, is a teenager whose desk by her bedroom window is buried in sketchbooks, half of them full of Clem in different poses: asleep, washing, upside down in the wheel. She notices shapes and proportions the way other people notice the weather. Otto, the younger one, can usually be found on the hallway floor, lining up pebbles and toy animals in long careful rows, and asking questions faster than anyone can answer them.

That is the household. Five people, one hamster, and a great many opinions. It is a bit like a crew on a small boat, where everyone has a different job and everyone feels the same wave when it comes.

Third: Is she ill, or is she simply getting older?

This was the question that sat under all the others. Otto asked it first, on the hallway floor, holding a plastic giraffe. "Is Clem sick?" I told him the truth, which was that I did not know, and that we would try to find out without guessing. He nodded. Then he moved the giraffe one pebble to the left.

I started reading. What I learned is that Syrian hamsters usually live about two to three years, and that many people start to see signs of age from around eighteen months. That number stopped me. Clem was twenty months old. In the life of a hamster, she was not a youngster who had become lazy; she was a middle-aged animal turning the corner into her later years, the way a September afternoon turns, almost without warning, into an October one.

The common signs of age in a hamster are more sleep, less running on the wheel, thinner or uneven fur, slower grooming, some weight loss, stiffness, cloudy eyes and fussier eating. Reading that list was strange. It was like reading a description of someone you know, written by a stranger. Clem was sleeping more. She was running less. And now that I looked, the fur on her hips was a little less thick than I remembered.

But the same reading also gave me a second list, and it was the more important one. Any new lump, a wet or dirty bottom, not eating or not drinking, noises when she breathes, or a sudden change of any kind are things to show the vet, and not to explain away as age. Hamsters are prey animals, and they tend to hide discomfort. A small change in a small animal can mean more than it seems to.

So I learned to hold two thoughts at once. Clem was probably getting older, and that was natural and nobody's fault. And Clem might also have something that needed help, and the only way to know was to have her looked at. I think of it as keeping one hand on the rail and one hand free. Neither thought was allowed to push the other out.

Fourth: What did we do on the first morning?

We did very little, and I am glad of it. The temptation, when someone you love seems changed, is to do something, anything, at once. Ravi wanted to build. June wanted to search the internet until two in the morning. Otto wanted to wake Clem up and ask her. I wanted to move her cage closer to my chair so I could watch her all day.

Instead, we sat at the kitchen table, among the ring marks, and agreed on three things. First, nobody would wake Clem up to check on her; a hamster sleeping in daylight is doing exactly what a hamster should do, and she would only be stressed by a hand in her nest. Second, we would start writing down what we saw. Third, June would ring the vet's clinic and ask for a general check.

I checked the room, too. A hamster is most comfortable in a room that sits roughly between 20 and 24 °C (68 to 75 °F), away from draughts, direct sun and heaters placed close to the cage. Clem's corner was well placed, away from the window and the radiator. But I found that the door to the garden had been left open longer than usual that week, letting cold air across the floor. We closed it. A chilly room can make a hamster go cold and still, and that is a reason to warm the room gently and call the vet, not to wait.

Mira took a fresh sketchbook and wrote "Clem" on the front in careful letters. It became our notebook. On the first page she drew the cage from above, like a map, and marked where the wheel stood, where the water bottle hung, and where the nest was. Under that she wrote the date and one sentence in her neat hand. Wheel quiet at midnight, Grandad says.

Fifth: Why not simply wait and see?

Waiting has its place. Many of the changes of age come slowly, and there is no sense in rushing to the clinic every time a hamster sleeps an extra hour. But "wait and see" can quietly turn into "wait and hope", and for a small animal that hides its troubles well, hoping is not quite enough. Clem cannot tell us that something aches. She can only show us, and only a little.

The vet in our part of town is Dr. Hale. Her clinic is small, with a waiting room where a fish tank hums slowly in the corner and a few orange fish drift past a plastic castle as if they have nowhere in particular to be. I had sat in that waiting room before with a neighbour's cat, and I remember thinking it was the calmest room I had been in for a long time.

When June rang, the receptionist asked a few questions and suggested that we bring Clem in for a general look, and that we bring a note of what we had seen. That simple suggestion changed how I thought about the whole thing. We were not going to the vet with a fear. We were going with an observation, the way a careful neighbour reports a dripping pipe before it becomes a flood.

I thought about my own father, who would not see a doctor until he could not stand, and about how much he missed by being proud. A hamster is not proud. But her family can be lazy, or scared, or too busy, and those things look the same from the inside of a cage. I decided I would rather make one unnecessary visit than miss one necessary one.

Questions Around the Table

That evening, over supper, the questions came one after another. Otto went first. "Does Clem know she is old?" I said I did not think she knew it the way we know a birthday, but that she knew her own body very well, and that sleeping more was perhaps her way of listening to it.

Mira put down her fork. "Should we buy her a new wheel, a better one?" I told her that a new wheel would not bring back the old running, and that the wheel she had was clean and smooth and the right size. What Clem might need, later, was a gentler setting around the wheel, not a shinier one. We would ask Dr. Hale before changing anything.

Otto had another one, of course. "Can I stay up and listen for the wheel?" I said that one listener was enough, and that a growing boy needed his sleep more than Clem needed an audience. But I promised to tell him at breakfast what I had heard, and he made me shake on it, very seriously, across the potatoes.

Ravi asked, half to himself, "Is it my fault for not noticing sooner?" I said no. The changes of age are like a tide coming in; there is no single moment when the beach disappears. He had noticed now, and noticing now is what matters.

June asked the last question, quietly, while she stacked the plates. "How long do we have?" I said that nobody could tell us that honestly, not even a vet, and that the most useful thing was to stop counting and start watching. Every evening with Clem was an evening. That was enough to be going on with.

Points to Watch

Watch the wheel, but do not judge her by it alone; a hamster who runs less may simply be older, but a hamster who stops running suddenly, or who seems to struggle to climb into the wheel at all, is one to show the vet.

Watch the food bowl and the water bottle each morning, since an older hamster may eat a little less or a little more slowly, while not eating or not drinking at all is a sign to take straight to the vet.

Watch the room as well as the hamster, keeping it roughly between 20 and 24 °C (68 to 75 °F), away from draughts, sun and heaters, because a cold room can make a hamster go cold and still, which calls for gentle warmth and a call to the vet.

Watch her coat, her bottom and her breathing whenever she comes out on her own, because any new lump, a wet or dirty bottom, or a noise when she breathes is something to show the vet and never something to wait out. If you are concerned, see a vet.

Watch yourself, too, and start a simple notebook with the date and one honest line about what you saw, because a family's memory blurs quickly, and a written page is what turns a vague worry into a clear observation that a vet can use.