Lesson 2: How Old Is Old?: Counting a Hamster's Years

A Syrian hamster usually lives about two to three years. I knew that, in a vague way, before Clem came into the house. I had read it on the card by the cage when she was a youngster, nodded at it, and put it away somewhere at the back of my mind, the way one puts away the date on a passport.

It was only after the night the wheel went quiet that the number came back and sat down beside me. Two to three years. The whole of a life, from the first blind days in a nest to the last slow evenings, fits inside the time it takes a child to move up two classes at school. Otto has owned the same pair of wellington boots for longer than some hamsters live.

I found that hard to hold in my head. So I did what I usually do when something is too big or too small to understand. I sat at June's kitchen table with a pencil and a cup of tea, and I tried to count.

First: How long does a Syrian hamster live?

The plain answer is about two to three years, and many people start to see signs of age from around eighteen months. Some hamsters live a little less. A few live a little more. The number is a range, not a promise, and I have learned to treat it the way I treat a weather forecast: useful for deciding whether to take a coat, useless for deciding exactly when it will rain.

When I first wrote the range on a scrap of paper, I felt something close to panic. Clem was twenty months old. If two years was the short end of the range, then she had, at worst, a few months left. I pictured a calendar with the pages already torn off. That was the wrong picture, and it took me some time to see why.

A range of two to three years is not a countdown. It is more like the width of a river at a crossing. Some animals wade across early, and some take their time, and most of the life of an older hamster is spent somewhere in the middle of the water, neither on one bank nor the other. Clem was not at the end of her life. She was at the start of her late life, which is a different thing.

I also noticed how much the number depends on the life a hamster has had. Every keeper I spoke to, and every careful source I read, came back to the same few ideas: steady warmth, a calm place, the food she is used to, room to move, and someone who notices early when something changes. None of these things can stretch a life beyond its natural length. But they can make the length she has a good one.

I went back through the photographs on June's laptop to find the week Clem arrived. There she was, a small orange bundle in Otto's cupped hands, looking far too big for her own ears. The date on the picture let us work out her age to within a few weeks. I wrote it at the top of the notebook in pencil, because that is the kind of fact one wants to be able to find again in a hurry.

Mira, who likes things to be exact, was not pleased with a range. "So how long will she live?" she asked, as if I were hiding the real answer in my pocket. I said that the honest answer was "we do not know", and that the range only told us which part of the story we were in. She frowned and wrote it in the notebook anyway, with a question mark after it.

Second: Can we turn hamster months into human years?

People love to translate. We turn dog years into human years, and we argue about it over dinner. With hamsters, a rough comparison some keepers use is that one hamster month is a little like two and a half to three human years. It is only a rough picture. Bodies do not age in tidy steps, and a hamster is not a small person in a fur coat.

Still, I tried it, because a rough picture is better than none. Twenty months, multiplied by two and a half, came to fifty. Multiplied by three, it came to sixty. So Clem, by this loose arithmetic, was somewhere between fifty and sixty in human terms. I sat back. That was roughly the age at which I first noticed that I could no longer run for a bus without regretting it for the rest of the afternoon.

The picture helped. It turned Clem from a "lazy" hamster into a grown woman in her middle years, someone who had earned an extra hour in bed and would rather walk round the garden than sprint across it. It also made the next numbers clearer. At two years old, the same rough sum put her somewhere between sixty and seventy-two. At two and a half, she would be well past seventy.

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of picture that can be pushed too far. A woman of sixty is not "nearly finished", and neither is a hamster of twenty-four months. And a hamster's body does not follow our milestones; there is no hamster retirement party, no grey temples, no reading glasses. The comparison is a lamp held up in a dark room. It shows the shape of the furniture. It does not show the colour of the walls.

What the comparison did best was to change how fast I thought time was moving. One hamster month standing for two or three of our years means that a single week of Clem's life is, roughly, a few months of ours. A week in which nobody looks closely at her is like a season in which nobody asks an old friend how she is. That thought stayed with me. It is part of why we began to weigh her every week, and why the notebook began to fill.

I tried the sum the other way round, too. If a year of mine were squeezed into a few of her weeks, then my morning walk to the corner shop would be, for her, something like a whole afternoon. A slow week of rain in which I barely went outside would be a season. I stopped thinking of her days as small. They were simply folded tighter, like a map that holds a whole county in a pocket.

Otto took the arithmetic in his own direction. He sat on the hallway floor with his pebbles and gave each pebble a year, laying out Clem's life in a line of fifty grey stones that reached from the doormat to the bottom stair. Then he looked at it for a long time. "That's a lot of birthdays," he said. I agreed that it was, and I did not tell him to tidy them up until after tea.

Third: When does a hamster become old?

There is no bell that rings. That was the first thing I understood. A hamster does not go to sleep young and wake up old. The change comes the way dusk comes in late summer, a little at a time, so that one moment the garden is bright and the next you realise you have been reading by the light from the kitchen window for twenty minutes.

For a Syrian hamster, many keepers start to see signs of age from around eighteen months. That does not mean every hamster changes at eighteen months, or that one who is still racing about at twenty months is somehow wrong. It means that from about that age onwards, it is sensible to look for the common signs, and to look a little more carefully than before.

The common signs are more sleep, less wheel running, thinner or uneven fur, slower grooming, weight loss, stiffness, cloudy eyes and fussier eating. Clem showed the first two clearly by the time we noticed. The fur on her hips was a little thinner, and Mira said she was washing her face more slowly, which I would never have seen without a sketcher's eye. The rest had not appeared, or not yet.

I came to think of "old", for a hamster, less as an age and more as a direction. Clem was not old in the way a broken clock is broken. She was old in the way a river slows as it nears the sea. The water is still water. It still moves. It simply has a wider, quieter way of moving, and more of its time is spent in pools.

There was one more thing I had to learn, and it mattered more than any of the others. Not every change in an older hamster comes from age. A new lump, a wet or dirty bottom, not eating or drinking, noises when she breathes, or any sudden change are things to show the vet, whatever her age. Age is slow. Trouble is often quick. That difference in speed became one of my most useful rules.

I recognised some of this in myself, which surprised me. Nobody told me the day I became old, either. There was the morning I needed both hands on the banister, and the evening I chose the armchair over a walk, and the year I bought my first pair of reading glasses and pretended they were for small print only. Each of those days was small. Together they made a direction, and I did not notice it until I looked back.

So when people ask me now when a hamster becomes old, I give them a two-part answer. Around eighteen months, start watching for the slow changes. At any age, take the sudden ones to the vet. It is not very romantic. But it has saved our family a great deal of worry, and it has made the worry we do have more useful.

Fourth: Why does such a small body live so fast?

This was the question I could not leave alone. Why should a hamster's whole life fit into two or three years, when a cat in the same house might live many times as long? I am not a scientist, and I want to be careful not to say more than I know. But I can say what I noticed, and what the reading I trust agreed on.

A hamster is small, and much about her runs quickly. Her heart beats several hundred times a minute even at rest. Her days are full of short, busy bursts: wake, wash, eat, run, store, sleep. Watching Clem in her youth was like watching a film played at a slightly higher speed than ours, where everything is the same but a little hurried.

I have an old wind-up kitchen timer in a drawer. When it is wound fully it ticks fast and loud, and the bell comes surprisingly soon. A grandfather clock in a hallway ticks slowly and runs for days. Neither is better. They are built for different times. I think of Clem a little like that timer, and of us a little like the hallway clock, and I find the comparison less sad than I expected.

Because here is the thing. Inside her own clock, Clem has lived a full life. She has had a youth of tireless running, a middle age of contented hoarding, and now she is entering a later life with its own pace and pleasures. Two years is short to us. To her, it is everything there is. It would be strange to measure her life with our ruler and call it short, the way it would be strange to call a summer short because it is not as long as a year.

Her day, too, runs on a different clock from ours. Hamsters are most active around dusk, at night and at dawn, and they see poorly, living by smell, hearing and whiskers. When the house goes quiet and the lamps come on, her morning begins. When June comes down to boil the kettle, Clem is finishing her working night. We share the same rooms, but we live in them at different hours, like two lodgers who mostly meet on the stairs.

The fast pace has a practical side too. Because a hamster's body moves through its stages quickly, changes can arrive quickly. A week is a long time in her life. A change that would take months to matter in a person might matter in days for her. And because hamsters are prey animals, they tend to hide discomfort, so the first signs of a problem are often small. That is why small changes matter, and why watching closely is not fussing.

That different clock explained something I had missed for months. I had always judged Clem by what I saw in the daytime, when she was asleep, and by the sound of the wheel at night, when I was half asleep myself. I knew her by her noise more than by her face. Once I understood that, I began to move my afternoon coffee later, closer to dusk, so that I could see her waking with my own eyes instead of guessing from upstairs.

I sometimes tell myself that Clem lives her life in a kind of shorthand. She writes the same story we all write, birth and growing and work and rest, but she writes it in small, quick letters on a single page. Our job is to read that page carefully. If we skim it, we miss half of what she is trying to say.

I find it oddly comforting that she does not seem to feel hurried. She does not rush her washing because her life is short. She sits on her haunches and combs each ear with great care, then the other, then her face, as if she had all the time in the world. Perhaps, inside her own clock, she has. It is only we, looking in from outside with our longer calendars, who see the hurry.

Fifth: Is a dwarf hamster's life any different?

June asked this one, from the kitchen table, scrolling through pictures of hamsters on her laptop. Her friend at work kept two small dwarf hamsters, and June wondered whether they would age the same way. It was a fair question, and I looked into it, but I want to be honest about how little I can say.

Dwarf kinds often have shorter or similar lives to a Syrian. Beyond that, they are different animals with their own habits and needs, and I know too little about them to say more. This book is about a Syrian hamster, because Clem is one, and I would rather say a small true thing about her than a large shaky thing about all hamsters.

What I could say to June was that the same way of watching would serve any small animal well. Know her normal. Write it down. Notice slow changes, and take sudden ones to the vet. A careful eye works on any kind of small creature, the way a good habit of checking the stove before bed works in any kitchen.

June nodded, closed the laptop, and added another faint ring to the table with her mug. "So it's not about the kind," she said. "It's about the looking." I could not have put it better. I told her so, and she pretended not to be pleased.

Sixth: What does knowing her age change for us?

At first, knowing Clem's age changed my mood more than my actions. I felt a kind of heaviness for a few days, as if someone had told me the ending of a book I was enjoying. I would pass the cage, see her sleeping, and think: there it is, the beginning of the end. That feeling did nobody any good. Least of all Clem.

Then, slowly, the knowledge began to change what we did, and that was much better. We started to plan for a body that would move more slowly, see less and want more comfort. We stopped expecting her to behave like the young hamster in Mira's old sketches. And we began, for the first time, to measure her life in ordinary, useful numbers rather than in fear.

The first number was her weight. We bought nothing new; June already had a small kitchen scale that weighed in grams. We agreed to weigh Clem at the same time each week, on the same scale, in the same small bowl. At her heaviest she had weighed about 150 g, and that became the range we watched for her. It was not a target for every hamster. It was simply her own normal, written down where we could see it.

The second number was the date. Mira began to write a short line in the notebook every evening: the date, whether the wheel turned, whether the food bowl looked touched, how Clem moved when she came out. Some evenings the line said only "Slept. Woke at nine. Ate." Some evenings it said more. Looking back now, I see that those plain lines told us more than any book.

The third change was harder to measure. We began to give Clem time. Not more toys, not more handling, but time. Time to wake on her own. Time to come to the cage door and sniff the air before anyone reached in. Time to take a seed from my fingers slowly, the way an old friend takes your arm on an icy step. That, I think, was the most important change of all.

There was a fourth change, and it was mine alone. I stopped saying "only" about her. Only a hamster, only two years, only a small thing in a cage in the corner. I had said it to friends, half as a joke, the way people do. I found I could not say it any more. A life is not made smaller by being short. A candle is still a light, however long it burns, and the room it lights is still a room.

I added one more thing to our notebook that week. On the inside of the back cover, I wrote three short lines: her age, her heaviest weight, and the name and telephone number of Dr. Hale's clinic, the small one with the slow, humming fish tank in the waiting room. I did not want anyone in the family to have to search for that number on a bad evening.

Ravi put it best, out in his narrow shed, with a pencil behind his ear and a jar of screws open on the bench. "So we're not trying to make her young again," he said. "We're just trying to make old easy." I said yes. That was exactly it. He nodded, picked up a scrap of pine, and began measuring something I did not ask about.

Otto made his own change without asking anyone. He took one of the smallest pebbles from his long line in the hallway, a round orange one, and put it on the low wooden chest beside Clem's cage. When I asked him what it was for, he said it was "her stone", so that she would have something from his collection. I left it there. It has not moved since.

Questions Around the Table

That Sunday, with the plates cleared and the evening coming in blue at the windows, the questions came round the table like a bowl of something everyone wanted a taste of. Otto went first, as usual. "If Clem is sixty, does she have a birthday cake?" I said that a hamster birthday would be best celebrated quietly, with a clean nest and nobody poking her, and he looked at me as if I had cancelled Christmas.

Mira asked, "Is twenty months old the same for every hamster?" I said no. Twenty months is the same length of time for all of them, but bodies do not age to a timetable, and one hamster at twenty months might look young while another looks tired. That is why we watch our own hamster, and do not compare her with a chart.

June asked, "Should we have done anything differently when she was young?" I said that she had been kept warm, fed the mix she has always eaten, given room to run and handled gently, and that nobody could have done much better. The past is a closed door. The useful question now was how to make the next months good, not how to rewrite the last ones.

Ravi asked, "Is there a way to tell how old a hamster is just by looking?" I said not really, not with any certainty. Signs like thinner fur or cloudy eyes can come with age, but they can also come from other things, and they vary a great deal between animals. Knowing her birth month, roughly, from when we brought her home was worth more than any guess.

Otto had one more, of course, as he was being sent up to brush his teeth. "Does Clem count her birthdays?" I said I did not think so, and that this might be one of the kindest things about being a hamster. She does not lie awake worrying about how many evenings are left. She just lives the one she is in.

Points to Watch

Know your hamster's age, or a close guess at it, and write it at the front of a notebook, because from around eighteen months a Syrian hamster is likely to start showing the slow signs of age, and it helps to be looking before they arrive.

Use the rough picture of one hamster month being like two and a half to three human years only as a picture, a way to understand her pace, and never as a reason to give up on her or to decide that a change is "just age" without looking closely.

Watch the speed of each change, not only the change itself, because the slow ones, such as more sleep or a quieter wheel, often belong to age, while a sudden change of any kind is a reason to show the vet.

Weigh her at the same time each week, in grams, on a small kitchen scale, and write it down, so that her own stable range becomes clear, since a slow drift may be part of age but a sharp drop is something to show the vet. If you are concerned, see a vet.

Watch your own mood as carefully as you watch hers, because a family that thinks only of the end tends to look less closely at the day, and a hamster in her late life needs calm, attentive people far more than she needs worried ones.