My first post after a hiatus of 6 months is going to be a tragic one.

It is an ordinary evening. As usual, the girls are taking their time eating and doing their homework, and the parents are either vegetating in front of the TV watching another inane show, or working on the laptop.

Daughter No. 2's hamster gives an oddly loud squeak.

Daughter No. 2 goes over to look at it, and asks me casually if I gave the critter a prawn.

Huh?

I take a look --- lo and behold! It's given birth! There are at least 5 pink gummy-bear lookalikes wriggling in a pile, in the transparent tube, and mummy hamster is resting, then getting up, then eating some placenta thingie, and licking the pups. They're about the size and shape of kidney beans. We are all very EXCITED and I start calling people and facebooking and updating my status to announce to the world the great news.

Shortly after, however, everything goes on a negative cline.

Mummy hamster gives birth to one last pup, picks it up with her teeth and tosses it to one side of the tube, onto the slope of the transparent tubing. Miraculously, it sticks precariously and does not tumble down. Thirty minutes later, she dashes over to the huddle of babies, picks one up in both paws as if it were a peanut and starts eating it down to the neck with relish. Strangely, as I stare at the pup's moving front paws as its head is getting chewed down, all I can think is 'There's no blood'.... Daughter No. 2, optimistic as ever, insists it's just 'cleaning' the baby, but it's clearly cannibalism in action. Such a traumatising scene! We are all horrified. Hubby kindly tells Daughter No. 2 that he would never do that to her. Daughter No. 1 tells everyone not to make so much noise around the new mummy. I just hope for the best for the other pups as I pick up the leftover half of the poor dead pup. Its back feet are perfectly formed, and remind me of those anti-abortion pictures that show the tiny feet of fetuses whose lives have been prematurely ended.

Sadly, the long-awaited 'happy hamster family' we dreamed of is not to be. The next morning, just before the girls go off to school, we see two more chewed up bodies, and the rest are missing. Daughter No. 2 says, almost clinically, as she eats her breakfast, "She must find them tasty." I'm glad she's so resilient (?!).

All my colleagues are suitably horrified by my recount of these events, and a few are disturbed enough to insist on some form of punishment for the mummy hamster. I read about how hamsters can commit this massacre because they feel threatened, or because they instinctively know the pups will not survive. I think about how animals are essentially amoral. Doesn't matter --- I've never seen an animal eat its own young before.

That evening, I clean the cage and find two whole but desiccated little pups, all but hidden in the bedding, dead from dehydration. Their eyes are dark shadows beneath the unbroken skin of their eyelids, and their bodies are naked and wrinkled. I say a little prayer over them before I dispose of their bodies.

Suffice it to say, I shall never look at gummy bears quite the same way again.

Labels: eating babies, hamster