Gerbils are social creatures that will be stressed, and their lifespan shortened, if kept alone. House them in same-sex pairs or colonies.

I’ve had a variety of pets over my lifetime but cats have always been my favorites. They’re intelligent, independent, soft, cuddly (on their terms), and full of personality. Most of my cats have been shelter animals except for a retired Persian “breeder” I got from a couple who bred purebred Persians, and a wonderful Burmese kitten, a gift for my father, which I bought from a local petstore.

Twenty years ago, a woman on her way to drop off some kittens at the local animal shelter stopped by my office to show me one of the male kittens. Bear was almost eight weeks old and fit in the palm of my hand. When he lifted his head and I looked into his huge blue eyes, I was in love! His coloring was Sealpoint Siamese even though his mother was a domestic shorthair of unknown ancestry. Of the litter of four, two kittens had Sealpoint markings and two had “domestic” coloring. Read more…

My husband and I have a spontaneous lifestyle. Bear and Missy fit into it quite well because they didn’t seem to notice, or care, when we left them alone for long weekends. I knew there were few pets that would easily adapt, or be able to adapt at all, to the type of life we lead. A dog was out of the question. If we got another cat we would have to get two, and now that we were “cat box free” did I really want to get back into all that? Memories of fighting a major flea infestation which was ongoing during Bear and Missy’s last days made the answer a definite “no”. Read more…

Visit most any petstore online or off, check out Amazon.com, or browse eBay, and the variety of hamster cages can be overwhelming. Are they all suitable homes for a hamster? Are some better than others? As soon as I had that figured out I would get a hamster. I’d made mistakes raising a hamster when I was a kid but as an adult I didn’t have any excuses. Read more…

Once I had the cage set up the way I thought a hamster would appreciate it, I called various pet shops in the area to see if any had hamsters, or more specifically, Teddy Bear hamsters, for sale. One local shop said they had two. I was at the shop within half an hour. Read more…

It was back to the drawing board, so to speak, once I saw how cramped Teddy’s 10-gallon aquarium was when it was filled with what I considered essentials. Certainly hamsters lived in less space and survived. But I wanted Teddy to have the optimum house, not one that was just adequate. Read more…

It took some time but Teddy now had a decent cage and I added a wooden house and a few other things for him to chew on and provide entertainment when he needed it. But now I had an empty 10-gallon aquarium. Teddy’s cage, on a table in my home office, had enough room next to it for the aquarium, assuming I found the right occupant(s) for it. Read more…

Teddy might chew on plastic once in a while but he could be safely housed in a plastic bin cage. Putting gerbils in a plastic cage would be asking for major trouble since they are capable of chewing through plastic almost as easily as chewing through cardboard. Even wire cages with plastic trays were out of the question. Read more…

The day before Thanksgiving (Nov 23, 2011), I discovered Teddy “asleep” in the smaller of his two houses. After wrapping him in tissue, we buried him in one of our flower beds. As sad as his passing was, if Teddy really was a year old when I got him, then he lived three years — a long life for a hamster. And he was very pampered the two years he lived with me.

RIP Teddy.