Hamsters baffle me. I don’t think we keep them in Australia (I’ve never seen one in meatspace) and they make no sense to me as pets. Everything I’ve learned about them makes them seem like a shittier discount version of a pet rat.
I understand that meatspace is a perfectly cromulent description, but i hate it on a visceral level
I refuse to call half of my life “in real life” and the other half what, my fake life?
Honestly I think part of the point of them (as pets) is that they get around the “ick” reaction some people have to rats and mice.
I had hamsters as a kid, and mice as an adult; I can confidently say that mice are better in every way, as a pet for a kid. (For starters, they’re awake during the day.)
But most people have never had wild hamsters invade the pantry, chewing through food containers and shitting on everything they don’t eat. They’d do if it they could, but they don’t live here. Mice do, and hence mice are associated, in many people’s minds, with filth, while hamsters are not.
Other than that, they are worse in every way.
(Hamsters and mice are both clean animals on their own terms–they don’t shit in their own pantries. Yours, they don’t care about.)
Yeah we aren’t allowed hamsters, or gerbils. I always thought hamsters were the size of a guinea pig, but no, they’re just spherical mice that can deep throat carrots.
I was very shocked when I learned how fucking tiny they were. I too thought they were basically antisocial guinea pigs.
Okay are guinea pigs really big or are mice really small? I thought they were roughly the same size.
Mouse:
Guinea pig:
There is some variation in size between breeds, of course.
NONE OF THESE ANIMALS ARE THE SIZE I THOUGHT THEY WERE????
If you want a more reasonably sized rodent, try rats.
@derinthescarletpescatarian I hate to be the bearer of bad news but your mouse picture is a picture of a hamster
Dear god
As someone that breeds mice, it’s 100% the tails. For whatever reason, more than any other single complaint I hear about mice and rats, is that people largely think their tails are “gross,” and hamsters don’t have that problem. Can’t be gross if they ain’t got one, I guess
and yes I know they have a stub tail it does not count when I’ve had mice look like this
This is, by the way, what mice look like, Derin, although they also come in Fuzzy Bastard
I also hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your image of a rat is NOT always the size of rats. That’s a young rat. Adult rats can weigh upward of 500g, that one looks maybe 250. Rats are easily as big as guinea pigs
Anyway. You should still get pet rats. They are very awesome. But if you want a reasonably sized small rodent for children, it’s pet-bred mice. If you get them from a halfway decent breeder, they’ll be about twice the size of pet store mice (50-60g instead of 30-35), and very friendly and soft like a hamster (rats have coarser fur than mice) without the behavioral problems hamsters often have (biting you biting you biting you). They also take up WAY less space than rats.
amhrancas 