Hamsters Gone Wild

We’re not the best family for pets, having killed many goldfish and two cockatiels. One time I had a parakeet named Clyde. Before you hear the rest of the story (so to speak), I should point out in my defense that this was a really mean parakeet. We were not the first owners. The bird was originally given as a gift from a man to his fiancée. In this case maybe flowers would have been better, because the man left her at the alter. She expressed her anger by torturing the parakeet. It was a sort of a reverse “he loves me, he loves me not” but done with feathers instead of flower petals. Eventually she couldn’t even stand doing that, so she sought to discard the bird. We wanted a pet, and this was before we understood about our deficient pet-rearing abilities, so we rescued him. But by then, Clyde was pretty much finished dealing with human beings. As a result, we didn’t develop much affection for this pet. Clyde was not easy to love. He wasn’t like the cherubic birds in Mary Poppins who would chirp along with Julie Andrews and land on her finger. No, Clyde was out for vengeance.

One time I was cleaning the cage while Clyde was still in it. I carefully avoided his nasty beak and sharp talons. I used the vacuum cleaner with the top attachments off. I got distracted and then I heard a “thunk.” Poor Clyde was stuck at the top of the vacuum, his little feet and tail feathers wiggling out the end of the hose. For about a week or so after that, Clyde was a bit friendlier, or at least not as nasty. It was either because the cage was cleaner, or the bird was fearful of being vacuumed again.

We haven’t had cats or dogs and we won’t in the near future. But my daughter loves animals, and she tried for years to get another pet in spite of our dysfunctional abilities. Finally we relented and got hamsters. This seemed like a safe choice. Hamsters stay in cages and they’re really mice, which makes them pretty hardy, even in our household. We thought about getting one hamster, but that seemed wrong because a solitary mouse would be too lonely. We got two, with the pet store assuring us that both were girls. My daughter named them “Wolf” and “Zeppelin.”

In the beginning, both hamsters were adorable little babies that needed help drinking water from the hanging dispenser. However, the lifecycle of a hamster is much shorter than a human being, or even a dog. Within a few weeks, Wolf and Zeppelin were much bigger. In fact, Zeppelin grew a surprising amount in a short time. We thought it was from too much food and watching TV with my daughter, but there was another cause of the sudden weight gain.

It turned out that instead of two girl hamsters, one was a girl and one was a boy. On a Friday morning, my daughter shrieked, “Dad, you have to come see this!” There was a gaggle of tiny, squirming babies in the cage. We had a hamster family of eleven. How the two original hamsters had gone so quickly from being babies to parents themselves I’m still not sure. I thought of an episode of the original “Star Trek” series, in which there are cute, fur-ball creatures called “tribbles.” The trouble with tribbles is that they would reproduce continuously and often. Dr. McCoy concluded that tribbles were essentially born pregnant—close to the condition of our pets, who had at least a few weeks of hamster childhood. Dr. McCoy’s key advice was that you shouldn’t feed the tribbles. This didn’t seem like an option for our pets.

With the now-expanded gaggle of rodents, we had to deal with all sorts of hamster infrastructure issues. The cage we bought was pleasant and spacious for the two pets at first. It was a split-level cage, with a health club spinning wheel on the side, and a plastic house on the top level where the two could hide out and rest. This was where Wolf and Zeppelin decided to raise the kids. What was cozy for two little hamsters seemed pretty crowded for two big fat hamsters and nine growing babies. Apparently hamsters like to smoosh all together.

Watching this growing family, I started to think about issues of sustainability. In the microenvironment of the hamster cage, it seemed clear that things would quickly get out of hand. In a few weeks, we went from two pets to eleven. Assuming the same rate of growth, with some conservative assumptions, we would have about 900,000 hamsters a year later. Clearly we would be out of room well before that. To support even a month or two at the current growth rate, we would need a vast expansion of the hamster infrastructure. We would need more cages, more hamster houses, more food, and more water bottles. We would need lots and lots more hamster exercise wheels, and they would all be spinning furiously at 3:00 AM since apparently the creatures are nocturnal.

But clearly something would happen before we reached the one-million-mouse mark. The initial growth rate would not be maintained. Another thing we learned about hamsters is that they have some problems with maternal instinct. After a few weeks of loving care, the mother hamster started eating the babies. One by one the kids turned up dead in the cage, until my wife actually caught Zeppelin in the act. At that point, Zeppelin was banished to a hamster ball, and eventually back to the pet store. This type of behavior apparently is not unusual in hamsters, but of course we were clueless.

The two extremes of hamster behavior help frame the debate about sustainable development for human beings. One extreme argument postulates that our human future involves massive overpopulation and environmental degradation, with apocalyptic results. For example, there was a global warming disaster movie in the summer of 2004 with giant tidal waves and tornadoes blowing away Hollywood. At the other end of the scale, a more laissez-faire approach is supported. The argument is that things will essentially readjust by themselves regardless of what we do. It’s not that human mothers will start behaving like hamsters to reduce the rates of growth, but that there are factors that we are not taking into account that will moderate the doomsday scenarios. One idea is that the vast reservoir of energy and mass in the ocean naturally moderates any changes we might cause.

There is evidence to support both scenarios. Rapid human growth and infrastructure development have probably led to some global warming, with uncertain impacts that we are unable to model with great accuracy. On the other hand, birth rates have reduced drastically in the last decade or so. The vision of “Soylent Green,” a cheesy post-Moses movie where Charlton Heston lived in a failed, overpopulated world, now seems like an overwrought and incorrect future extrapolation. The debate is often phrased in terms of the classic engineering approach of alternatives analysis. Engineers as problem solvers must do something, even though doing nothing is one of the alternatives. It may be that doing something could be a worse alternative. In this context, for example, requiring a limit on the human population has the negative impact of less people in the community, which can be a bad thing: what if one of these unborn individuals would have discovered the cure for cancer or the follow-up to string theory?

Civil engineers are now grappling with the difficult set of questions related to sustainability. What is needed is a multidisciplinary, big-picture understanding of problems and interrelationships. For many engineers used to a more atomized, discipline-specific evaluation, this requires a new set of skills and a new approach. Another challenge involves comparing and weighting entirely different issues—for example, the economic “bottom line” of a project versus projected social impacts twenty years from now. Our current approach is not much better than formulating checklists of what’s been accounted for and what hasn’t. The old bottom line still tends to carry the most weight. But true sustainability is what is demanded of our projects now and in the future. Our evaluation, analysis, and design tools must learn to rationally address this requirement. Engineers need to get ahead of the learning curve, or we will be continuously in reactive mode.

As with most complex problems, the best responses are probably found closer to the middle of the issues rather than at the extremes. As it goes with pets, so it goes with infrastructure design.

Brian Brenner is a professor of practice at Tufts University. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected].