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This week we venture into the land of CUTE to learn about hamsters, ferrets, and some other small domesticated animals. Thanks to Kim and the Angel City Ferret Club for the suggestions!\n\nHamsters are SO CUTE:\n\n\n\nHamsters have giant cheek pouches to carry food in:\n\n \n\nGerbils are also SO CUTE:\n\n\n\nFerrets are SO CUTE in a totally different way:\n\n\n\nThe black-footed ferret does not want anything to do with the domestic ferret, thank you:\n\n\n\nAn extremely complicated but neat way to use your pet's exercise wheel to generate power:\n\nHamster-Powered Night Light\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nBack in episode 106 we learned about domestication, especially the domestication of dogs and other canids. But recently, Kim suggested an episode about the domestication of other animals, like hamsters and ferrets. Then the Angel City Ferret Club suggested I talk about ferrets too. So this week, let\u2019s learn about hamsters, gerbils, and ferrets.\n\nHamsters are rodents, and there are lots of different species. The most common domesticated hamster is the golden hamster, also called the Syrian hamster, which is indeed from Syria. A DNA study of domesticated golden hamsters indicate that they\u2019re all descended from a single female captured in Syria in 1930 and kept as a laboratory animal. It wasn\u2019t long before some of her babies became pets, because hamsters are incredibly cute.\n\nThe golden hamster is about five inches long, or 13 cm, and is a chunky little rodent with a little nub of a tail, short legs, and rounded ears. And a little pink nose and shiny black eyes. I had a pet hamster named Wembley when I was little. It\u2019s a golden tan in color with lighter fur underneath, and some breeds of domesticated golden hamsters may have white spots on the body or long fur.\n\nSome other hamster species, most of which aren\u2019t kept as pets, can grow much larger than the typical golden hamster. The European hamster, which lives in parts of eastern Europe, can grow up to 14 inches long, or 35 cm. It\u2019s mostly brown with white patches. One of the smallest hamster species is Campbell\u2019s dwarf hamster, which is sometimes kept as a pet but is originally from Mongolia. It grows about three inches long, or 8 cm. It\u2019s brown-gray in color with a darker stripe down the middle of its back and pale gray fur underneath.\n\nAll hamsters have cheek pouches that extend down to their shoulders. In the wild, a hamster tucks food into its cheek pouches to carry back to its burrow, where it pushes the food out by pressing its forefeet against its sides and pushing them forward. Campbell\u2019s dwarf hamster has cheek pouches that are big even compared to other hamsters. They extend all the way down the sides of its body.\n\nHamsters in the wild like warm areas without a lot of rain, like deserts and dry grasslands. They dig well and spend most of their time underground when they\u2019re not out searching for food. They\u2019re most active at dawn and dusk, although they\u2019re nocturnal to some degree also. In cold weather some species hibernate for short periods of time, generally only a few days. A hamster\u2019s burrow can be pretty elaborate, with several entrances, a cozy sleeping burrow, a pantry where the hamster stores food, and even a bathroom where the hamster urinates. Hamsters are hindgut fermenters, and like some other rodents and rabbits, some of the poops they produce aren\u2019t waste material, they\u2019re partially digested food that the hamster eats again to gain as much nutrients from it as possible.\n\nHamsters are omnivores, eating seeds and other plant material as well as insects and other small animals. Occasionally wild hamsters hunt together to catch insects, although in general the hamster is a solitary animal. In addition to its ordinary diet of hamster food, a pet hamster likes seeds and nuts, green vegetables, root vegetables like carrots, a little bit of fruit, and other plant foods,