Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT strips 4376-4380 (Oct 19th to Oct 23rd 2020)
MattStriker:
So, funny story about rodents...
Where I live we've got one of just a few decently-sized urban populations of wild european hamsters. Not escaped pets, the genuine endangered native critter. When they turned up pretty much overnight (the large vacant lot where they'd been hiding got built on so the hamsters did a Watership Down, packed up all their stuff and moved in here with us) it became a topic of interest to the university's biology department.
So of course they sent some students to do fieldwork. I volunteered to help them out a few times and thus witnessed the horrors of wild rodents first-hand.
The little bastards had to be caught, weighed, blood and stool samples taken and marked to recognize them later.
Catching them was easy. Peanut butter is apparently irresistible to them so they'd wander into cage traps within minutes of them being put down. And as long as the peanut butter lasted, they were fairly content to stay in there. But eventually the stuff ran out, and the hamsters got cranky. By the time the students came to remove them from the traps, they tended to be on roughly the same level of cranky as Michael Douglas' character in Falling Down.
And the students had to reach into the traps to grab them.
They had heavy protective gloves. Kevlar-lined.
They didn't help much. Hamsters have enough bite strength to draw blood even if they can't pierce the material...they just drive it through your skin and flesh to the bone as well. Then somebody had to hold the struggling hamster while somebody else tried to get samples. Fun fact: Hamsters don't look like they have much in the way of a neck but their heads have a pretty surprising range of motion...
Those biology students developed a lifelong hatred of all things rodent within the span of a few months.
Tangentially related: Before the hamsters moved in, we had rat problems. There aren't any rats anymore. Only hamsters.
snubnose:
Probably should have given a bit more peanut butter first ... enough so that they get stuffed and lazy ?
Also something to grab them securely thats still at the end of a stick.
P.s.: And maybe add a weak barbiturate, even, too.
Gyrre:
--- Quote from: MattStriker on 21 Oct 2020, 00:54 ---So, funny story about rodents...
Where I live we've got one of just a few decently-sized urban populations of wild european hamsters. Not escaped pets, the genuine endangered native critter. When they turned up pretty much overnight (the large vacant lot where they'd been hiding got built on so the hamsters did a Watership Down, packed up all their stuff and moved in here with us) it became a topic of interest to the university's biology department.
So of course they sent some students to do fieldwork. I volunteered to help them out a few times and thus witnessed the horrors of wild rodents first-hand.
The little bastards had to be caught, weighed, blood and stool samples taken and marked to recognize them later.
Catching them was easy. Peanut butter is apparently irresistible to them so they'd wander into cage traps within minutes of them being put down. And as long as the peanut butter lasted, they were fairly content to stay in there. But eventually the stuff ran out, and the hamsters got cranky. By the time the students came to remove them from the traps, they tended to be on roughly the same level of cranky as Michael Douglas' character in Falling Down.
And the students had to reach into the traps to grab them.
They had heavy protective gloves. Kevlar-lined.
They didn't help much. Hamsters have enough bite strength to draw blood even if they can't pierce the material...they just drive it through your skin and flesh to the bone as well. Then somebody had to hold the struggling hamster while somebody else tried to get samples. Fun fact: Hamsters don't look like they have much in the way of a neck but their heads have a pretty surprising range of motion...
Those biology students developed a lifelong hatred of all things rodent within the span of a few months.
Tangentially related: Before the hamsters moved in, we had rat problems. There aren't any rats anymore. Only hamsters.
--- End quote ---
.......Did none of those kids own pets? You have to assume the little bastards haven't eaten in awhile when you collect the traps and feed them before trying to handle them. The only time you don't do that is if you're collecting them for specimen samples (i.e. you're just going to snap their little necks via cervical dislocation anyways).
EDIT: typo fixes
snubnose:
--- Quote from: Starla!! on 21 Oct 2020, 00:45 ---
--- Quote from: Perfectly Reasonable on 20 Oct 2020, 21:27 ---My cat just watched. No help at all.
--- End quote ---
I had a cat like that once. Nothing fazed her. A squirrel could have sauntered right past her, and she would probably think, "Gee, my atavistic instincts tell me I should hunt that thing down and kill it, but...man, that just seems like so much work." :roll:
--- End quote ---
Actually animals dont hunt unless they are hungry. Well .. typically not, anyway.
Also cats dont kill unless they learned it from their mother. Which means many house cats would die in the wild because they would hunt animals down all right but then not know what to actually do with them.
JoeCovenant:
--- Quote from: MattStriker on 21 Oct 2020, 00:54 ---... There aren't any rats anymore. Only hamsters.
--- End quote ---
Smacks not only of poetry, but as the last line of some epic Eco-Saga ! :)
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