Search and Rescue Operation for 45-Gram Animal Deploys Three Adults and One Cat, Who Is Also a Problem
PARIS — The escape of @HamsterDuMarais’s physical model — the hamster whose Instagram account is in an ongoing dispute with the goldfish — from his enclosure on a Thursday at approximately 6pm has produced a household response that Claire, the hamster’s owner, describes as “disproportionate and also completely proportionate depending on your relationship with the hamster,” involving Claire, her partner Marc, and Marc’s visiting sister, who had not expected her Paris visit to include a forty-five-minute hamster search.
“He went through the gap,” Claire explained. “There is a gap between the enclosure’s door and its frame that is smaller than the hamster. The hamster found it anyway. I don’t know how the hamster found it. I would like to understand this.” The gap is 0.8cm. The hamster is 4cm wide. The physics are unclear. The hamster is somewhere in the apartment.
The Search Methodology
The search proceeded through: visual inspection of all visible spaces, auditory attention (hamsters move in ways that produce faint sounds), systematic displacement of furniture, and the consultation of two YouTube videos on hamster escape tracking that Claire found in the first fifteen minutes of the search. The videos recommend: placing food in the open, turning off lights, and listening. The food-and-silence method produced the hamster in forty-three minutes, behind the washing machine, where he was retrieving something he had apparently stored there on a previous escape whose occurrence was not known until this discovery.
According to Psychology Today’s small animal behavior research, hamsters have spatial memory sufficient to navigate complex environments and return to cached food locations. The hamster knew where the washing machine was. The washing machine cache was established before this escape. The hamster had been there before. The gap has been addressed. The cache has been removed. The hamster is considering options.
Nothing escaping our attention at Virtuosal.com.
