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Houdinis of the animal world It seems that anyone who has kept small rodents has a story to tell about an escape. My vet husband and I were talking to our neighbours recently and Mark was recounting a story of a client from that day. A woman had rung the vets in a total panic because of an incident that had happened with their gerbil. The little explorer had not escaped but was regularly let out to run around the living room. The mum had started hovering and I think you will already see where this is going. Somehow the gerbil ran too close to the Hoover while mum was looking away and started to get sucked in. With the reflexes of a cat she grabbed the disappearing rear end of the poor creature and turned off the vacuum but in her panic the tail came off in her hand and the gerbil was left with a rather raw inner tail. On examination the tail was actually drying up very nicely without the outer sheath and would undoubtedly shrivel and then fall off so it was decided that nothing would be done except give the wee one some welcome pain relief. As we, Mark’s audience, sat in wonder at the story our neighbours started to develop a wry smile. When Liz, their daughter, was a small girl they had a hamster that lived in a very luxurious rota-stack cage. The hamster, unbeknown to them, had found that if he hung upside down from the top of the cage by his little front paws he could very expertly use his back feet to unscrew the lid and get out. On realising that hammy had gone AWOL an extensive search began through the entire house. After a futile few hours someone thought of looking in the Hoover in the downstairs cupboard (Mark and I couldn’t really see where this idea had come from but we gave them the benefit of the doubt being very good friends). Sure enough when they looked into the wide head of the attachment there was a very small nose poking out. It turned out that the hamster had easily climbed into the narrow aperture of the attachment but had then totally filled both cheek pouches with fluff and hair for a lovely nest but was then stuck because of the massive increase in the size of his head! After some sweat and a few curses the Hoover was dismantled and the bulging rodent extracted and returned to his rightful place. From then on a heavy book was always on top of the cage to keep Hammy Houdini in his place.
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