Huge parenting failure. Getting a kid an animal without teaching them the respect needed. I was so careful with my pets as a kid because I respected them as living creatures and I understood how big and scary a human can be.
There is a ride called drop zone at the local theme park. When I was a kid, we’d win prizes in the arcade next to it, and often I’d get a parachute man and put him on my knee and watch him fall like 10 stories. No hamsters were murdered in my childhood parachute man antics though…
At first i wondered how shitty the parachute must’ve been, but then I remembered that I had dwarf hamsters as a kid, not normal ones.
Also for some reason my mom made the mistake of getting a boy and a girl and they did exactly what you’d think. Except that the cage was too small for that many critters and the momma started eating the babies out of stress…
…
Oh! The hamster mom. Not your mom.
Ok, that’s a bit less horrifying.
I witnessed the other side of that phenomenon. The babies ate the mom.
We had one pet rat then my mom let me get another one of the opposite sex. Anyways we had really bad rat infestation before we sold that house.
I had that parachute action man, and I remember chucking him down a flight of stairs. Shitty, shitty parachute. The doll itself was surprisingly well made (I guess it was drop tested a lot during production?) but weighed a ton and the parachute was hilariously too small for it
😳
Dont worry she didnt eat all of them! I think we had like 3 or 4 generations of inbred hamsters before we finally got a second cage and segregated them.
… as an adult i am staunchly against any “pet” that has to be kept in a cage or enclosure.
Pretty sure the Hamster would be fine, didn’t Kurzgesagt have a video on this kinda stuff where they tossed a mouse of a skyscraper but due to the mass and size of the mouse it doesn’t reach a speed in which it dies on impact?
Hamsters will die from looking at them wrong. I also know three childhood friends who had hamsters that died from it just walking off the bed
They are very fragile
Hamsters are way heavier, around 150g, unless we’re talking pups or dwarf breeds. That’s around 6 - 10 times the weight of a mouse.
And they are a more compact shape with stubby legs and tails, which I imagine has negative implications for terminal velocity.
Size comparison:
Our hamster died from a 50 cm fall. I don’t think they are as durable as mice
You can drop a mouse down a mineshaft and it can survive the landing, but a skyscraper has cross winds, which could easily get it moving laterally too fast to survive. A hamster is considerably larger than a mouse though, and just because a mouse could survive doesnt mean a hamster would.
i had a hamster when i was a kid it was put inside a glass aquarium. my lil bro took it to our granma house couple blocks away. idk how but he lost his grip and fell to the ground. the tank glass shattered and the hamster died on the spot. im sure its not a height thing and more of a shock and stress thing
The US military has been collecting all the munitions grade hamster due to a shortage of depleted uranium.
From what I’ve seen on the internet hamsters need to be on a 24/7 suicide watch, even without retard kids throwing them from buildings.
Kids shouldn’t have rodents as pets.
And I had one as a kid…
Rats are great kid pets. But as any pet should be primarily be taken care off by adults, not the kids themselves
How else are they going to learn about cannibalism?
Reminds me when we build the hamster colosseum out of Jenga blocks.
Anon has either never owned a hamster or did own a hamster and is a psychopath that had no issues with animal abuse.
Given that it’s not uncommon for kids to injure themselves jumping from high places using a sheet as a parachute, I don’t think we need to be assuming malice here.
9 year old hamster owners know that unattended hamster outside run away in seconds.
I don’t think you’ve been around many 9 year olds
Kids are stupid
I have firsthand experience. I was a 9 year old (and younger) with hamsters. Yes I was stupid, but it only took one time of taking the hamster outside and setting him in the grass to see him bolt in 2 seconds. I was able to get him back, but that lesson was never lost on me.
So, you were stupid until you tried something and learned from it?
You don’t see the parallels here?
That doesn’t make it a universal truth or general hamster behaviour. We’ve played outside with our hamster plenty of times as kids, it never ran away.
In fact, the only animal that we had run off was the turtle … it was found 3 month later in a garden a couple of houses down the block.
It is also possible that the fictional 9yo anon didn’t have a firm grasp on physics, the wisdom not to endanger an animal for their own entertainment, nor the awareness that they didn’t understand how actual parachutes work
(couldn’t be me, at that age I had a drivers license, a stable job and the ability to vote)
The dad on the other hand…
Nope, straight to jail
Only thing the dad did wrong is set a bad example by getting caught laughing. Don’t they say comedy is tragedy sped up?
Personally I wouldn’t immediately lmao if I learned that my child had killed an animal hours prior, but yeah, I wouldn’t go as far as accusing him of being a psychopath either
It’d be highly context sensitive for me. I had a horrific hamster accident as a kid myself, so I might laugh out of pure unprocessed trauma.
or with distance. like slipping in the mud, that’s a tragedy. now tripping someone and seeing them slip in the mud, that’s comedy gold.
This is how they get the voter fraud statistics.
You’re skipping the first part of my statement. I can tell you didn’t own an hamster either.
Lets say the hamster successfully parachuted down safely to the ground outside of a 4 story building. Hamsters can run quickly and squeeze into impossibly small places. There is a good chance the hamster, now unattended, would run away and escape. Hamster owners know this.
Here’s a perfect example from a random youtube search. Hamster running away outside. 7 second. Thats how long it took for the unattended hamster to disappear into the underbrush. In this clip the owner was right there and able to recapture the hamster. A 9 year old would not be able to traverse 4 flights of stairs in under 10 seconds.
A 9 year hamster owner knows this too.
I did own a hamster, when I was 6 years old.
I also didn’t know shit, because I was 6 years old,
and I don’t know about the challenges of chasing a hamster (which has something to do with yeeting it out of the window, somehow?) because I didn’t yeet a hamster out of the window,
and even if I did I wouldn’t remember it well because I was 6 years old.What kind of child were you at either of those ages,
sheldon_cooper@lemmy.world?I did own a hamster, when I was 6 years old.
I didn’t get my first hamster until I was 8. Anon apparently has one at 9.
I also didn’t know shit, because I was 6 years old,
Sure, but we’re talking about a kid 50% older than 6 years old. There’s a lot of cognitive growth between those 3 years. I don’t think you’d say you were as stupid at 9 as you were at 6 are you?
and I don’t know about the challenges of chasing a hamster (which has something to do with yeeting it out of the window, somehow?)
I don’t know why I have to walk you through this, but okay: If anon at 9 assumed that the hamster would safely parachute down to the ground 4 stories down, then the moment that hamster was unguarded, it would bolt. A 9 year old that has ever taken their hamster outside knows this. A 9 year old typically doesn’t want to lose their pet. So this was why I said that anon never had a hamster (as in this post is fake).
and even if I did I wouldn’t remember it well because I was 6 years old.
You don’t remember anything from when you were 9 years old (as Anon was)? Are you saying if you had a pet at 9 you have no memory of it today? That…wouldn’t be normal.
Mf that’s a 9 years old
9 year old hamster owners know that unattended hamster outside run away in seconds.
