Sunday, October 2, 2011
Hamsters In Peril
There is an important matter I want to draw to your attention. Hamsters all over the United States are in peril. Pet store owners previously believed they were dealing with inexplicable but isolated incidents. So, until recently, there has been no media attention drawn to what has been happening. Pet store owners when approached my have remarked on the incidents in question as 'odd' or 'strange' but little concern was in evidence. All over the nation, leaving behind small puffs of smoke and not much more, hamsters are detonating.
In recent years, the popularity of the hamster as a pet has been experiencing a steady decline. It has been hard for them to compete with the variety of small pets available such as hedgehogs and sugar gliders as well as the rise in lizard ownership. The traditional hamster has been replaced in the school classroom with turtles and other low maintenance pets. This problem is not just commercial in nature but has much wider consequences and implications. And, now that the explosive hamster fatalities are coming to light, we are finding that the phenomena bears a closer look.
I have been doing research into the more isolated reports of pet store hamster explosions since the late seventies and was in a fortuitous position to notice the alarming trend. For decades previous, the average time from pet store arrival to purchase for any given hamster was five days. Shipments and general procurement of hamsters by retailers were designed to reflect this high turnover. Though hamsters have a short life span, ranging from one and a half to three years, their fertility rate is very high. Furthermore, they reach maturity quickly making them well suited to a demanding market. On the rare occasion that a hamster would remain 'on the shelf' for two weeks that hamster appeared to experience spontaneous detonation. It was difficult to correlate the data on explosions (which lacked a consistent method of reporting) with an accurate timeline in terms of shipment and arrival. Due to the increase in hamster detonations, these numbers have been thrown into sharp relief.
It has come to light that these hamsters have been used to collect data of their own. During the Cold War, the primary purveyor of hamsters was the former Soviet Socialist Republic. The Russian hamster farms were producing as many as ten thousand marketable animals per week. This lucrative business served a dual purpose of steady revenue and information gathering. Each tiny hamster was implanted with a device designed for both recording and transmitting far beyond the capabilities anyone suspected the Russians of possessing. It was thought by the Russian intelligence community that hamsters unpurchased after two weeks may inadvertently find their way into scientific research, resulting in discovery of this valuable technology. Hence, the inclusion of the detonation fail safe.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Socialist Republic, the thriving hamster business and advanced hamster technology fell into the hands of the new Russian Mafia. Arrangements were made and the entire system, part and parcel, was transferred to the Chinese government who willingly employed this valuable information asset. The widespread proliferation of pet hamsters provided information from a variety of resources including U.S. classrooms! This asset has remained viable and a real boon to the Chinese information community for many years until only recently.
Many factors have contributed to the decline in hamster sales over the past several years but the net result is what is most important. The marked increase in hamster detonations has made the data apparent and recordable at last. In the past, the relatively low number of explosions kept the wider scientific community skeptical of the phenomena as a whole. Furthermore, the destruction of the hamsters involved was complete as it takes a very small charge to effectively destroy all evidence. I was eventually able to obtain a hamster that had succumbed to wet tail (proliferative ileitis) prior to the two week "shelf life" deadline and was finally able to verify the presence of both the receiving/transmitting device and the detonation charge. I cannot emphasize enough that hamsters are completely blameless in this situation and should be seen as helpless pawns of the dark machinations of an information hungry world. Rather than penalize hamsters for their unwitting role, we must take steps to relieve their plight.
The size and placement of the intelligence gathering devices makes removal untenable for the hamsters and would be almost universally fatal. Yet, it would be cruel to leave these hamsters to simply explode in pet stores across our fair nation. It is eminently possible to include hamsters in out homes and classrooms without fear. We can save the lives of these innocent victims of global politics and still protect our national security. It would be a simply matter to care for and enjoy pet hamsters while presenting them with a steady stream of either disinformation or neutral data. Simply make certain to keep your hamster in a room that does not contain a television and shield it from all media feeds. A small speaker may be placed near the hamster habitat and set to play an innocuous mix of jazz fusion and new age music. This should prove soothing to the hamster and a bar against information leakage. Furthermore, you may bring your hamster into the common areas of your home on a daily basis and discuss completely inaccurate information in its presence such as false military base locations and defense policy issues. Take an opportunity to be both compassionate and patriotic. Buy a hamster today!
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