Hamish: 'I Want My Freedom'

Instead of homo sapiens, I think we should call ourselves homo cagiuus, the animal that puts other animals in cages. From zoos to veal stalls to birdcages, we have a passion for limiting the movement of our fellow creatures on this planet.

I try to put myself in the place of the chimps in the zoo. Like us, they depend on sight to explore the world. They must find it very unsettling--how the visitors outside their bars stare at them all day.

There is a sad SeaWorld commercial on American television right now showing killer whales flowing fancifully over golden wheat fields and across bays and through cities, gracefully suspended above us until they land in their pool at the amusement park. The water-filled cement prisons at these parks are so small, compared to the hundreds of ocean miles a free orca roams each day, that captive marine mammals develop severe psychological problems and sometimes even commit suicide, either by ramming their heads against the cement walls, or submerging and refusing to surface, till they drown. That more trainers aren’t killed or injured is some kind of tribute to the restraint of these prisoners, given how frustrated they are.

(Marine-mammal parks seldom mention how many captive dolphins have died so you can ‘swim with’ one of those prisoners still left alive. Nor do they mention the chlorine burns on the dolphins’ corneas, or the scars on the males’ bodies due to attacks by other males under unnatural conditions of confinement.)

Put anything in a cage, and it goes nuts. In Florida (USA), at a shabby little marine park, a solitary orca named Lolita has been trying to keep herself sane for three decades by doing laps around her small pool. Highly sociable, forming life-long pods, bonding with mothers and sisters, orcas are not meant to live by themselves. An orca alone is broken and incomplete. But Lolita is tough. She refuses to surrender her sanity. Day after day and year after year, millions of laps later, she is still trying to find some release and space--and the strength to go on.

It’s a sad contrast—her free orca cousins skimming the seas with wild abandon—and Lolita, circling her small pool day after day, trying to stay strong. Does she wonder, some days, why she is trying to stay alive?

I’ll depress you in a later article about the lives of veal calves, battery-cage hens, and elephants in circuses, chained by one foot for up to eighteen hours a day. And I’ll describe in detail the way lab mice run frantically back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, in their few inches of cage space, an excess of nervous energy forever driving them, not at all understanding why those bars are there, keeping their sensitive, high-strung little bodies confined.

But now I want to talk about a hamster I used to have named Hamish. I called him this because he was a burly little guy with broad shoulders, kind of like a rugged Scotsman with an ax, in a kilt, about to bash an enemy. Reddish and furry, with light bands of white across his stomach, and on the tips of his ears and tail, he had an urge for freedom equal to that of Braveheart.

I would let Hamish roam free, outside his cage, as much as I could. At the time, I lived on the third floor of an apartment building, and one evening, while Hamish was out and about, I accidentally left ajar the sliding glass door which opened onto the balcony.

Hamsters, I forgot to mention, will walk off of any precipice you put them on—bed, table—balcony. It has something to do with them lacking a vertical axis in their brains; in nature they live in horizontally-constructed burrows underground, so they’re always moving parallel to gravity, never up and down. (I have another theory: since they are completely solitary creatures, coming together for only a few moments, to mate, maybe they also lack a dominance/submission axis—no hierarchies of superior/inferior since they live alone, with no one to dominate.)

Help. Panic. I ran out onto the balcony. No Hamish. Wooden slats formed the railing, with plenty of space at the bottom for a hamster to fall through.

I forgot, also, to mention that at this time I had white rat named Nigel. So called because he had a long aristocratic British nose and looked like landed gentry. Hamish the Scottish hamster and Nigel the aristocratic English rat.

Rats do not walk off of precipices. They have more sense. Instead, they peer over first, before they jump. So here was Nigel, peering over the edge of the balcony, eyes all wide and alert and curious, whiskers waving, pink nose twitching like crazy, a sign he was very excited about this brief outdoor adventure. Coming up quietly from the side, so as not startle him, I scooped him up, hugged him with a sigh to my breast and then put him in his cage. After a quick search of the apartment, I tried the balcony again—almost afraid to look over, spy Hamish’s broken body below. Thankfully, a patch of grass under the balcony would have cushioned his fall. Beyond that was concrete and parking lot.

I looked down. No Hamish lay on the grass.

But, sure enough, there he was, still alive, his tiny reddish body scurrying frantically along, hugging the curb, since he was out in the open. I slipped into my shoes, dashed downstairs. It took a while, as I followed the curb, looked under every nearby bush, but finally I caught up with him--peacefully grooming himself under a magnolia tree.

When I had him safely in my hands again, I breathed. It felt as if I’d been holding my breath with anxiety for about the last half hour.

Nothing looked injured but I took him to the vet the next day anyway. She said he was probably sore but with no permanent damage since he’d fallen on grass. So little does a hamster weigh (only about 5 oz.) that gravity doesn’t have much affect on them.

For several days, Hamish slept constantly, recovering. When I finally let him run again, I found him frantically trying to scratch his way through the sliding glass door, at just the spot where he would have made his escape earlier. He kept this up for weeks, every time I let him run. Let me out. Let me fall off the balcony again. Let me run free.

Such was his desire for freedom that even a frightening fall didn’t deter him from trying again.

I always think that anything with wings must suffer greatly from being caged. No place to stretch them. You see photos of Chinese men taking their birds for a walk in the park. Imprisoned in a tiny wooden box, on the end of stick, the bird is limited to just a few inches of air out of that huge world out there that is his natural environment.

Birds in cages look half dead. Some vital spark is gone. A parrot with clipped wings, no matter how colorful and iridescent his plumage, seems a mere ghost of a bird. The humblest brown sparrow outside the window is far more full of life and beauty.

(For more information about the physical and psychological problems of captive marine mammals, go to any Ric O’Barry website. O’Barry, the man who trained Flipper, is now an activist who protests both the slaughter and capture of marine mammals. Lolita: Slave to Entertainment, put out by Rattle the Cage Productions, is a video documentary about the life of that brave orca circling her cage.)