Domestication of the Syrian hamster
[2] Alexander Russell was a Scottish physician who had been living in Syria from 1740 till 1750 or 55, and while in Aleppo, he documented the natural history of the region.
I once found upon dissecting one of them, the pouch on each side stuffed with young french beans, arranged lengthways so exactly, and close to each other, that it appeared strange by what mechanism it had been effected; for the membrane which forms the pouch, though muscular, is thin, and the most expert fingers could not have packed the beans in a more regular order.
[2] This species is less than the common Hamster (Cricetus vulgaris), and is remarkable for its deep golden yellow colouring.
In 1839 at a meeting of the London Zoological Society George Robert Waterhouse described the Syrian hamster as a new species.
[2] His identification of the animal happened after his 1835 appointment as a curator of the museum of the London Zoological Society, where his job was to process mammal specimens.
[3] Some derivative works of the Waterhouse publication which also presented the existence of the hamster were Louis Fraser's 1849 Zoologia Typica, Christoph Gottfried Andreas Giebel's 1855 Säugetiere, and Henry Baker Tristram's 1884 Fauna and Flora of Palestine.
[10] In 1902 Alfred Nehring studied a preserved female Syrian hamster specimen at the Beirut Museum.
[10] In 1930, Israel Aharoni captured the first live hamsters known to science and in 1942 published his notes and a narrative of the experience in an autobiography, Memoirs of a Hebrew Zoologist (זכרונות זואולוג עברי [Transliterated: Zichronot Zoolog Ivri]).
[14] Sometime before Aharoni's 1930 hamster expedition, parasitologist Saul Adler was having trouble doing his research because of lack of animal testing subjects.
[10] Leishmaniasis was a regional problem and it was common to infect Chinese hamsters as a model organism to study the disease.
[10] Because of these problems, he wished to find a Middle Eastern hamster that would be easy to capture locally and have potential in animal testing.
After several hours of hard work, they succeeded in raising from a depth of 8 feet, a complete nest, nicely upholstered, with a mother and her 11 young!
I saw the mother hamster (a creature whose evolutionary level is not high) harden her heart and sever with ugly cruelty the head of the pup that approached her most closely (each of the young measured at the time just 21/2 cm).
Natural mother-love led her to kill her dear child: "It is better that my infant die than that it be the object of an experiment performed on it by a member of the accursed human race."
[16] Aharoni delivered these to Heim Ben-Menachen, who was the head of the Hebrew University animal facilities and that department's founder.
His dismay increased as I described how difficult it was to get the creatures out of the depths of the earth, the great value of the discovery of this beautiful animal, that in the whole wide world, the only suitable habitat it could find was a long region between Aleppo and Homs; of all the bundles of dried grass, all the hay, all the sheves of wheat...The most thorough search was unable to find the escaped hamsters, leaving three females and a male.
It proceeded to chase the female – who was far more familiar with the environment than her assigned mate – and finally (how long it was I don't know) caught up with her.
Only someone who has tasted true happiness, heavenly joy, can appreciate our elation over the fact that our great effort did not prove to be in vain.
[5] Among his many scientific projects and recognition, Saul Adler took particular pleasure in distributing Syrian hamsters to researchers in other laboratories.
[22] He gave the hamsters to Edward Hindle, then of the London Zoological Society, who himself established a colony for researchers.
"[25] There are records that Guy Henry Faget of the United States Public Health Service in Carville, Louisiana, received a shipment of Syrian hamsters from Adler in 1938.
[27] In 1948 Adler wrote that before World War II he sent hamsters to India and that Kligler sent animals to America.
[29] Albert Marsh of Mobile, Alabama, established the commercial hamster industry in the United States in the 1940s.
On 10 February 1948, with the help of the governor of Alabama and others, Marsh was successful in convincing the California State Department of Agriculture to designate Syrian hamsters as "normally domesticated animals".
