In 1797, an English physician by the name of Alexander Russell was traveling near the city of Aleppo, in what is now Syria, helping treat a plague in the area, when he made an astounding discovery, a small rodent that only lived in that specific region. Okay, maybe discovery isn’t the right way to say it, given the locals had known the critter was there for generations, but he was the first European guy to not only notice its existence, but also bother writing down that it existed. Finding out that animals existed was all the rage in Europe at the time. The locals called the rodent by a name that roughly translated from Arabic to Mister Saddlebags. Not being down with that name, Russell called it a hamster, which kind of sounds like the German word for hoarder, because you know, hamsters shove food in their cheeks all the time. Anyways, after making his astounding “discovery”, Russell promptly forgot about the hamster, probably because he had more important things to worry about, like a fricking plague, leaving it to be “re-discovered” in 1839 by George Waterhouse, an English naturalist whose primary job was wandering around looking for cool animals to draw and write about. However, the hamster was far from the coolest animal added to the so-called list of animals now known to exist by English people at the time, so though it was “officially” categorized, nobody really gave two shits about it.
That all changed in 1930, when a Jewish biologist living in Jerusalem named Israel Aharoni launched an expedition to find a living hamster specimen. At the time, many Jewish people were returning to the lands of their ancestors and a major movement had begun for these settlers to convert Hebrew from a language only used during religious ceremonies to an everyday language for talking and walking. Israel was contributing to this movement by making up Hebrew sounding names for the various animals and plants in the area not described in the Torah. For some reason this involved travelling around and actually looking at the animals in person rather than via pictures in books. Israel was kind of a weird guy. He was also a coward, a terrible worrier, and hated in anyway being uncomfortable, which was surely just awesome for those travelling with him. Israel travelled to Aleppo where he paid several local guides to wander around from farm to farm, asking if anybody had seen Mister Saddlebags. Most likely the guides thought the whole thing rather stupid, but money is money after all.
Eventually such door to door canvassing paid off. A farmer reported that he knew hamsters were living in one of his wheat fields, something he likely instantly regretted when Israel ordered his guides to start digging. However, there was little he could do since Israel had the blessing of the local sheik, who evidently was bored and wanted to see how things played out. Anyways, after digging down some eight feet, the guides found a mother hamster with a litter of eleven pups which Israel promptly had them put in a wooden box to take back to Jerusalem. Israel had gotten it in his head that hamsters would make great laboratory animals, and he wanted to see if he could breed them in captivity.
Things did not go well from the start. As it turns out, mother hamsters tend to be a little extreme when they get freaked out. Evidently convinced being put in a box was the end of the world, she started killing her young, biting the head off of one poor bastard before Israel removed her, and for god only knows what reason euthanized her. That left him with ten pups he needed to feed by hand with an eyedropper. On the train, the pups chewed their way out of their box and escaped, and Israel was only able to find nine. The pups pulled the same stunt again soon after arriving in Jerusalem, and this time only four were recovered, one male and three females. Somewhat wiser, Israel managed to raise what remained of the litter to maturity, and then put his last male with one of its sisters, which the male promptly ate. With fingers crossed, Israel tried again. This time the incestuous hamsters did what was expected of them, and then they did it again, and again, and again.
Fun fact, hamsters have a gestation period of only sixteen days and have on average ten pups at a time. The hamster Adam and Eve had 150 offspring in total, which mated with each other to create thousands of offspring, so on and so forth. As hoped, the hamster turned out to be the perfect lab animal, and Israel began selling them to researchers around the world. Early on, breeding pairs were smuggled into other countries in coat pockets, but as their usefulness became better understood, they began to be shipped through legitimate channels. Many of these research hamsters found their way to the United States and England, where noticing how cute the little buggers were, researchers began taking them home to give to their children as pets. Today, hamsters are the fourth most common pet in the U.S., behind fish, cats, and dogs. Pretty much all pet hamsters worldwide are descended from Israel’s first successful breeding pair. To this day, very little is known about hamster’s behavior in the wild.