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warum der hamster der geeignetste nager fuer die stressreiche gabelholmarbeit ist:

Saturday June 3, 2006
The Guardian

Another chapter was written yesterday in the history of great hamster escapes, when a pet called Mike survived three types of crushing machine and a shredder at a waste recycling plant.

The small rodent was left with only a minor foot injury after astonished staff discovered him limping into a final sorting area after going through a process which rips cookers and washing machines into stringy bits of metal.

Mike's white-knuckle ride through the Recyclo works on Deeside, north Wales, adds to the remarkable survival record of Mesocricetus auratus over many years. Hamsters have returned from premature burial, travelled through the post in envelopes (a highly illegal practice) and contentedly shared pet cages with poisonous snakes.

Mike's adventures rate highly in a sub-group of binmen sagas, particularly as Recyclo does not deal in food or similar rubbish which might attract pets.

"We don't get very much animal activity here," said the plant's general manager, Tony Williams, who supervises some 400 tonnes a day of "dry" waste. "Some is shredded and then goes through the trammel - conveyor belts and grids which let the smaller pieces of waste fall through. It seems the hamster was small enough to pass through the 150mm gaps between the shredder blades, but big enough to pass along the trammel without dropping down."

Hamsters are agile and energetic, regularly travelling up to eight miles during nocturnal hunts for food. Mike - named after one of the crew who found him - is thought to have gone a step too far in his explorations and ended up trapped in a Recyclo-bound white goods skip.

Unloaded at the plant, he was whirled in a rotating drum, taken on a conveyor to the shredder, bounced around in a giant sieve and then juddered along a moving grille whose waste disappears into sealed underground sumps. His survival of the four-minute process comfortably beats the waste-disposal record of Lucky, a hamster from the Anchorage Baptist temple in Alaska, who only had to deal with a municipal garbage truck.

The remotely familiar part of Mike's journey may have been the drum - a giant version of a hamster exercise ball. These have featured in other escapes: a hamster called Roly was found pedalling his along the hard shoulder of the M6 in Birmingham after falling from a car.

Pending possible calls from distraught owners, Mike is now getting to know Liam Bull, 10, whose father, Craig, was one of the rescue team. "He's doing fine now," said Liam. "But I can't believe he's still alive after what happened to him."