Whence
Golden hamster (the pet hamster)
Animal

Where does Golden hamster (the pet hamster) come from?

The golden hamster, the pet hamster of homes around the world, comes from the farmland near Aleppo in northern Syria. Pet hamsters are thought to trace back to one family dug out of a wheat field there in 1930.

Mister Saddlebags of Aleppo

Scientists first described the animal in 1797, in The Natural History of Aleppo, a book by two Scottish physicians living in Syria. In 1839 the British zoologist George Robert Waterhouse named it Cricetus auratus, the golden hamster; the skin of his specimen is kept at the Natural History Museum in London. Its local Arabic name means roughly 'mister saddlebags', for the cheek pouches that stretch back to its shoulders and carry food to its burrow.

A dig in a wheat field

In the spring of 1930 the zoologist Israel Aharoni of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem went looking for the animal near Aleppo. His colleague Saul Adler hoped it could become a laboratory animal for research on leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease. Guided by a local hunter, Georgius Khalil Tah'an, he reached a farm where, on 12 April, villagers dug eight feet down and found a mother with her young. Escapes and losses left only a handful in Jerusalem, but a brother and sister bred.

Why people say Europe

The hamster reached Europe as a laboratory animal. Descendants of Aharoni's colony were shipped to Britain in 1931, to the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research, and two more pairs went to the Zoological Society of London in 1932. Their descendants passed to private breeders in 1937, and today most hamsters in British and American pet shops are golden hamsters. Europe has its own wild species, the larger European hamster, but the pet hamster comes from Syria, and in the wild it is now endangered.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Golden hamster ↗ · smithsonianmag.com ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Israel Aharoni ↗

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