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Hamsters would be very, very low on the list of household pets I’d expect to be responsible for an incident that led to the death of a human being. However, one man in England is seemingly lucky to be alive after ending up on the receiving end of a bite from one of the rodents.
There’s no shortage of stories concerning people who suffered a pretty gruesome fate after willingly welcoming an exotic animal into their home, and I find it pretty hard to sympathize with pet owners who’ve gotten a firsthand lesson in the downsides of cohabitating with a venomous snake, carnivorous feline, or a seemingly harmless primate.
With that said, as someone who grew up with a steady rotation of hamsters, I can’t say I was ever particularly concerned about the seemingly nonexistent risks of caring for tiny furry creatures that don’t even weigh a pound.
However, it would appear they’re not as harmless as they might seem at first glance—especially for some allergy-prone members of the population—based on the information I came across after stumbling upon a strange story that recently transpired in England.
According to The Mirror, Nathan Halliday of the town of Kirkby was doing what he could to comfort Mochi, a 20-month-old Syrian hamster he’d been caring for along with his partner Rebecca and his three-year-old daughter that appeared to be nearing the end of its lifespan after becoming noticeably frail.
The 34-year-old said he’d spent around 90 minutes cradling the hamster in his hands when it suddenly clamped down on his palm after seemingly suffering a seizure that immediately preceded its final breaths. However, things took an alarming turn shortly after when he realized he was having trouble breathing and was “covered in hives on my back, chest and arms.”
Halliday—an asthmatic who told the outlet he’s allergic to horses and pollen—took multiple puffs from an inhaler to no avail before Rebecca placed a phone call to emergency services who dispatched an ambulance to the home as he struggled to breathe through his swollen throat.
He was placed on oxygen, rushed to the hospital, and received two doses of adrenaline along with a tetanus shot and an antihistamine, a cocktail of treatments that was thankfully able to assuage the symptoms before he was ultimately discharged.
As the outlet notes, a man in the English town of Redditch died after going into anaphylactic shock in the wake of a hamster bite in 2007—three years after the publication of a small study that attempted to figure out why they have the ability to spark that kind of reaction.
Another paper that was published in 2014 suggested hamster saliva may contain certain proteins with the potential to trigger bite victims who are predisposed to certain allergies, but the results were far from conclusive thanks in no small part to the seemingly rare nature of the reactions.
It would appear most people probably don’t have to worry about death via hamster bite, but you probably want to avoid them if you can given the potential pitfalls.