But I /am/ glad it's a comfort for someone.

Does this post mean the Little Dude is gone?

Or, to reach for the natural quote: "You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime."

(Rats: two years, maybe more. More than enough time to learn their personalities and get attached.)

* It's a male character saying that, and generally to other men. But he'd be the first to agree that the same applies to a woman... or a hamster.

Janet Brennan Croft @21 I remember that, too, though not to quote. Lazarus also says something like, "When she died, I stopped wanting to live forever." That, of course, implies greater equality and devotion than one has to a hamster, however beloved.

Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether the elven reaction is to view the humans as fully their equal, and thus tragically short-lived, or view them with affection, but more as pets.

YEMV (Your Elf May Vary)

I didn't realize until after I commented that the post could be anything other than elegiac. I fear I've miscast the entire tone of the thread. Oops.

(Disclaimer: I am not a veterinarian, and this is not veterinary advice. No diagnosis can be made without seeing the animal. This is not a diagnosis.)

The symptoms you describe could also be consistent with chronic kidney failure, which wouldn't necessarily express lethargy or elevated temperature as a kidney infection might.

I believe you're thinking of the Doctor.

Teresa #18, #19: Well, good to know he's still going. As you say, soon enough. However interpreted, Death is known for his/her/it's patience.

Also, grief stinks however it comes our way.

(At the other end of the spectrum, what this reminds me of is "raising John Thomases.")

...and the webcomic Shortpacked is currently in a storyline titled "The Death of Snkrs"; Snkrs is one of the hamsters of Amber, who works at Galasso's toy store with most of the rest of the cast. There's other things going on in the storyline, of course - David Willis' comics get incredibly back-story-full - but this one starts here:

http://www.shortpacked.com/2011/comic/book-13/05-the-death-of-snkrs/mom-3/

(Spoilers: by now it has gotten past the actual death and we're dealing with followups.)

--Dave

Thank you for your kindness. It will be applicable soon enough.

This made me go "Ouch." Nothing like a succession of small mammals to teach us how to mourn in advance, or at least to prepare for the inevitable mourning.

Kipling's poem about dogs breaking your heart comes to mind. But at least dogs (and cats) can give you a good couple decades if you're lucky. I wonder what Kipling would have said about rodents. (Maybe he *did* say something, and I just haven't read it yet.)

Indeed, until they started organizing their data‡ they didn't realize that we had a lifecycle. They thought we were four (or five—it was hotly disputed±) separate species. They've since pieced together the complete biography and behavioral description of one human, based on observations in a family-owned pet store. Some of their assumptions are incorrect**, but it's broadly accurate§.

They think of us as creatures who walk in wheels rather than running in them.

-----
‡ They do this in pet stores, by the way. At night the air is full of data exchanges among the small mammals*. This makes the turtles testy and the snakes hungry. The fish would be irritated, but they forget how long it's been going on.
± There are no flamewars like hamster flamewars.
** The relationship between food and bedding is just not the same for humans. In particular, though infants may chew on their cuddly toys, teddy bears are not midnight snacks.
§ and controversial±
* There's a colony of bats that has an oral tradition going back generations now, started by one of their number eavesdropping† in a pet store. It's turned into a complex saga of supra-Homeric proportions, but with substantially more sex.
† yes, you did see what I did there

Vale Pets.

We do a bit better, at 3 billion, and live longer by the calendar than elephants with their bigger, slower hearts.

Bats do well, too.

It's all explained by a Just So story, like the Rhino's skin being all wrinkly after he put it back on that time.

* In one of those books what he wrote.

Ouch. Reminds me of the retirement home in the eponymous Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End.

A long time ago a short-lifer proved to me that we all live the same length of time.” He glanced at Minerva; she looked solemnly back. “Because we all live now. She—he—was not asserting that fallacy of Georg Cantor which distorted pre-Libby mathematics so long; uh, he—was asserting a verifiable objective truth. Each individual lives her life in now independently of how others may measure that life in years.

------------------------------------

The more thoroughly I learned this— through living day on day with Dora—the happier I was and the more I ached in one corner of my mind with certain knowledge that this could be only a brief time too soon over—and when it was over, I did not marry again for almost a hundred years. Then I did, for Dora taught me to face up to death, too. She was as aware of her own death of the certain briefness of her life, as I was. But she taught me to live now, not to let anything sully today… until at last I got over the sadness of being condemned to live.

Asimov claimed in one of his science essays that all mammals, except for humans, lived for around a billion heartbeats. Humans managed to live for two or three times longer than this calculation would suggest. The lovely graphs and tables here suggest that he wasn't far off the mark,

Loss is always a risk associated with love or caring - and much more likely/inevitable in our companions with shorter lifespans*. A little over seven years ago we got two littermate kittens and I was hoping we'd delight in their company for 15 or 20 years. Two years ago, one of them died suddenly while we were travelling (in the car, during a rest break). I spent some time expecting her sister to just drop dead as well, then realised all I could do was cherish the time we had together. That, and be really glad that, early in the morning before setting off on that journey, I'd made the time to give Sundae her usually morning "needy"** time.

*as measured in days/years.

** Definition: I need attention and I need it now.

I believe that my initial interpretation of this phrase may have been incorrect. But it was _awesome_. Sure, it takes them a little longer to scurry the whole length of the Pattern, but...

Dogs and cats live barely long enough to make the pain of losing them worthwhile. I have a friend who loves Great Danes, which like many large breeds often live less than a decade; I think he's mad.

I beg to differ.

Nine years ago this month, F and I adopted a pair of mature female cats (age estimated at 6-8; bad teeth and morbidly obese but otherwise healthy) from the local Cat and Dog sanctuary.

One of them is still with us. But about a month ago I had to take Frigg to the vet for what proved to be the final time. She was always a high maintenance cat (and a one man cat -- I was her food ape, and she never let anyone forget it); we got her weight down under veterinary guidance, but not in time to prevent her overladen joints from developing severe osteoarthritis in her tail and hindquarters and front left shoulder. About a year ago she became hypertensive and sprang two detached retinas (a common complication of hypertension in cats), but I'd seen it before and got her to the vet in time to save her vision. By this time she was on half a dozen medications and losing weight slowly -- but she'd always been a fussy eater. She un-toilet trained herself some time around August, then the weight loss accelerated.

In her last five days she lost 350 grams (equivalent to a human losing 15% of their body weight in a month) and her personality changed drastically. The vet's tentative diagnosis was colon cancer, and at 15-17 years old and in poor health she was too frail to face surgery. I will confess: I chickened out of staying with her for the final injection. But by then, she was already withdrawn and ignoring the humans fussing around her. I believe the pain killers (for the arthritis) probably kept the cancer from hurting too much until the very end.

I miss her more than my cousin, who died of cancer five years ago. But? We had nearly nine good years together. And when Mafdet (the survivor) finally checks out, we will grieve, and acquire kittens.

David DeLaney @ 31 & chris @ 44, recently one of my partners dreamed that our gorgeously strong-willed tortoiseshell cat was following our other partner (who is her Person) through various universes in a way compatible with Pattern-based shadow-shifting. We've been joking since then that torties = redheads, though obviously if Amberite cats are fur-coded then tortoiseshell coat must not be caused by X chromosome inactivation.

Thalia adopted me when she was 8 weeks old (she was supposed to be my roommate's). We had 16 years together and she was the first being in my life to love me that totally and unconditionally. She got me through pneumonia (I had to get out of bed to feed her and the other cat and therefore I would take my meds and feed myself. She didn't hate it too much when she lost my lap to pregnancy and she was fascinated by the end result. Lost her to kidney disease after much medication and IV fluids.

Alexis, who previously was Madeleine Robins's cat, shared my life when Madeleine and I were roommates. He and Thalia were soulmates. Though he was older and bigger, she bossed him around relentlessly (and he loved it). He came to live with me and Thalia fulltime due to health problems with the humans in Madeleine's household. He was, without a doubt, the sweetest cat I have ever known. Friendly to everyone, large, warm, and cheerful. Lost him only a couple of years after the move, at 16, to colon cancer. Thalia and I both mourned.

Minerva, adopted as a kitten, was a total PITA to me. But when my daughter was born, a year later, it was clear that this was what Minerva had been waiting for. She was my daughter's cat. Taught the kid to crawl (see, I'm sitting here, come pet me . . . oh, you moved, well, I'll move too--now come over here and pet me!), once the kid could talk, Minerva would let her hold onto the tip of her tail and lead her all over the apartment. Stupid, stupid cat--walked into walls when turning corners--clawed and nipped at me . . . but never at the baby. Lost her at 8 to diabetes, my daughter was heartbroken.

Now we have Alex, who came to us at 6ish (adult shelter rescue) and is now 13ish and 2 years into a diagnosis of kidney disease. He's doing very well (knock wood) and we hope to have more years with him, but I am well aware that the average lifespan of a domestic cat is 14 years. He's not a lap cat and doesn't like cuddles, but when he looks at me with that little kittenface (he's not a little kitten but he has this one sweet expression that reminds me of a kitten), I just melt.

8 years was really short.
16 years was somehow even shorter.

In this story, humans live longer than a deer of similar mass because we're not liable to be eaten by predators, owing to our tools, or our language, or our culture, use of fire or something else deer don't have.

What have elves got that makes them very unlikely to be eaten by predators?

Magic.

The study of various kinds of scaling in biology is called allometric scaling theory, and it's been somewhat controversial in the last 10 or 15 years. The correlation between heartbeat and lifespan is especially controversial because the data scatters over such a wide range. Here's an article that analyzes the controvery, if you're interested.

Disdain, arrogance, and magic swords.

What have elves got that makes them very unlikely to be eaten by predators?

Magic.

No, it's not magic, it's the pointy ears. They're like cactus needles and choke on the way down.

Also, there's not a lot of meat on them.
From Gnash Pounder's Traditional Cooking: "Pound for pound, both humans and dwarves will return a richer, juicier and far more tender meat than elves. According to the late Jewel Child-eater, 'Elf-meat is tough and stringy, and the long ropy muscles cling to the bone besides. I never use elf-meat for serious cooking, although the clan elders do enjoy the occasional treat of on-the-bone-jerky.'"

But then I used to write these little vignettes myself. Shorter and less thoughtful than yours, in fact. Like the kid who was raised on a space station visiting a planet for the first time, who commented that he had to pretend the sky was just a really large blue dome to get by, that he grabbed for the nearest fixed object whenever the wind blew, and that, since chicken tasted just like artificial vat protein anyway, he couldn't understand why anyone would put up with such filthy creatures.

Also, this reminded me of something Anne Laurie Logan once told me, which is that cats cannot comprehend why humans, having devised a method of keeping a bowl of water continually refreshed, then pee in the bowl.

tykewriter 35: They split with Ave Atque Pets, and foolishly divided the name. Or perhaps it's a pet sematary.

dcb 42: Loss is always a risk associated with love or caring

The Dark Aphrodite, using the mouth of a friend of mine, once told me (and others; it wasn't just at me) that this is not a risk but a price. "If you love, you will mourn," she said, "because all relationships end in either separation or death. The only ones who escape this are those who die young." Two things about that: one, 'young' means "before anyone you care about dies," and two, hamsters seldom mourn (at least for this cause).

Mary Aileen 51: In a D&D campaign I ran in decades ago, the Elves didn't so much have a slower metabolism as a slower timesense. Raising children was much less of a burden because 20 years or so just wasn't that big a chunk of a ~2000-year lifetime, but if you told a mixed group of Elves and Humans that the entire area they're in would be blown to hell with nuclear weapons at some random point in the next 20 minutes, the Humans would get out in time and the Elves would not.

The version of the Just So story I heard (or possibly amplified on my own) was that anything which makes a creature less likely to be a prey animal increases longevity-- so, flight, intelligence, largeness, armor, poison, living in groups.

ObIron&Wine

ObAndalso

Too many of my animals have died when I wasn't there, hadn't had a chance to say goodbye (mainly because they were at my parents' house and I was at university or whatever). Now I always say goodbye to my animals before going away - just in case. And if I hadn't given Sundae her "needy" time that last morning (when we were trying to leave the house before 6 am), my lasting memory would be regret and guilt.

I sometimes wonder whether evolution, which made Syrian hamsters obligate solitaries, made them like being solitary. I'm not sure it did. As long as their territory isn't threatened, they're remarkably amiable, even friendly creatures that can get along with anything except another rodent. Maybe we ease their loneliness.

Niall McAuley @52:

"What have elves got that makes them very unlikely to be eaten by predators?"

Fragano @62: Hamsters would make good vampires. They've already got the fangs for it, and I can vouch for their ability to draw blood. It would be interesting to see how cunning and sneaky an evil hamster could become if it had more than a two-year lifespan.

I was assuming a certain quantity of household hamsters returned to pet shops, either for breeding or like Lucius was. They could provide some insight into the nighttime habits of the humans. ("They're quiet the whole night! Well, they snore, but you know what I mean. They just lie there.")

The main purpose of the pet shop for hamster science is as an informational clearinghouse. Combine that frequency of recording and analysis with a stable population of humans (thus, a family-owned one) to observe over multiple generations of hamsters, and you can build up a fairly complete picture.

I suspect small-animal vets will also have information streams, albeit patchier ones. But the biggest problem with the model is that most of the hamsters who leave pet shops to collect data on the human world don't return to report. That's an immeasurable loss, which has impoverished hamster scientists enormously.

I think it was when we were driving through Belgium that Abi told us about some mad epic Ukranian work of LOTR fanfic that's told from the Orcish point of view.

It was. The book is The Last Ring-Bearer, by Kiril Yeskov, and I was mistaken if I asserted he's Ukranian. He's Russian.

Must finish it. Got sidetracked by Patrick O'Brian, for all love.

Vampsters?

Hampires

Why is Sméagol immune to elf glamour? Years of possessing the Ring, maybe.

But the words. They fail me.

Having some passing familiarity with research turned into popular press, I suspect the stupidity is the work of journalists and not of the original researchers.

(When we hired some PR people to help us get wider exposure for results of an annual survey, my boss described their first sensationalized pass as "grotesque.")

It's not a stupid piece of research to do. It's stupid to present it as descriptive of humans. The picture is, of course, the last straw.

Sigh.

What the perceived need says about its editors' opinion of their core audience is a different question, but the obvious answer is nothing I haven't suspected before.

(The test subjects were hamsters. Maybe this is in the wrong thread. :)

First thought: Given that hamsters do have heat with pheromones involved, there should have been a control group which was exposed to females in heat, but not allowed to mate.

Second thought: Human development is known to be anomalously extended compared to other mammals, and for us, sex in adolescence is by no means unusual -- in most societies, not even abnormal. Findings of this type aren't even suggesting potential abnormalities, so much as variations within the existing spectrum of diversity.

The amount of grief at their loss is directly proportional to the love they bring, and to deny the grief denies the love. That was the mantra that pulled us both through the death of one of our younger cats, a bouncy flouncy floofy orange cat named Tiggar.

Naah, it's just one of them. Nicknamed the "Daily Heil", it lies somewhat to the right of Murdoch's "The Sun" (the Sunday edition of which, "The News of the World", was shut down with extreme prejudice not too long ago for embarrassing the Dirty Digger), but somewhere to the left of the "Daily Express".

"The Daily Telegraph" in contrast is a right-wing broadsheet slightly to the right of "The Times" (note definite article: it is not "The Times of London": it is timeless and universal), both of which are somewhat to the left of "The New York Times".

Well, guinea pigs certainly do. I've got gnawed spots all over the legs of my wood furniture. The usual interpretation is that they're gnawing to wear down their teeth, but I don't buy it. First off, it's usually just a couple of bites. And secondly, they tend to gnaw where others have gnawed, and inexplicably leave other places entirely alone.

I've actually speculated that there is some sort of scent-marking going on. Might be as simple as detecting the unique scent of someone else's saliva. There might also be specialized scent/olfactory glands in the mouth. (Cats and horses certainly have olfactory glands you can see them using when they "gape.")

I also wonder about the gnaw-marks themselves. If you take a really close look, they have a remarkably glyphic character to them. Guinea pigs don't pay much visual attention to anything close or below the level of their eyes. (Their vision is all about detecting predators or the possibility of predators.) But they have exquisitely sensative touch on their lips. (Watching one scratch-and-sniff an interesting scent is hilarious and fascinating.) So I wonder if it is, in addition to chemical communications, some sort of tactile code, like Braille.

And I know for a fact that they pass information around between them; no specific examples come to mind, but there have been numerous times when guinea pig A, who lives over on the south-east side of the room, starts exhibiting behavior previously demonstrated only by guina pig B who lives in the north-west cage. Kinda spooky, actually.

Leaving spoor at the vet's offic would be tricky, but only if you're assuming that they're only in conversation with their own species. Addl'y, the vet's coat and tech's scrubs would make for marvelous chemical bulletin boards, I would think.

I'm sure they wouldn't be approved for hamsters, though.

Spear-carrier to the perfume and literature stars, yup! It's a darn fine gig.

Later today will be the funeral of my brother-in-law's mother; she was 95. Not exactly overclocked, but she always complained thatt the "assisted living" home she lived in the last few years was full of old people. She never thought of herself as one. Rest in peace, Eleanor!

Thank you! I will now do my best to forget it exists, so I can get some work done today.

I am trying to keep my mouth under control, but my lips keep escaping into this smug grin at having supplied you with something you enjoy.

With regards to loving and mourning, do not deny me joy just to save me pain. The price is not one I want to pay.