Hamster rises from dead: A England couple who buried a hamster during Easter weekend, thinking the rodent was dead, but the hamster appeared to have come back from the dead.
The two-year-old hamster was found “lifeless” by 23-year-old Lisa Kilbourne-Smith and her boyfriend, 24-year-old James Davis, who were watching the rodent for a friend.
The Stroud News and Journal reported that they thought the hamster, named Tink, was dead. They then buried it in a flower bed but on the next day, the hamster apparently ate its way out of the paper towel it was buried in.
The hamster then climbed up a pipe and fell into a recycling box.
“Suddenly a little face popped out of one of (the boxes), which gave me a big startle I can assure you,” Kilbourne-Smith’s father, Les, told the paper. He added, “It’s amazing that she survived.”
“The energy she had to dig herself out of that hole, then get along the wall and climb up into that recycling box was remarkable really,” he continued.
Experts told the paper that Tink went into hibernation when the couple thought it was dead.
“This isn’t the first instance of a hamster coming back from the dead that I’ve come across,” veterinarian James Auld told UPI. “If its body temperature drops below a certain level the animal can go into hibernation.”
He added that in the past, owners have mistaken their hamsters for dead when they were simply oversleeping.
“However, I’m amazed by this hamster. The animal’s body temperature would have had to have risen to rouse it from hibernation. With the temperatures we experienced over Easter, one would think that the ground would have been far too cold for it to come out of its dormant state,” he said.
