Page:The Golden Hamster Manual.djvu/16

 odorless, quiet nature, and brief gestation period mark the hamster as the ideal school propagation animal.

Remember that the large, highly commercialized hamsteries are out to get all of the larger laboratory orders they can handle. Competition for large orders is keen. During the first 3 to 6 months one should take it easy, study the animals and their possibilities, learn advertising rates in all publications he might wish to use later, contact local doctors, visit laboratory technicians in nearby hospitals to offer a few hamsters (young stock, possibly free of charge for first experiments) for technicians to try out to learn hamster possibilities, sell a few animals for pets, get cages or pens into schools (see folder, School Hamsters), sell enough breeding stock to pay all expenses, but not breed more than necessary to supply the foregoing outlets. The hamster industry is no place for even the most experienced producer of any other small stock to start in on a big scale. Those who start out buying a large number of breeders are more likely than not to find themselves in sorrow. Six is about the maximum number of females advised for the beginner. In many cases, 2 or 3 may be enough. Why? These animals are PROLIFIC! Hamsters are perhaps easier to raise than most other small stock, but they are absolutely different and unique, and to attempt to raise them on the same schedule and with the same equipment as mink, cavies, rats, rabbits, etc., is to invite disappointment. It takes a few weeks to learn first-hand the fascinating characteristics making the hamster so unique and so valuable. After 2 or 3 months, if your hamstery output is selling right along and you like the animals well enough to warrant expansion, you might place some classified advertising where It will do the most good (Chap. 56), contact other nearby hamsteries about the matter of helping fill orders which may come too soon or too large for you. Average laboratory orders are too large for a lone beginner. But this may still be too early to expand production. When sales demand expansion, exchange young stock with these other hamsteries to add new blood and raise most of the choice females desired for any added production pens.

One with experience raising other laboratory animals, also having proper connections for laboratory sales, may, like any other beginner, start with 6 or less production females. Then, after a couple of months' careful study and handling of hamsters, he may expand to any number desired to meet his laboratory markets.

As suggested in Chap. 10, whether beginning or expanding a hamstery, either hobby or commercial, there is real advantage in buying carefully selected females at 4 to 5 weeks. Not only do they usually cost somewhat less, but one may watch their development until proper age for best first matings. Some dishonest shippers have sent older runts when young females were called for in an order. To the novice, a 14- to 15-week runt may at first appear to be a normal 5- or 6-week female. So, It may pay the buyer to be reasonably certain of the integrity of the source of his breeding stock. Laboratories expect good weights, and the better stock produces a better weight average of good young throughout the productive