(The “Long-Haired Teddy Bear Hamster” from Syria seemed to be in hiding.) Strands of triangular, white-and-black-checked plastic pennants gave a Monte Carlo ambiance to the enclosure where three parallel, 10-foot sections of black plastic track stood at the ready. Only five kids had registered their rodents for the race, but their parents and siblings formed a decent crowd next to towers of glass cases labeled with descriptions of their inhabitants.
So it was with curiosity that I observed kids who’d brought their hamsters to Petco’s semi-annual, in-store Hamster Ball Derby, extracting their four-legged charges from carrying containers and snapping them inside colorful, translucent spheres.
As kids, my brother and I kept gerbils, and when we were raising our many generations of fuzzy nibblers in the mid-’80s, plastic exercise balls had yet to make the rodent-running scene.
