Forums › Life › Pets & Animals › UK : Postie saves hamster!
A royal mail postbox is not an appropriate habitat for small ground mammals….
This is harsh on the hamster, and the Royal Mail staff who do not expect to find live animals amongst the letter post (if you are going to send living creatures by post or courier there are far more humane ways of doing so.)
On a serious note whoever did this needs to be caught. the kind of people who do this to animals have been proven to often end up committing violent crimes against humans – and to me this sounds like a form of bullying where the idea is to get back at the owner of the hamster; probably a small child…
0845 456 456 4 (cambridgeshire police non emergency)
0800 555 111 crimestoppers
0870 55 55 999 RSPCA
Posted pet hamster survives box
A pet hamster is at the centre of a bizarre police investigation after it was put in a sealed envelope and posted in a letter box, it has been revealed. It was rescued by a Cambridge postman who saw it wriggling as it tried to eat its way out of its cardboard prison.Patrick Von Heimendahl, a vet who examined the animal, told the BBC: “I find this utterly cynical to post a hamster. She is lucky to survive.”
The hamster, found in a post box, is being looked after by the vet.
Mr Von Heimendahl added: “It must have been very hot in there and did not have any food in there or water.
“I don’t think she would have survived for very much longer.”
‘Surprised and shocked’
The hamster is thought to have been in the box for about four hours.
Rob Maher, the postman who spotted the package, said: “I swore when I saw it. I was surprised and shocked.
“They (anyone who posted it) must either have a grudge against someone or someone playing a sick joke.”
The hamster was found in the city centre box on Wednesday.
Anyone with information should contact Cambridgeshire Police.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/4620879.stmPublished: 2005/06/24 20:08:07 GMT
© BBC MMV
dont be such a twazuk…crimestoppers can fuck off, and the police arent gonna and cant do shit. i cant beleive you put their numbers up here. what the fuck?
animals are treated worse than this legally every day, for money. hamsters and guinea pigs are tortured every day for verious research purposes, and the state of battery farming in this country is disgusting. this was prolly some little girl who didnt know better, i think the police is a little harsh.
animals are treated worse than this legally every day, for money. hamsters and guinea pigs are tortured every day for verious research purposes, and the state of battery farming in this country is disgusting. this was prolly some little girl who didnt know better, i think the police is a little harsh.
I stand by what I have done – I’ve left the cops numbers (or provided them) in the past when reporting on violent crimes, (I will of course remove them from anti-rave reports!) and even on SJ they have been posted (or people have suggested involving the police) when people have posted stories of domestic violence, or have been trying to track down angst-ridden teenagers who attend raves and then run away from home on the comedown (which has happened quite a few times).
When the scum who hid cocaine in live dogs were recently caught, I even congratulated the authorities for catching them….
Although this may seem like a minor incident – I doubt any child in their right mind would deliberately post their own pet.
Tthis is just a sick prank of some sort carried out with no thought for the welfare of the animal, and could have more sinister overtones which is why the cops even bothered to talk to the BBC. (they actually do have wildlife/animal crime units now which investigate animal cruelty)
Any kid who does do these things need to be identified and given help. Its a precursor to worse violent crime and catching these people is the sort of job the cops should be doing, not hassling relatively harmless things such as raves.
The RSPCA and NSPCC have been working together over the past few years comparing case details and there is an increasing indication that youths and teenagers who attack animals are the ones who go on to be bullies and also commit violent robberies and domestic violence.
I agree with you about the battery farming and the lab research (both of which I am opposed to – and have criticised on here in the past) – but battery farming is finally being outlawed here (although its taking too long IMO), factory farming methods are becoming discredited, and animal research has decreased drastically in the last 20 years due to the successful campaigning of the animal rights movements. (I ensure that everything I buy has not been tested on animals).
That which remains often happens only because large corporations and governments won’t between them reach acceptable solutions for complying with product testing regulations (many of which still demand animal testing).
But just because animals are treated badly elsewhere by big companies doesn’t mean others should get away with it….
there’s also a big problem with people who get pets and cannot look after them – But the this is mindless cruelty – like the scum who fire upon cats and dogs with air rifles, or attack the swans/ducks on the river.
People who carry out this kind of cruelty (even if they are kids) do need to be dealt with by the criminal justice system…. it won’t always mean prison (IMO the sentences are actually often not harsh enough); normally just a community sentence (cleaning out the small animals cages at a city farm would be a good punishment!) and perhaps psychiatric treatment…
Only a few months ago there was a murder case where a young lady was killed by her jealous ex-boyfriend – before that he had attacked her dogs and horses.
Some vets actually now tip off the social services when they see pets being brought in with certain injuries (such as cuts/impact injuries which don’t match up with a traffic collission), quite often someone is attacking their partner and the dog goes in to protect them (and gets a kicking as well)..
One day its the girl next door’s hamster in a postbox – a few years later it could be the girl next door ending up in a ditch.
i still think putting those numbers up is not appropriate – especially crimestoppers, who have no interest but to keep the daily mail nimbys happy.
while i accept your veiw that mistreatment of animals is likely to escalate into human mistreatment / violence, in this case the hamster wasn’t hurt and we can only guess as to who put it in the post. as for “no child in their right mind would do this” i find that laughable. my cousin, at the age of four, put the cat in the washing machine to clean it – it makes sense, and if a child has been watching postman pat, for example, they would expect each package to be handled with care, not sorted via machines and conveyor belts, as actually happens. as i said, any idea we have of who did this is pure conjecture, so i think your idea of who it is is as irrelevant as mine. we’re both making it up.
i would question how exactly you expect the culprit to be caught, i cant see it happening myself (at least i hope not as ive posted drugs loads of times, and assumed its untracable). and i cant see this as a valuable use of police time, as the hamster was not harmed, and was in a box, which means it stood every chance of surviving.
personally i have a problem with these animals being kept as pets, because they are tundra and desert animals, with natural habitats spanning vast expanses. to keep them in a cage is like keeping a dog in a sack.
one one level thats true – they have picked up that sort of image (although Neighbourhood watch is far more in that vein) but on another level they have also helped catch some real violent scum such as rapists and murderers and people who commit domestic violence, often because they are not the old bill and don’t trace the calls.
they are not just used by grannies peering through net curtains who are IME perfectly happy to talk to real bobbies (or the Daily Mail!); but also by younger people who would not normally want to talk to cops as they do a bit of drugs etc but then see an incident such as someone getting shot, stabbed or raped and don’t want the person who did it to escape justice.
I had a look at the Crimestoppers site and was quite surprised, they had a whole youth section as well and some relatively good info about dealing with bullying or robbery – it wasn’t exactly rants about “crimes being caused by asylum seekers/feral kids/single mothers”. Their drugs info was merely a link to “talk to frank” – which is a far more progressive “anti-drugs” site than anything the Government has ever previously produced….
OK they do sometimes also cause small time dealers to be busted, but a lot of the time its actually other dealers turning in rivals to try and take their turf, or because the dealers themselves have acted like fools and hotted themselves up by having customers coming in at all hours and waking up the neighbourhood with anti social behaviour.
I know its not fashionable to support the cops or other authorites – clearly no one likes them when they bust up parties – but in reality a lot of the time they end up picking up the pieces after our “alternative lifestyles” have fucked up because someone decides to “regulate” an “unregulated” society by violence…
in my area they’ve even turned up to free parties to stop fights/vigilante action etc (they weren’t called; they werealready there were just watching from a distance and saw trouble kick off), and during the week they would often end up dealing with the domestic arguments people sometimes have on comedowns which escalate into violence. (my friends had a scanner and (before airwave) we used to hear stuff like this all the time, often amongst people we knew! 🙁 ]
the alternative to cops would be every wannabe macho bloke playing vigilanté and eventually all of us living like Hunter S Thompson with a load of pistols and rifles to hand at all times.
Is that what you would prefer?
it may be a desert animal, but I doubt the confined space of a postbox without access to food/water would have done it any good… it could eat the paper and metabolise it but it would not get enough water from the average contents of a post box. The impression I got from the report is that it had been placed into an unaddressed envelope (otherwise the cops would already have visited whoevers address it was!) – which is clearly not a suitable package for live animals (you can actually send smal animals by courier but they need ventilated crates)
if the culprit is caught it won’t be because of the royal mail – more likely to be because he/she boasts in school or to their friends about it, and one of the kids talks to a teacher, parent or other person in authority.
If its a little kid who got the worng idea from the telly, then they can get their teachers/parents to deal with them and if they are over 10 and did it for fun or to harrass the hamsters owner they will be arrested but will just get an interview, a warning about cruelty to animals, and their school/social services notified, which seems proportionate IMO.
If they learn from this experience and do not commit any further acts of that nature, (which is far more likely to happen if you get them young…) that would be a far better use of police time and better for society than having to deal with them 5 years later when they have stabbed someone. Anyway it probably ranks higher or equal with stopping a rave on the priority lists (its often the wildlife crime units which deal with raves in rural areas because of allegations of environmental damage)
TBH they are only popular because people have an unfair prejudice against rats (and hamsters are often solitary – rats need 2 or more in a pack or they get bored)
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Forums › Life › Pets & Animals › UK : Postie saves hamster!
