HAMLET'S DEATH GETS OWN WEBPAGE

Hamlet, a Dominant Spot Chinese hamster, was just like part of the family for his owners Terry and Julie Davies of Traubert’s Heath.

So when Hamlet died from a drugs overdose last month at the age of one and a quarter, Julie decided to create a web page to tell his story and help others with drug addicted rodents.

She said: “We saw the first signs of his addiction a day or two after we’d bought him. We noticed that he'd eat only ice cream and would frequently go into cold sweats and start squeaking piteously.

“Very concerned, we returned to Polly’s Pets where we’d got him.

"Imagine the shock when we learned that the precious new addition to our family was, in fact, a heroin addict!

“Apparently it’s not unusual for this particular breed to become dependent upon opiates, though we didn't know that at the time.

“We took him to a vet who put him onto a controlled course of methadone. This helped a bit, but he was still very temperamental and would spend long periods during which he would withdraw into his nestbox and refuse to come out.”

With Hamlet’s addiction taking hold, life for the Davies’ got steadily worse. As his demands became greater, Terry, a scaffolder’s mate, would have to make ever more regular trips to London to score the drugs his pet craved.

“It was a difficult time for us,” recalled Terry, “I had to take more and more days off work and was spending more and more of my wages on this filthy stuff.

“We used to mix it with warm milk and feed it to him with an eye dropper.”

Eventually things became so bad that Julie was having to hand-turn his wheel as Hamlet was too weak to do it himself.

She said: “It is a terrible thing to see a beloved pet go through the agonies of drug addiction. Hamlet's life was a living hell, he just a shell of a hamster.

“My hope now is that our website will be of comfort to other owners who, like us, find themselves in this heartbreaking situation.

"That way, our pet's death will not have been in vain."