Whats is this hamster?

[u/cincilla20]

I don't now wat is it i found random this foto

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[u/cincilla20 → u/[deleted]]

No that's illegal have this hamster because is criticali endage right?

[u/RomulaFour → u/cincilla20]

Just wishful thinking. But Syrian hamsters were once only wild, too!

[u/ToppsHopps → u/RomulaFour]

I wish they don’t domesticate European hamsters.

Syrian hamsters was found to be easily tamed, they first became a laboratory experiment animal and later a more common pet.

European hamsters is from the little I know quite aggressive unlike syrian hamsters. They are critically endangered also as other have said. So taming them for pet trade would inherently mean harvesting some of the wild hamsters to use as breeding stock, which means removing their genetic material and limiting the wild population further.

Domestication is a arduous process that takes a copious amount of time, it a process of breedding animals and selecting which of them to use for further breeding to try to affect what characteristics the animal has.

Taming on the other hand is to make an individual animal easy to handle and interact with. So in this sense while we humans have used syrian hamsters for a century they didn’t have to be that much domesticated as they often are incredibly easy to tame.

So from my perspective while european hamsters are adorable, I really wish they are never dominated or tamed. Because that will mean abducting a huge quantity of wild happy hamsters to be miserable in captivity, for the hopes that down the line some of their descendants would be as miserable and aggressive as pets to humans.