When I was a kid I had a bunch of hamsters. I kept em in one of those plastic Habitrail cages with the attachable tubes and penthouse lofts. The first one lived over a year, then it got real sick. The pet store guy told me cod liver oil was great for hamsters, so I sat there for days with this poor shivering little animal and a dropper, practically bathing it in cod liver oil...poor thing. I probably drowned it. Then I got another hamster and it lasted only a couple months, then got sick like the first one and died. But I wouldn't give up and got like 4 more of the things in direct succession, each one dying faster than the last....at this point they were only lasting a couple weeks. We had a theory that the cage was infected with some kind of deadly hamster virus and my dad took it apart, bleached and boiled the parts...all to no avail and the hamsters kept dying. Eventually one of my grade school teachers gave me a hamster her kid could no longer take care of, and she gave me the cage with it. This one lived for a few months and seemed pretty healthy...then I got the bright idea of buying an attachment tube and hooking the two cages together to make a giant hamster complex, of course after boiling all the parts of the old cage again. Within a week of hooking the two cages together, the hamster got fatally ill and kicked the bucket. After that, I gave up. And it wasn't until decades later that my little sister confessed to taking the hamsters out while I wasn't home, brushing their teeth and giving them elaborate shampoo baths in the bathroom sink.