Jake has a hamster named Stuart.  Stuart lives in a cage in Jake's room.

We have a dog and a cat in our house.  At night, the dog sleeps in Davey's room, and the cat has free roam of the house.  She's quite the assasin, is our cat.  She's got to Bert the mouse and Punkin the hamster already, not to mention the moles that she killed when she got left out one night.

This morning, as I'm cleaning the living room, I notice the dog scratching and digging at the corner of the couch.  I looked behind there and didn't see anything, so I carried on with my cleaning.

Then he started sniffing and barking and digging and trying to squeeze himself between the wall and the back of the couch.  I figured he's got a toy stuck back there, so I moved the couch a little to try and see what it was.

There was Stuart's nose, poking out from under the couch.

I put the dog in his crate, and shoved the cat in my bedroom, shutting the door behind me.  I moved the couch a bit further (something that I'm not supposed to do, recovering from surgery and all) and managed to get down low enough to grab up Stuart and put him in a tupperware container for transportation to his cage.

Jake had left the cage door open about half an inch, and Stuart being the escape artist that he is had got out.  How in the hell he made it to the living room without being pounced on by the cat I'll never know.  it's a good 12' walk out Jake's room, down the hallway and to the living room couch...that's a huge distance for a little hamster to cover.

Stuart is, at the moment, probably one of the luckiest hamsters on the planet.  He ran a gauntlet of dangers to not only get to the couch last night, but also to avoid being caught by both dog and cat this morning.

I wonder if he knows how lucky he is.  He doesn't look like it's bothered him at all...he's sitting in his food dish gnawing on a sunflower seed.

I think Jake will be a bit more careful about shutting the cage door in future...