Hamster Juggling Lesson #1: Hold Your Hamsters

You will not be able to juggle your hamsters properly until you have a "feel" for their weight, activity level, biting tendency, etc.
How to hold a juggling hamster:

Good:


















Bad:


















This concludes today's lesson.

What Is Hamster Juggling? (pt. 2)

My editor seems to have rather butchered my previous entry with unnecessary annotations. She has been fired.
Now, to continue.

While various rodents, insectivores and even small marsupials went in and out of fashion among jugglers over the years, for most of the latter half of the 20th century, hamsters were easily the most popular juggling animal in most countries.
Animal juggling itself, however, was still relatively rare. The U.S. and U.K. in particular, with their increasingly strict animal-welfare laws, were slow to accept that juggling hamsters and other mammals was a respectable business and pastime when performed correctly. It ranged from occupying a legal "gray area" to being banned outright, and regular raids were being made on American juggling tents up until the mid-80's, when the Hamster Juggler's League of America (HJLA) was formed and animal juggling was officially legalized.

Unfortunately, unscrupulous jugglers took advantage of the more lenient attitudes towards hamster juggling in other countries, practicing highly hazardous juggling routines and keeping their stock in substandard living conditions. These "rogue" jugglers were the minority, but naturally received the most publicity, further driving down the reputation of animal jugglers everywhere even as laws were being revised to accommodate them across the globe.
Despite the best efforts, hamster juggling slowly declined in popularity from the mid-'80s onward, and jugglers began selling their stock into the pet trade and packing up their tents for more profitable ventures. This may explain the explosion in the popularity of hamsters as pets for children, despite their general lack of knowledge about the ideal care and housing of the animals.
The end of public hamster juggling seemed near.

Near the close of the '90s, however, a slow shift became apparent. Consumers were again seeking out novelty and adventure; they craved a return to more organic, nature-based forms of entertainment. Hamster juggling, which had an unmistakable element of the exotic and at its most basic required only three live hamsters and a little juggling experience, would soon prove to hit the spot perfectly. By 2006, there were even a few brands of hamster-juggling "kits" for home use, aimed at teaching owners of multiple hamsters the basics of amateur hamster juggling.

I began my own juggling adventure in earnest in the early 2000's, when the hamster juggler revolution was just starting to pick up steam. At the time I, like most of the newer hamster jugglers, was largely ignorant of its troubled past, and unaware of its present complexity. I had been juggling my own pet hamsters for some time as a means of entertainment for friends and family, but none of that had prepared me for the legal and technical challenges I would face when I took my act public.
Juggling hamsters, as I would soon learn, is only a fraction of what's involved in becoming a full-time, professional Hamster Juggler.