Last night, my son ran up from the basement to tell me that our hamster, Chocolate, was dead. I ran down and found her in her cage laying on the floor limp and cold. Something piqued my attention, something I had read before but hadn’t spent a whole lot of time on. Something about hamsters and hibernation.

iPhone on my hip, I whipped it out, did a quick Google search for +hamster +hibernation and found out the following.

Syrian hamsters have only been domesticated as pets for the past 60 years, and there hasn’t been enough selective evolutionary time to harden them to strong fluctuations in weather and temperature. With the coming of cold weather here in Ottawa, Canada and this year quite quickly, our drafty house turned overnight from a sort of cozy place to a cold and drafty, quite inimical to hamster well-being. At some point over the previous night or day, our hamster had slipped into hibernation.

Holding her in my hands to warm her up, I felt her move, twitch really, occasionally, and breath, maybe once every ten seconds. Attempts to rouse her failed and she, sadly, inevitably, stopped breathing and grew stiff and even colder in my hands.

My son and I will miss this animal. She had a personality and temper well beyond what you’d expect from a creature her size. Stories of her repeated escapes from her cage and inevitable voluntary returns shortly thereafter are legendary amongst our family and friends. She won’t be coming back from this escape, but the whole event despite its domestic-scale tragedy pointed something out to me that was quite interesting. I was able to look something up immediately, go through a variety of sources to pick the ones that seemed most qualified and get real information that was useful and usable right there and then. No running to a computer, or running home to a computer if we had been away from our family’s WiFi. Here is something that the iPhone really has done to change my life. If I want to know, or need to know, I can look it up quickly, conveniently, anywhere I am near cell phone coverage.

Now, all those fairly pointless conversations where people ask, “I wonder if” and then take thirty minutes to roll over all the possibilities and options without actually determining anything at all will be a thing of the past. At least once the stigma attached to whipping out your iPhone (or other device, admittedly) and looking it up fades away.

Anyhow, no big social conclusion here. I just miss my hamster and feel comforted by the fact that having my iPhone on me meant she got the care she needed as quickly as she could. If nothing else, Apple’s iPhone might help reduce the accidental mortality of small domestic pets. And for one forty-something and one eight-year-old, that makes the whole device a bit more valuable somehow.