What would cause an untrapped animal to chew off all 4 of its feet? Even if it was starving, would it start to eat itself? :shrug:
Looks to me as if someone else cut of the feet, not the hamster itself. People are very cruel to animals as wll as other people.
Self-mutilation is occasionally encountered in mammals, including humans. Perfectly healthy whales sometimes beach themselves... Assuming human cruelty may be a statistically safe bet, but excluding self-mutilation is a statistically errant one.
People get phantom pains; no reason it can't happen to other species. For that matter, the pain may be real; perhaps he walked through some nasty chemicals, or was bitten by four poisonous insects. Haven't you ever had such a painful and intractable headache that you at least briefly considered simply cutting the damn thing off? One would assume that evolution would rather easily program against that particular response to starvation. If a thunderstorm suddenly hits and drops a pomegranate in front of you before you finally lose consciousness, you'd really want to be able to walk over and eat it.
Most likely, yes. Various animals can exhibit obsessive compulsive disorder-like symptoms (eg. hair pulling and obsessive cleaning to the point of severe skin abrasion). Indeed, there are rodent models of OCD, both natural and genetically engineered, that are used for OCD research and pharmaceutical development. Various infections can produce aberrant behaviour. The classic example is rabies which, in humans, can produce cerebral dysfunction, anxiety, confusion, agitation, abnormal behaviour, paranoia, terror, hallucinations, progressing to delirium. Other animals (dogs, raccoons etc) also exhibit the same erratic behaviour. Another strange example of an infection producing a very specific behaviour is the parasitic infection of insects by certain species of nematode worms. The water-borne nematode infects an insect, grows to maturity then takes control of the insect’s CNS forcing it to seek water and drown itself, thus returning the nematomorph to water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nematomorpha http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0901_050901_wormparasite.html Syphilis in humans produces erratic behaviour if it reaches the tertiary stage. At this stage the infection has spread to the brain and causes widespread brain degeneration resulting in altered behaviour such as aggression towards others and/or self-harm. I don't know if the Treponema bacterium responsible for Syphilis also infects other animals. But it’s a good example of how a bacterial infection can influence CNS function and, hence, produce strange behaviour.
Probably or perhaps a lot of nervous energy. My brother has ADHD and he chews on his own fingers, when he was younger he even got down to the bone. It was so gross. If my parents hadn't been around to make him stop, he probably would have chewed his perfectly healthy finger off. For no other reason than that it's a nervous tick that he has, most likely caused by his neurological disorder.
What did the doctors do to stop this? Some sort of medication regimen? Is he better, and if so, how does the ADHD manifest itself now? Please don't answer anything you feel to be too personal - just tell me to f*** off... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
No, he's been doing it since he was in 4th grade or so. Like most bad habits nothing you try to break them really works. If my mother caught him biting she'd tell him to stop, but she couldn't watch him all day. So he has gross scabs on his fingers, one day he noticed that his knuckle was hurting, it was because he had bitten the skin clean off. It healed pretty fast though.
Doctor didn't do anything he just told my parents what was most likely causing the strange behavior, he said he had never seen a case as bad as my brother's. My brother takes medication for school and when he's on it he doesn't bite his fingers, but he doesn't take it everyday, nor does it last all day. So whenever it wears off or he decides not to take it then he still chews on his fingers. It's a more destructive habit than the ones he had when he was little, but this one is far less annoying... for me anyway Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!.
Yes. It's common enough in highly intelligent species in captivity. We used to breed several species of parrots and stopped when we saw that most of the people who wanted one shouldn't have one. They don't understand that this cute little googly baby they're getting will be an adolescent in five years, with the intelligence, curiosity and opposable thumbs of a three-year-old child, might outlive them without ever growing up and going off to college, and can chew the legs off of their piano. And they don't understand that most species are highly social and can't stand being left alone. And we're not even talking about their tenth birthday when they become sexually mature adults. Unfortunately there are quite a few obviously insane parrots in shelters and rescue homes. One of the most common behaviors is to pluck out ALL of their feathers. They often do this when they're bonded to just one person in their household and he dies. That's not even insanity, just a behavior problem. You can rescue that bird and give him a loving home and he'll be happy enough, you just have to avoid letting him get too hot or too cold because he's got no insulation. No, that was explained in one of the Jim Henson series. They have a doggie-old wives' tale that they all believe in: "Before you sleep, turn twice around, Or else you'll wake up in the pound."
