They Thought They Knew Their Hamsters. Then They Put Up Spy Cameras

This would be a brilliant creative writing prompt.

Or: is there a trend of human other-ization?

In high school, I had a hamster who would spend all night trying to escape from his cage. At first, he was in a fancy plastic cage with tubes and stuff for him to run around in, but he figured out he could pop the top off of it, and one night my mother found him wandering around the hallway. We moved him into a glass cage with a screen stop, but he would climb on top of his wheel and jump into the screen until he fully dislodged it, so I ended up stacking a few textbooks over part of it to make it too heavy for him to move. He still spent every night for the rest of his life climbing up and jumping into the screen though.

Nowadays, my fiancee and I have two cats, and the antics they get into provides endless entertainment. One of them likes to "play" by laying down on surfaces and vigorously rubbing her chin against them, and the other has a weird obsession with trying to steal bread from us when we're eating (but he never tries to take any other human food). While not "reality TV", the silly and absurd behaviors pets sometimes have is part of the appeal of them, and I don't think it's a bad thing if people find it amusing to theorize what exactly is going on in their strange little minds.

Yeah. A related/sub-trend is pet owners buying those buttons for pets to press which play sounds, allowing them to "speak" by proxy. Some people who buy them act like their cat pushing "food" "food" "mad" "walk" "happy" is commuicating something absurdly complex, e.g. an appeal for more time walking outside with a harness to get relief from their indigestion.