FRANCE is failing in its duty to protect the Great Hamster of Alsace,
"Aye, children! The Great Hamster of Alsace! If you don't clean your room he'll come and gobble you up!"
a cute fur-ball facing extinction with fewer than 200 remaining, the advocate-general of Europe's top court said on yesterday.
Usually the way to get more hamsters is to leave a boy hamster and a girl hamster together for 24 hours, then remove the remains of the boy.
"If agro-environmental measures were put in place, in 2008, to protect the Great Hamster, they are incomplete at this stage," Juliane Kokott, a top legal expert at the European Court of Justice, wrote in an opinion.
"All you have to do is change the way you farm! What could be simpler?"
The opinion of the advocate-general is not binding, but in most cases the judges in Luxembourg take the same line -- in which case France could land a multi-million-euro fine.
Which works out to how much per surviving hamster? And helps the hamsters precisely how?
Well, someone has to represent the hamsters to the court! You think that's cheap? Riddle me that one!
The European Commission brought the case, arguing that France has not applied European Union law covering protected species.
I'm guessing the lemming is also a protected species?
The hamster, Cricetus cricetus, an animal that hibernates for six months and spends the vast majority of its life alone,
Which is why there's only 200 of them...
has been protected legally since 1993 but is now only found in fields around the eastern French city of Strasbourg.
All hamsters spend all the time they're not on exercise wheels or eating asleep.
| You forgot fighting. Two hamsters in one cage equals lots of time spent trying to disembowel one another while screeching much more loudly than their size would suggest. |
Commission figures show its numbers fell from 1,167 in 2001 to as few as 161 in 2007.
Sounds like too much time on the exercise wheel and not enough time alone with female beating up the male...
The creature, which can grow to 10 inches (25 centimetres) long, has a brown and white face, a black belly and white paws.
If you replaced them with guinea swine would anybody notice the difference? Maybe not even a Great Hamster of Alsace?
| Cavies are sweet, loving, placid creatures, who haven't figured out the screeching-while-disembowling game that hamsters so enjoy. |
In old times, the paws were much prized by farmers who made them into trinkets.
My sainted father used to lug around a rabbit's foot. But I guess it coulda been a Great Hamster Paw.
The preferred grazing of the Great Hamster of Alsace -- forage crops such as alfalfa -- have largely been replaced by the more profitable maize, which it cannot abide.
"Yuck. Ptui. Corn. I guess I'll just lay down and go extinct."
France has previously given subsidies to farmers to grow alfalfa or wheat, but the commission wants it to do more.
It's really great living in an age when this is a major problem. When it comes down to choices among the Black Death, cholera, smallpox, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler, and the Great Hamster of Alsace, I'll go with the Great Hamster. 
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