Our neighbours hamster, Harry, is dead. They come back from their holidays next monday, The 4 years old daughter will be pretty sad. So, what other animals have died in your short term care? We are assuming natural causes here not neglect! Harry was well looked after.

friend of a friend was looking after someone's hamster for a few weeks whilst the owners were on holiday. Unfortunately, whilst out of his cage, the hamster escaped! This was in a Hong Kong flat, 16 floors up, so one would assume the hamster had nowhere to go…

Not so – he disappeared off the balcony..
..so they bought another hamster and offered their apologies.

However, the original hamster actually turned up a while later – on a balcony three floors below. They think he must have climbed down through some pipes.
So they didn't actually kill anything, but got their own hamster for their troubles

Bruce the hamster. Found feet up in his food bowl, stiff as a ping-pong bat.

Changed the water in a goldfish bowl of a poisson that I was house sitting as it was looking rather murky.. couple of days later it was floating on the surface, oh dear!

My wife has worked in schools that have had hamsters that are, apparently, decades old. The carers can't bring themsleves to tell the school that the class pet has croaked so take the corpse along to a pet shop to source a similar looking replacement.

This did backfire on one occasion when, having returned the school hamster after the summer holdiays little Harry was asked to write about what he did during the holidays;

"I am a murderer. I killed the shool hamster by kneeling on it but mummy bought a new one and says no-one will notice"

Ha Ha kids are great.

My wife tells me that when she was younger a neighbour asked if they could look after their goldfish while on holiday. Her younger sister decided that she wanted to stroke the goldfish so picked it up out of the bowl and because it was slippy and flapping around held onto it tightly. So tightly infact that she squashed it and its insides ended up on the outside! 😀

My son put some of his bubbles in our fish tank 'so they could blow bubbles'.

It turned out they couldn't and shortly after they couldn;t do much else.

I only found out at my dad's funeral that when I had a goldfish, it died the day after we bought it so he spent the night phoning round friends to see if one of them had a goldfish they could give him as a replacement.

I was looking after a neighbours rabbit when they went away for a long time (a month I think), one morning poor bunny was dead and there was a (live) mouse in the hutch. I couldn't explain it.

Heard this great story ("friend of friend", so make of it what you will):

Woman is looking after friend's dog while owner on holiday. Of course, the dog dies. The woman phones the vet, who is sympathetic: "Don't worry", he says "I know that dog – very elderly, not 100% well, no surprise".

"What do I do now?" asks the woman. "I can dispose of the dog if you bring it in" is the vet's response. "But I don't have a car" says the woman, "How do I get it to you?". "Just bring it in on the bus" advises the vet.

It's not a small dog, but the woman finds a cardboard box that will do the job. The puts the dog inside, tapes it up, then places the box in a large carrier bag.

She heads down to the bus stop, where she struggles to get her awkward cargo onto the next bus. A helpful bloke offers assistance: "Do you want a hand with that?" he asks, as he lifts the box onto an overhead luggage rack."Wow, it's heavy! What's in there?" The woman can't tell the truth: "A stereo", she says, thinking about what originally came in the box.

The woman reaches her stop, which happens to be the same destination as the helpful stranger. "Let me get that for you" he says, lifting the heavy box down from where he had placed it. The two passengers get off the bus, whereupon the bloke sticks the box under his arm and runs for it, no doubt excited to have obtained a stereo through his deceitful act of generosity.

I wonder if he was disappointed…

I only found out at my dad's funeral that when I had a goldfish, it died the day after we bought it so he spent the night phoning round friends to see if one of them had a goldfish they could give him as a replacement.

Now that's a top dad.

CliveA – thats a cracking story!

Only had a friends pet rat die with us, that was traumatic enough considering they'd left it with us because they didn't trust anyone else with their beloved pet 😳 – wouldn't mind but it appeared perfectly healthy the day before and we hadn't even opened the cage!