Mollie, a 10-month-old pet hamster in the Netherlands, probably runs a lot more than you. 

We know this because, a few weeks ago, a Dutch physicist named Thijs — who owns Mollie — rigged up the rescued hamster’s running wheel to Strava, a popular app that runners use to log their miles. Thijs found that Mollie typically runs around six miles every night.

“He’s beating me,” Thijs told the CBC. “Almost 70 kilometres a week, which I think many people doing marathon training would be happy to hit.”

The internet loves a quirky animal story, and this one has gotten plenty of attention on Reddit and X. Mollie even got a recent profile in Runner’s World, and he now has over 9,000 followers on Strava. Mollie’s Strava updates are headlined with cute puns like “No Rest for the Whiskered,” and “The Fast and the Furriest.”

I get why so many people are cheering on Mollie and his commitment to going the distance: Hamsters are adorable, and the idea of one logging miles on Strava is extra charming. But the light-hearted virality of the story masks a fundamental problem with owning small pets like hamsters. Mollie evolved to run in an open and diverse ecosystem, but he lives in a small cage and doesn’t have much to do besides circle endlessly in a simple wheel.

Big problems with small pets

Most pet hamsters are Syrian hamsters, native to that country’s Aleppinian plateau — steppe terrain in the northern part of the country. In the wild, they regularly traverse the landscape to forage for food, consuming a wide sampling of seeds, fruits, insects, and green vegetation. They store their haul in their cheeks while journeying back to their two-foot deep burrows. 

But, as pets, they’re largely fed a monotonous diet of grain pellets and are confined to tiny cages where they can’t engage in their natural behaviors, like building proper burrows, traveling for food, and exploring their turf. Confining a dog or cat in a kennel for all or most of their lives would no doubt be a severe form of cruelty, yet we’ve normalized doing so for small animals whom we’re less likely to view as capable of suffering, even though there’s no scientific basis for that assumption.

And while you might think it could be nice for an animal to not have to work for their food, research has found that many species don’t like to freeload (cats might be one exception). On top of all of that, according to some research, these smaller pets are less likely to receive veterinary care to address their ailments and injuries than cats and dogs. 

Their tedious and confined existence can contribute to “stereotypic” behavior: repetitive motions, like gnawing on cage bars, that are indicators of stress. Some animal welfare researchers have proposed that wheel use could also be a sign of stress — or that it could indicate an urge to run or escape. One other study suggested it might help reduce other stereotypic behaviors. 

“I think that the welfare of these animals is worse than anybody else’s,” Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and author of several books on the ethics of pet keeping, told Vox for a previous story. She was talking about small pets in general — not just hamsters, but also species like snakes, fish, and birds, most of whom are still much more wild than our domesticated cats and dogs (who also might not be as happy as we think). 

Thijs, for his part, is sympathetic to these concerns, which he told me over email were fair. “I hope the attention that Mollie got will not result in people impulsively buying hamsters (and then forgetting about them after it turns out their hamsters just sleep 80% of the time),” he said.

He adopted Mollie from someone who could no longer take care of him and who kept him in an even smaller enclosure. “[Mollie] showed some behaviour that really concerned us back then (climbing, biting the fence, etc),” Thijs said over email. So, within the first week, he upgraded Mollie to a larger cage and a larger wheel and got him some toys, which seemed to improve his mood.

“I think some behavioural aspects (more running, digging tunnels in the bedding, ‘foraging’ if we hide food in the bedding) make his behaviour closer to natural, but it’s, of course, never like in the wild,” he said. Thijs also wonders whether his data-gathering might provide insight into how certain actions — like when he cleans Mollie’s bedding or when he stays up late watching Netflix — affects Mollie’s running behavior. 

“People often talk about pets being ‘happy,’ but, especially with small animals, that’s difficult to assess objectively,” he told me. “I’m curious whether long-term activity data might give us useful clues about changes in his behaviour or wellbeing!”

Inside a “hamster mill”

While Thijs adopted Mollie, there’s also the question about where many of these pets come from. A 2024 undercover investigation by the nonprofit Last Chance for Animals into a massive US “hamster mill” documented thousands of rodents being bred and raised in overcrowded, small, barren cages. Some of the animals were dehydrated, diseased, and suffered from wounds. Individual animals weren’t provided with veterinary care, and breeding hamsters whose production dropped — along with litter runts — were gassed to death.  

Investigations into other rodent mills have found similar problems. Such investigations, combined with veterinarians’ concerns with keeping small animals as pets, has driven some cities — including Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC — to prohibit pet stores from selling rodents and other small pets.  

I don’t mean to single out Thijs for his interesting experiment, especially considering he adopted Mollie and immediately improved his life. But animal ethicists like Pierce argue that however much effort one puts into giving these small pets a better life, it likely doesn’t ever add up to a good life, considering the constraints of cage confinement and other common care issues. 

To Pierce and some of her colleagues, the sizable gap between what small pets need and what they often get reveals a largely hidden but serious crisis of animal neglect and suffering. And that’s rarely mentioned, if at all, in viral social media posts or news articles about these critters. 

If we take a moment to pause and see Mollie’s life for what it is — and examine the industry that breeds these small animals for profit — all those miles he’s logging on Strava seem more like daily posts saying that he’s striving for a far different life with no way to get there. 

“This entire ‘track his runs on Strava’ thing started off more as a geeky side-project, I never expected it to get anywhere near this much attention,” Thijs told me. “But it’d be nice if you can use it as a way to educate people (including me!) about the ethical considerations!”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

I’ve seen a strange problem in my inbox that I haven’t been able to put into words. A saga involving a botched app release helped me figure it out.

Did Claude copy an app idea wholesale?

Earlier this year, Terry Godier won a lot of fans among techies for suggesting a new approach to RSS readers, which became his Mac and iOS app Current. He’s continued to build ideas like that, along with an impressive blog, when he ran into a bit of a snag with his latest app, an astronomy app named Dark Hours.

The app was blocked from the App Store after a review, with Apple citing the app’s astrology content, a category it has long banned. Astronomy isn’t astrology, you’re thinking, right? That’s what Daring Fireball’s John Gruber also thought when he wrote a full-throated defense of the app, based in part on a behind-the-scenes conversation with Godier. Turns out, it started as an astrology app, only to become an astronomy app. (Weird leap, right?) That undermined the entire point of Gruber’s post, and led to a rare retraction from Gruber.

If that was all, that’d be one thing. But the app, built with the help of Claude, appeared to be a close copy of another open-source app built with Claude. The creator of the existing project called Godier out, and shit really hit the fan at that point. Godier responded by stopping distribution of his app and encouraging people to use the existing open-source Dark Hours.

Some are skeptical of Godier’s explanation of what happened, given that he appears to have misled Gruber. Godier denies even being aware of the other app, but he used the same name, and the developer shared specific examples of ideas copied from the existing tool. The optics ain’t great.

I’m not going to credit malice, as I’m not close enough to say whether he did anything wrong. But it does dovetail into the problem that I’ve been seeing in my inbox.

When you can’t trust the weekend tinkerer

Technology has long been a space of hustlers, of people who want to impress. By that standard, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are two of the greatest hustlers that ever lived. But my heart has always been with the people just getting started and trying the new thing, as that’s always the mode I’ve seen myself in.

Which is why I’ve been at least mildly optimistic about vibe coding helping make room for new types of creatives. I’ve never liked the “learn to code” gatekeepery stuff and I certainly don’t want to gatekeep people who just want to see an idea through. But there’s clearly a problem when people building new things, going through the steps of launching it and sharing it with the world, can’t even write the email announcing the thing themselves.

I’ve been clear in my views of AI, the bionic arms of it all. I don’t think it’s necessarily dangerous if you’re being honest about what you’re doing and why. But if you’re building a thing, there has to be a point when the tool stops and you begin. I don’t mean that you even have to code the damn thing if you don’t know how; I reject gatekeeping every day of the week and refuse to take a knee-jerk approach to artificial intelligence. (If gatekeeping is bad in one situation, it is bad in every situation.) But I do think it needs to reflect you, your passions, and your creativity.

If the Dark Hours situation is true, and Claude did end up copying an existing open-source project and turning it into an app, the whole idea of whether you created it becomes an open question. But even if it isn’t, an infusion of your own interests and personality go a long way to make that story yours.

That spirit of creation, which got me so excited about the internet when I first got online, is real. Back in 2009, I helped a random site that I thought was interesting but was poorly coded with a redesign, just because I thought it would help make it successful, and because I thought it could bring me traffic. (It did, on both counts. I didn’t ask to be paid for it, I just liked scratching someone else’s back.)

I’m seeing email after email suggesting these users built a thing they’re truly passionate about. But if we can’t trust that this passion is real, legit, and from the heart, we’re in trouble.

Take a step back. Is this thing you built a reflection of you?

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

Here is another puzzle posted on Facebook by Konstantin Knop.

Puzzle. One day, three inhabitants of the Island of Knights and Liars invited a foreign correspondent to visit so that they could tell him about their island. Knights always tell the truth, while liars always lie.

• The first inhabitant said, “The island has at most AT inhabitants. All the islanders are liars.”
• The second added, “The island has at most BAT inhabitants. Not all the islanders are liars.”
• The third disagreed, “The island has exactly CAT inhabitants. At least two islanders are knights.”

Unfortunately for the correspondent—and for us—he did not know the local number words very well. He knew only that AT, BAT, and CAT stood for three consecutive positive integers in increasing order.

How many knights and how many liars live on the island?

In the mid-'90s, the web was exploding, but finding anything of actual value on it felt like an elaborate negotiation with whatever proto-search engine happened to be standing closest to the door. Unlike now, when Google is widely seen as both portal and gatekeeper, sites like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves promised to tame the chaos, each with its own suite of quirks, charms, and flaws.

The real story of pre-Google search is not that early engines were inferior. It's that they reflected a different Internet entirely, one where directories mattered, crawling was still an art, ranking was fragile, and the idea of “search” had not yet hardened into a single dominant interface.

A different kind of web

The first thing to remember about the pre-Google Internet is that there was no built-in assumption that you could search for everything. Many users found pages through Yahoo-style directories, bookmarks, newsgroups, email signatures, and links from site to site because the web was still small enough that human organization could compete with machine indexing. It was an era of Wild West-style discoverability. Search engines existed, but they were only one part of a larger ecosystem that blended curation and accident.

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