As some of you may know, me and my wife got some pet rats over the last few months. I figured I hadn’t updated my blog in a while so why not post about my newest pets. The reason we got rats is first, my wife is allergic to most fuzzy pets. I know that she hates being allergic to fuzzy pets so we wanted to find some fuzzy animals that she wasn’t allergic to. Second was that while she is not allergic to the lizards, the lizards mainly keep to themselves and don’t seem to like to be bothered while basking or hunting for food (which apart from sleeping, is mostly what they do). After looking for a chinchilla to see if she was allergic to them, we found some rats at a petsmart by her parents house. We figured we would give rats the allergy test. After calling over the petsmart sales person, we picked this little cutie to see if she caused an allergic reaction:

Turns out that rats are hypoallergenic, perfect for people with allergies! She cuddled with and seemed to really like to be held by both my wife and myself. We took her home that day and called her Rosie. After doing a lot of research we learned that rats are very social animals and don’t do well by themselves. We felt bad for poor Rosie so we went to another petsmart who carried female rats and picked up this little cutie:

Because she was and still is white and black we called her Chessie. We got a larger cage than we had at the time and put them both in the cage. Luckily these two had no trouble getting along. We later learned that introducing rats properly and slowly is important. This was our bad, but we lucked out and Rosie and Chessie get along great. Here is a youtube video of the Rats playing on the table.

After living with two rats for a few months, we started talking to other rat owners and got to know even more about rats and their behaviors. We started making toys out of tissue boxes, toilet paper tubes, paper towel tubes and cardboard boxes that I got from work. Having rats is great, they are smart, they are fun to have.

Recently my wife has been contacted by a rat owner who claimed he did 3 months of research before getting his pet rats. I somehow think this is a lie because it seemed like he would freak out over the dumbest things. For instance he had jewelery on, and rats happen to like shiny things. He called at least once saying that they were biting and trying to take his jewelry. He would also very harshly verbally abuse his rats. If that didn’t bother me enough he also lets his cat free roam around the house. His rats are in his living room where the cat can watch, attack and do whatever it pleases while he is at work. All of these factors and more made for a poor living situation for his rats and one of the rats started attacking another out of fear. It got really bad and the rat that was being attacked had large scars on her ears. After talking with him for a while, we finally convinced him to let us rescue at least one of his rats. He unfortunately had 3 and refused to allow us to help rescue any rat except for the one who was so afraid it was attacking the other rat in it’s cage. He had named the attacking rat Balthazar, so when we rescued the poor girl we renamed her Zara:

We need to get some better pictures of her now since she is much less afraid of everything and is being slowly, over several weeks, introduced to our rats. It is taking a lot of patience and a lot of understanding with this little girl. When we got her she would bite us, and bite just about anything she could get her mouth on. While it is not weird for rats to nibble on things to try to see what they taste like, Zara’s bites were hard and she didn’t have the curiosity that our other rats do. After showing her who was alpha (me) and allowing her to get more acclimated to our presence and her environment, she has calmed down considerably. She hasn’t bitten anybody in a while and she seems really interested in playing with Rosie and Chessie. Introductions with Zara are going slowly. Rosie and Chessie seem to want to hang out and play with Zara, but Zara still seems to be a little afraid of them. Last night we put Zara in Rosie and Chessie’s cage while we put Rosie and Chessie in Zara’s cage. They all snuffled around each others cages, tasted everything, left their own scent. After a few hours we put them back into their own cages and they repeated the process. We will continue doing this for about a week before we allow them to sniff each other in person. After a week of allowing them to sniff and play with each other on a clean bed or the kitchen counter (and continuing the cage swap), if all goes well, we should be able to put them in the same cage safely.

What I am most excited about though is we are getting two little girls (quite little, they will be only 6 weeks old when we get them on 1/28/2010). We are not sure if we want to keep the names the rattery gave them or give them new ones (I’m all for giving them new ones) Here is Lybian, the Black Dumbo:

And here is Sinai, the Russian Blue Burmese:

They are both very sweet and very cute! Currently they are only about as long as my finger, including their tail! We will take more pictures of all of our rats as time permits.