Our Rat Family

Rat Sprites the Dust

Our most friendly pet rat, Sprite, has died. We don't know how old she was as she was a rescue rat, but she developed a large tumour and went rapidly downhill over Christmas. She was given a lethal injection yesterday, and we buried her today. The picture here was taken mid-December.

Hungry, Biting Beasties

Our new rats have revealed extremely varied personalities. Teggs, the clearly dominant rat, will stash food away and attack any rat who comes close to it; as a result she is much heavier than the others. Two of the pictures below show what damage she can do when she gets mad. She doesn't bite humans; that is Twitch's job, an un-handlable rat. Jasper is at the bottom of the rat-pack, extremely friendly (with other rats and humans) but a bit dim; she likes to cosy up to Teggs, who then attacks her. Sprite is the most interactive, and shows the most intelligence and desire to explore.

Into the Peanut Butter Jar

Here's Teggs (the fat piggie rat of our four new adoptees) getting stuck into a peanut butter jar.

Our Adopted Family

To give Monty some company, we have now adopted a family of four sister rats from a rescue shelter in Surrey. They are:-

• Jasper with thick black stripe, shy but happy to nestle on a shoulder.
• Teggs with broken black stripe, very nervous and doesn't like being picked up.
• Sprite with broken brown stripe, always the first to the door and happy to be held.
• Twitchy with wide brown stripe, very nervous indeed and has been biting.

Having read that biting rats can be cured by offering them food on your finger, we tried it with Twitchy. Amazingly, it worked! She happily nibbled scraps of mashed potato from a finger without a hint of biting. Teggs on the other hand was much too vigorous, not actually biting but getting quite a lot of finger in her mouth.

Sudden Death

Billy, the calmer and more sociable of our two rats, died suddenly this evening. Daniel brought her in from the lounge, saying that she had a bit of a nose bleed. Julii took her and just held her; a few seconds later, blood started pouring out. Julii says that she could feel Billy's pulse, and it was rapidly getting weaker and weaker. Isabel was right there, and getting hysterical because we could all see that something was really wrong. Billy was dead within a couple of minutes of Dan finding her.

We've no idea what happened. There are a couple of small spots of blood in the lounge, but no evidence of injury of any kind on Billy. She literally seemed to just spontaneously haemorhage. She had been getting slower of late, but was running around shortly before we found her like this.

Being Gentle with Monty

Isabel is really gentle with the rats, and here she is carefully holding Monty. Monty does like to run away, so you need to hold her firmly so she doesn't scamper away at the first opportunity.

Monty and Billy do like to nestle up with Julii, though; maybe they feel safe there!

Say Hello!

They're ever so inquisitive, but still very nervous, but we have absolutely no problem handling them. They are already quite at home running on us and inside our jumpers, and the children are gentle too.