Unsolicited Advice

I have found out why the MSPCA was told these guys were bitey. It's mostly Yogi, and he's not biting. He's investigating . Rats use their mouths when they play, just like puppies. When they bite out of fear or anger, it's a very quick strike, very bloody, and you don't get your finger back in a hurry. When they bite during play, they don't chomp very hard -- just hard enough that the other rat feels it and knows he's gettin' got.  Yogi has been systematically testing my hand to see how hard he can toof me while he plays. I offer him my hand, he looks at me a second, then he slowly and deliberately puts his teeth on my knuckle and bites down a little bit. I go 'eep!' and jerk my hand away, then slowly give it back. And the next time he tries it, he's a little bit more gentle.  This is totally normal for a rat, but doesn't usually go over well with little kids. They feel teeth and think they've been bitten for real, then start shrieking...

Yogi, left, is a black self dumbo, and Koda, right, is a black Berkshire top-ear. They're about seven months old. These two came already named from the MSPCA. Usually rats in a group together get theme names, because humans like patterns; Google says these two are named after some beagles on Instagram . That's boring, so I combed through the WWWJDIC for some ateji/jinmeiyou kanji that I liked. I've decided the names are actually spelled 容疑 (yōgi, "looks suspicious") and 幸多 (kōda, "many blessings").  I have matched the correct name to the correct rat, trust me. Yogi is the fourth dumbo rat I've had who believes he is in charge of the entire universe. He is also the fourth dumbo rat I've had, period. I am starting to think it's genetic. Something about the shape of that flat little skull just doesn't leave any room for humility. The volunteer at Nevins said they were surrendered because they were "nippy", but further investigatio...

I am saddened to report that Casper left us to rejoin his brother late on Wednesday night. It was very quick. One moment he was fine; the next, there was a sudden flurry of noise from his cage, as his legs failed him and he fell off a shelf. I sleep through normal rat sounds, but this was unusual. I bolted awake and went to see what was wrong. Cas was never a lap rat. I wasn't even allowed to pet him, when he first came home. Mickie wanted to live in the armpit of my shirt forever, but Casper permitted me only to politely boople his snoot through the cage bars. Actually picking him up was reserved only for dire emergencies, like the fire alarm. This was a touch awkward when it came to play time, since I needed a way to get them from the cage onto the bed where their rat-safe blanket and boxes were set out. But if he didn't want to be picked up, he didn't want to be picked up, and I wasn't going to argue with him too much. Instead I just offered them use of the box they ...

  One tequila, two tequila.... Man, what a party. The Fate of a Squash, starring Cheddar.

Did you think I would let an eating holiday pass without decorating the cage? Hahahaha, no. Behold, the results of a trip to the Dollar Tree and way too much unmonitored daydreaming time at work. A pair of purple skeleton hand shot glasses (plastic!) full of hors d'oevres for Les Fromages. We've recently discovered Cheddar doesn't care too much about sweets, so I gave the candy corn a miss (also wouldn't have given them enough to fill the shot glass -- there are limits, much as they hate that thought), so instead they got banana chips and toasted pumpkin seeds. Where did I get teeny pumpkin seeds, you ask? Just wait. A view from the floor, showing a black photo box for nesting, a Halloween bowl of off-brand cereal for snacking, and a PIDER BASKIT for lurking! The plastic spider baskets are the perfect shape, basically the base of the perennial-favorite sputnik, but need to be covered with fabric so the rats don't get their wee toeses caught. Les Fromages' cage f...

For those who may have missed it over on Instagram, I took in two younger rattos in August. A nice young lady on one of my message boards had lost her housing and had to re-home her critters. Cheddar and Cheese came all the way up from New Jersey to meet me in Providence, and take an interminable train ride back up to Boston, where they were installed in the top floor of Schloß Ratter. Les Fromages seemed not terrible fussed by the move, and downright excited by all the rain that weekend, and mostly ignore Casper's attempts to annoy the neighbors from below. (Mickie does not care. Mickie cares about very little, other than hammocks, snacks, and getting proper scritches right behind the ears. Mickie is very happy with his life, and we would all do well to learn from this.) A few weeks ago, Les Fromages started making snoof  noises. This, like most other rat malfunctions, is pretty easy to diagnose. Itchy rat? Probably mites! Bathe rat, clean cage, apply kitten Revolution. Somebody g...

Last week, I lost the old man rat. Tseng told me he was done on Thursday morning, and I took him in that afternoon. My beautiful monster is gone. Tseng was a lucky rat. He was originally destined to be snake food, but the snake got picky. Snake Mama had nowhere to keep live rats, so she offered him and his female cagemate around on Facebook. I got on a commuter train in the middle of a pandemic, rode all the way up to Lowell to meet some random lady for two minutes, and got right back on the same train to come home, two rats richer. My then-roommate took the girl, and I got the boy.  I had two other older rescues that I'd re-named Rude and Reno, so the wiggly little Siamese was christened Tseng. Snake Mama told me he was six months old, which was patently impossible; he might  have been four months old, but unless he was a dwarf variety, he was far too small for six. I was vindicated later when he grew into an absolute behemoth. The girl was, predictably, already pregnant, so ...

I hate heat.  Normally I write these things at 2 am because that's when I'm awake. I'm writing this particular thing at 2 am because that's when it's not 95F outside. It's not quite 95F inside, but it gets stupidly close. My room only has one window -- so, still legally rentable as a bedroom in the state of Massachusetts -- and for some reason only the upper sash will open. I'm not dumb enough to wedge an AC unit into the top of a busted antique double-hung window, so my bedroom has been temporarily converted into a large solar-powered oven. The rat has been spending his days in the living room, where it's climate-controlled. (Rat, singular. I am down to only Tseng at the moment. If you don't keep up with my Facebook, Errand, the remaining old man foster, finally got to go back to his original mommy. He was very weirded out by being packed up into a carrier and trundled out to the Fenway, but happy to be returned to someone who is home enough to sati...

I lost Garion -- one of the old men -- a week ago today. It was not unexpected; a previous owner actually happened to know their birthdate, June 1st 2018, which means Garion was just shy of three. Hitting three for a rat is like a human hitting a hundred. Domesticated rattos live a lot longer than their feral counterparts, but not a lot of them make it quite that far. Garion also spent a fair chunk of last year suffering through the single worst bout of pneumonia I have ever seen a rat survive. He recovered pretty well, but never quite regained all of his weight, and had persistent breathing trouble that I'm guessing was down to scarring of the lungs, since it didn't respond to antibiotics but did remit a bit with the faceful of Dulera he got every morning. I kept the two old men when the other six went off to Mainely Rat Rescue specifically because I figured Garion didn't have a lot of time left. It's difficult to re-home senior rats, I was already their third caretake...

For anyone who didn't catch it on other social media, I have finally moved out of the "temporary" apartment I was stuck in for 7 months, thanks to a lot of emotional and logistical support from friends, and a generous amount of financial support from the folks who gave to my GoFundMe. I am endlessly grateful to all of you, and if I weren't so goddamn tired right now I'd be more eloquent in saying so. I've spent the past few weeks of unpacking and working out the bus routes around my new place trying to figure out how to explain what was so terrible about the last one. Most attempts devolved into page upon page of rage, which is not really what I want to be doing here. On the other hand, I also don't want to downplay how bad it was.  Spoiler: The temp apartment was Very Very Bad. The tl;dr is that I was offered someone's spare room on the condition that I help out a little extra with household chores and caring for their rats, because the pet owning roo...

Behold, the Valentine's Day cage tour: Enjoy!

Hello all! I am not dead. I apologize for the long irregular silences, but I'm having issues devising a schedule that lets me stream on Twitch, AND update a blog/a Patreon/a GoFundMe/several Facebook pages/Twitter/an Instagram account, AND go to a few things I need to be physically present for on someone else's schedule, AND, like, sleep. This is a persistent problem with my life. I'll get it eventually. I'm only about to be 40, I have some time. Meanwhile, I have been trying to teach myself this New Media thing. As an elderly and decrepit OG Millennial, I have been consuming this stuff since I was a teenager, but my knowledge on the assembly-code level of production is pretty much all from a half-finished electronic media degree from about 2006. It's more useful than you'd think, but I still need to Google to find out where all the buttons are in OpenShot. Behold my rudimentary video editing skills: "Meet The Rats". It is followed by a long list of pl...

Hello, all! That was a much longer hiatus than I intended. About a week ago, I emerged from my cave to talk to the EMTs for the fourth time in about six weeks, and one of my housemates got to take an unscheduled (non-COVID) trip to the ICU. Everything's turned out fine, but until that got resolved, I was left in the care of the house population of TWENTY rats, twelve of whom were babies, and one of whom needed meds for a good case of pneumonia. They are kindly masters, on the whole, but unbelievably demanding divas when meal time rolls around. The housemate is back (and still breathing), and both baby boys have gone to their fur-ever home, with 7-8 of the remaining ten girl-babies being sent off sometime this week. The boys, in fact, went to a tech at my vet clinic who had met some of my fat lovable rat-lumps, and fell hard for the little guys. I dropped them off at the clinic this past weekend, where apparently they blocked off almost an hour at the end of the day for playing with...

I woke up this morning trying desperately to remember what day of the week it was and whether there was anything special about it. As of this writing, it's Friday, and no.  It has become clear that I have moved into a situation of grinding poverty. I knew when I got here that nobody was going to have any money. Literally everybody involved in this venture is disabled in some way, which in modern America means you are left to starve by default. What I didn't realize until I got here is that the other two kids in this apartment grew up in this kind of deprivation, without any useful parental figures of any kind. When I arrived, there was no bath mat. I assumed this was because everyone was skint and had better things to do with $8 than buy one. I probably had better things to do with that money, but I was tired of slipping on wet tile, so I went and ordered one anyway. They said thank you. I also ordered a wire shelf for the freezer, because I was tired of vegan "patties...

Durnik's gone.  He started acting oddly yesterday, but perked up and ate his dinner all right. I called and made him an appointment for Thursday, just in case.  Then, around midnight, he took a nosedive. He had never been the slightest bit interested in the windows, but suddenly he decided he needed to rest on the windowsill. He slept there a while, smelling the great outdoors. After a time, he started circulating restlessly between all of his favorite spots, cage and bed and now window, and back to cage and bed and...  They always do that at the end. They're checking all the places they remember being comfortable before, hoping that one of them will feel better. They're trying to get away from whatever is making them feel bad. But they can't. It's inside .  I sat up and helped him move around when it got difficult, and helped him keep his face clean. He never stopped trying to clean his face.  He got chocolate ice cream for breakfast, because that was what I c...

I am saddened to report that Old Man Barak left us very suddenly late last week. Less than five minutes elapsed between "wait, that's not a normal rat noise" and lights out. Ten minutes before that, he was bothering his brother and agitating for Cheerios. He spent his last moments cuddled in a blanket on my lap. You will all be glad to know that he did get dinner before he departed (beans and banana). Also a snack of pasta, and several yogies, plus some of  my popcorn. Barak was a good rat. He received many pets, and ate many foods. He was a loving but solitary boy, who smashed his face into the front of my shirt to demand scritches, and then shamelessly turned his little ratty backside and trundled away when he decided he was done. His goal in life was to be as large as possible, and he succeeded by every possible measure, particularly body mass, holding the record for Largest Rat Yet Seen by our vet, at a whopping 840g. He has been lovingly laid to rest in one of their ...

Happy Year of the Rat, everybody! Barak and Durnik have already celebrated by going to the vet. See, we had company over the holidays. Guest Rat Relg needed meds while his mommy was out of town, so while her boyfriend could handle food, water, and the occasional bedding change for the other three miscreants in their mischief, I had Relg in a travel cage on the floor of my room for two weeks. Relg was not especially happy with this arrangement, unfortunately. I was not Mommy, he was not home, and he definitely did not want his medication twice a day. Barak and Durnik were also not especially happy with this arrangement, as neither of them have any constructive way to cope with the existence of other rats. Even each other. I have to have one of them out for runarounds in the morning and one in the evening, because when I plop them on the bed one right after the other, chaos ensues. If Durnik goes first, Barak wombles around the blankets huffing for a fight, and if Barak goes first Du...

Hello, rat-fans! I hope you have all enjoyed your holiday weekend. The rats did! As a reminder, this year's advent calendar is now running on the public blog, but to see the regular weekly-ish blog entries in the month of December, you can become a Patron . This is especially important right now, as I've just found out I'll have to move again by the end of February. I hate moving and was on track to deal with it again "by September", not "by March", so I spent my holiday weekend either in a dead panic, or trying to ride that fine line between medicating myself out of a dead panic and being in a coma. Yay. If you're in need of some holiday gifts, you also have the option of buying some of my hand-knit creations over at Etsy, or splurging on a Ratmas gift set . This serves the dual purpose of funding me and  giving me less crap to pack later, so consider it a mitzvah . Now that's over with, on with the show! First we have Ratsgiving Br...

Helo! -- Durnik I have new rats! Meet Durnik (above) and Barak (below). In accordance with internationally-recognized Rat Law, these little widgets are now the exact geometric center of my entire universe, and will be treated accordingly. 'Sup. -- Barak These guys are re-homes, about a year old. A short list of things Barak and Durnik like: Each other. Humans. Food. Conspicuously absent from that list is 'other rats'. Which was a problem, because they were brought on as companions for an only whose rat-bro had sadly passed away. From what I gather, the singleton is happy and friendly and also ADHD in the form of a rodent. So while Barak and Durnik were settling down into being asshole teenagers (~6 months, for rats), Attention Deficit Rat would basically land on their heads at random going HAY LETS GO RIDE BIKES!!!11!!! or whatever the rat equivalent is. Barak would go JESUS FUCKIN Y U CHOO ON MY HED AGIN?, Durnik would follow, and it would all end in a lo...