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 got nipped? Betadine, ibuprofen, amoxicillin if it looks sus. Etc.
Snoofy rat is almost always mycoplasmosis. Pretty much all fancy rats are colonized with the bacteria Mycoplasma pulmonis, but it's only a problem when it overgrows, at which point they basically get a nasty cold. If it progresses too far, they can end up with bacterial pneumonia. It's easy to treat, but the main antibiotic used for it, enrofloxacin (aka Baytril), was one of the few things I couldn't figure out how to get my hands on without going through a vet.
I keep a store of the most common veterinary antibiotics around, because rats are simple creatures and vets are expensive. Amoxicillin, doxycycline, and erythromycin are easy to get from aquarium suppliers. Apparently you dump them into fish tanks to take care of fin rot. I side eye the erythromycin a little, because I could only get it in powder packets and I can't find out what the inert filler is, but Fish-Mox and Fish-Dox are literally just bottles of the same off-brand generic antibiotics CVS would give you. They come in capsules that you can twist apart, and the contents dissolve in water -- or, in my case, sugar-free sno-cone syrup.
Enrofloxacin is apparently not used for fish tanks. I could find a few places that would sell me tablets, but that's not very useful. Tablets are stupid hard to compound. You need a mortar and pestle to grind them back into powder, and the fillers used to press them into tablet shapes are usually not water-soluble. You wind up with a suspension instead of a solution, and I don't know of any good way to emulsify it, so getting it to stay mixed long enough to get a consistent dose is a little iffy. Baytril tastes appalling and is a little caustic, so keeping a known concentration is a little more important than with the other ones, which I'm betting don't taste great either but are not so hefty that getting ±10% in your dose is a big deal.
It turns out that my vet doesn't do mail order Rx, so I had to hunt around anyway -- but what I didn't know before was that injectable Baytril can be diluted and given orally. Injectable 5% and 10% solution is surprisingly easy to get, for reasons unclear. It might be that injectable is used more for livestock than pets, and farm supplies are under alarmingly loose control in the US. Or it might just be that if you're down to buying injectable antibiotics, they figure you either know what you're doing or you're too damn stupid to be stopped. Either way, I now have a bottle of shelf-stable liquid enrofloxacin, and know where to get more when it runs out.
Just in time, too. Cheddar had started making a constant snorggggggle noise whenever he ran around too much, a bad noise for a rat to be making. He wouldn't take his decongestant chocolate either, which was alarming. Chocolate is usually the very last thing rats stop eating. Turns out he just doesn't have much of a sweet tooth. After some trial and error, I did find the flavor that made everyone take their meds without complaint, and that flavor is: Ham. Cheddar hungers for flesh. Fine by me, baby food is cheap.
It took a few days, but I woke this morning to blessed silence. Nobody in the cage was snoring. Huzzah! We are back to just mysterious chewing noises and unpredictable squeaking sounds as Cheddar, who seems to be feeling much better, pins his brother down solely to chew on Cheese's head. The Toon Bros remain fine and completely unconcerned about anything besides their own food bowls.
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