rat silliness

[quietann]

Saturday morning, Ben and I discovered a good way to be entertained: put a whole (chicken) breakfast sausage into a cage with nine young, active rats. The second-littlest one, Clownface, proved quite able to keep the rest of the rats away from it, for a while, but I am not sure how much she actually got to eat. This was about as good as putting in a piece of chicken on the bone.

Babies are starting to wander around; I moved them and their mama to a multi-level cage and they are figuring out how to climb, and how to drink soymilk out of a water bottle. Mama is starting to try to get away from them, but her hiding places (on top of the lab block feeder and in a hanging basket) will soon be breached. She's doomed! When all of them are trying to nurse, she is nearly immobilized.

Also entertaining: rat sex, or lack thereof. I put two rats together last night, Esther and Silverdip. Esther was very much in heat, but she jumped and squeaked every time SD touched her, and eventually he got bored of the chase. Ben says that later on, she was soliciting attention, that is to say crouching and flapping her ears, but he was ignoring her. OTOH I found them curled up together this morning, so maybe they worked out their differences. If they did, the babies will be very pretty.

Comments

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

Snicker. Sounds a bit like putting a bunch of dill in the bunny cage.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad the plague is over, and that you started breeding again. Was this current set of babies an accident? I can't recall.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

NO accidents here, the mama was bred just before I realized we had the plague.

[rabbitorf.livejournal.com]

the ear flap is always my favorite part :)

[quietann.livejournal.com]

It's really more an ear buzz. Esther is a slightly fat, small Russian Blue rex dumbo dalmatian girl. The best way to describe her personality is "prissy." She's a squeaker, and that was part of the problem; Silver Dip kept jumping back when she squeaked at him, and she kicked him 'cross the cage a couple of times. Silver Dip (ANR Dipped in Silver) is a Russian Silver-Blue dumbo bareback. He went through a kind of scared stage for a few months but now he's just a big lug. They were both virgins when I put them together, but they got with the program at different times. Ben called Silver Dip "an embarrassment to Buckhood."

[jerkface02.livejournal.com]

haha that does sound entertaining! pets are fun!