rat silliness
Jan. 22nd, 2007 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quietannSaturday 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.
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.
