T-minus 1-day before leaving to get married! We spent our last day in New York running all sorts of last minute errands for our trip. We cleaned the rat cage and made sure they had lots of fresh bedding.
On Wednesday night, we discovered that Ratso (the first rat we got as a pet) had a big tumor on her side. (If you look carefully, you can see the lump on her right side). I gave her a bunch of carrots...
We ended up closing out the Sly Fox and heading back to our apartment for some Saturday night after hours. 4:25am. We keep the same hours as our rats. Eeek!
When you have four rats, you obviously cross over into "crazy rat people" territory, which means that every single person either one of us knows sends us ANY kind of news that's even remotely rat-related (much to Meredith's greatest joy, btw).
It's through this "rat news network" that we learn of a woman who's adopted a tiny female rat from an owner who originally bought her to feed to his pet boa constrictor, but after the tiny rat survived multiple attacks, decided, like a little Emperor proceeding over a tiny gladiatorial colesium, to let her LIVE! (Yep, that tiny little one in the upper left corner of this photo).
Then Meredith saw a Craig's List posting that was looking for people who were interested in adopting fawn-colored rats. She went to pick up the fawn-colored rat and when she arrived they told her that they'd only give her a brown one if she ALSO took a second white rat! Two for the price of one bringing the grand total up to FOUR!
Can you believe that at one point we had FIVE PET RATS? It started out as ONE PET RAT! Then we read that rats are such highly social animals that some people consider keeping them alone cruel! Doh! So we got a second rat, NBD.
Like it's pretty adorable how when you come over to the cage they all rush over and smash themselves against the bars so that they can say hi (ok, and for the off chance that you might be holding a delicious treat).
...but I mean, seriously, c'mon. Even if you hate vermin, there's no one in the world who can't say this picture of two rats spooning each other in a box isn't ridiculously cute. (PS - If you count the intertwined tails, you'll realize there's a third rat cuddled up in the box behind these two love birdsrats.
On Wednesday evening, Meredith came home with TWO MORE rats! She'd left with plans to rescue a brown rat, but because the brown rats are so much rarer, the people that were hosting the rat-adoption event had a rule that if you wanted a brown one, you had to also take a white one! So, that's how we ended up with FOUR RATS!
When I got back to our apartment that evening, Meredith was proudly showing off the huge, new, four-level rat cage she'd purchased earlier in the afternoon. We needed a bigger rat cage to make room for...
Here's where we left off! Meredith in a cab smiling about picking up our two pet rats that Mandy was nice enough to look after for us while we took a month-long trip to the United Arab Emirates and then Thailand!
We spent Saturday afternoon getting settled back into our apartment. Meredith was jet-lagged and called it a night...
We dropped off our bags and immediately went uptown to Mandy's apartment to pick up our two rat ladies that she was nice enough to take care of in our absence. (Thanks again, Mandy!)
Look how cute he was! I didn't even know rats climbed trees! (I guess they don't in NYC because there's no way the squirrels would tolerate that shit for even a second).
Monday was our very last day in town, and we had a ton to do before we left the next day! In the afternoon we packed up our rats (we only had two back then) into the cute little travel cage that Meredith made...
They were wise to me watching them and stayed hidden, but as soon as I took a few more steps down the street, they all made another mad rush for the trash pile! Hahah. It's hard to see them, so how about another zoom?
After Motor City I was walking on Rivington to get a slice of pizza and came across a pack of wild rats that were dashing back and forth across the sidewalk carrying delicious trash back to their nest from a huge garbage pile. What rats, you ask? Well, how about we zoom in on this photo a bit.
Check the zoomed view! INFESTATION! I count eight of them! (There are two peeking out behind the green pole in the upper left corner and then six peeking out from under the white door!)
...she decided to give my camera a closer look just to make sure it wasn't a treat that she might be missing out on. "OH HAI! I has a fuzzy, bulbous nose?"
Just in case you haven't seen enough pictures of our pet rats, here's a picture of Roxy (aka - "The Bad One") curled up in a ball and looking not-to-happy about me waking her up with my camera. But, since she was already awake...
She also always is taking old clothes and cutting them up and making fun little cloth "tubes" for them to enjoy. Here's Ratso enjoying life on the hammock from the inside of an old leggin.
...and by different, I mean that one of them (The Good One) was dyed bright pink! Meredith bought some Kool-Aid and decided to give Ratso a little bit of color.
...I gave her a vigorous rubbing with a towel which she actually seemed to like a lot. (The Bad One, however, turned out to pretty much HATE taking a bath and scratched the shit out of my arm when she tried using it to climb up out of the water!)
How about we kick this entry off with some rat-action? At this point, we'd had Ratso and Roxie for about three months and they had gotten used to us. Every time I'd come home to the apartment, the two of them would wake up, run across the cage and climb up into the nearest corner to say hi.
On Saturday, I played with our rats. Over time, Meredith and I noticed that they had two very distinct personalities and temperaments! Ratso is really friendly and loves to be pet and handled (so we started calling her "The Good One"). Roxy is cranky and hates to be touched or handled (so she's since become known as "The Bad One").
I thought that having pet rats would be similar to having a hamster or a gerbil - that they'd just sort of be things that sat in a cage looking cute. But in the first few weeks of having them, I was amazed by how smart and friendly and genuinely interested in people they were! They're like teeny tiny dogs! Hahaha.
Ratso and Roxy! Rats are so funny and smart: any time they have a treat, they're worried that the other rat is going to try to steal it from them. When we gave them both treats at the same time, they experimented with different cage positions before finally settling on the "mutual butt-touching treat-enjoyment position." They back up into each other and know that as long as they can feel the other one's butt, they can enjoy their treat in peace! Hahaha.
We bought them a wheel, but they didn't use it. At first we thought it was because they didn't understand what they were supposed to do in it so we kept picking them up and putting them in it. They'd run for like three steps then climb out. Over time it because apparent that they understood, but they just didn't really like excercise. (Meredith: "See? Rats ARE really smart!")
