Rat in a Box

I know have complained before about all the spam e-mail we get on our ratinabox account. I thought I was being really clever, and I set up a filter so that mail from our regular commenters would go into a special folder so I wouldn't miss real messages. I didn't do such a good job, though...today I was cleaning out the mailbox and found some messages that were several weeks old, including one with sad news that Romulus and Remus (our Australian buddies) had both passed away.

The only thing worse than sharing the grief is not being there to share the grief.

I'm so sorry.

Romulus and Remus, I'm sure you've settled in with Rufus and Reuben...all of you boys be sure to watch over your mom.

Update:
Oh my. I have also found notes from people with questions...I feel terrible that they came here looking for help and it looks like I blew them off.

I've changed some things on the server side to try to block junk mail before it hits my inbox, so hopefully without hundreds of messages to skim, things won't be lost. (I'm not exaggerating, we were getting 300 to 500 messages a day. Stupid robot spammers.) The drawback to that is that I'll have to manually delete messages from the server, and when I don't, people may get messages bouncing back saying that our inbox is full.

Russell and R.C.

I was hoping we could go a few weeks without a visit to the vet, but R.C. and Russell have both developed lumps. I think theya re probably abscesses, because they're in the same spot (lower abdomen, off to the side) where MoonPie, R.C., and Mosby had the abscesses back in the fall. We talked to the vet, and he just went ahead and scheduled them for surgery tomorrow.

No, they aren't rats. But how can anyone not saw "awwww" when they see baby waterfowl?



There's a small lake a few blocks from our house, and I'm quite fond of the resident Canada geese, especially in the spring when the gosslings hatch.

Every year my friend Barb gives me her leftover matzo for the rats, but this year, she didn't even wait til the holiday was over.

The vet called me Thursday night after finishing Bandit's necropsy. The first thing he told me was that surgery would not have helped.

For one thing, the affected area was behind the facial nerve, so the vet wouldn't have been able to get at the tumor without seriously risking paralysis. But it would have been impossible to get to the whole thing...it sounds like it was hard to differentiate abscess from tumor, and the bad tissue went down as far as his esophagus and up nearly to the brain. I have a feeling that within days, it would have spread that far.

Knowing that we made the right decision is not a huge comfort, though. Poor Bandit.

The vet said he'd never seen a case like this, so I hope we never see one again.

Bandit's story, at least the way I'm thinking of it, goes back to before Bandit was even born. It was Labor Day weekend 2005, when Leather died.



Leather was almost three, and the last rat from her family. She'd been living with Oliver, and I was heartbroken to see him alone. I took a shortcut in the usual rules of introducing rats, especially adult males, and let Oliver out on the bed with three other boys. Of course there was a fight, and in breaking it up, George bit me through the second knuckle of my right index finger.

The initial pain was astounding. The resulting treatment was painful, time-consuming, and expensive. At the end, the occupational therapist told me that I could have actually lost my finger and even now, there's slight nerve damage.

So I take rat bites very seriously.

This is where Bandit actually comes in. Celynny, a member of the old Rat Palace forum, had rescued Bandit from the feeder bin of a sketchy pet store. After quarantine, he moved in with her gang of friendly, socialized boys, and Bandit was okay with them...but he didn't like people. He went out of his way to bite Celynny whenever she opened the cage,even when she was just filling the food dishes.

She was putting up with the biting, but her daughter was a toddler, and one night Bandit bit the little girl. Not a nip, a full-strength bite through her fingertip that bled for 20 minutes...in fact, it wasn't until another rat nipped Bandit that he let go of the child's finger.

Obviously Celynny couldn't keep a pet who was a danger to her child. And this was only three months after my bite, so the idea of adopting an aggressive rat known to bite unprovoked was not immediately appealing. To be honest, I really thought that he might be neurologically impaired, untrainable.

But...we don't have kids, it turned out we lived only an hour from Celynny, and every time I looked at his picture, it
reminded me of Leather. We adopted Bandit. His first trip to the vet, they plastered red "BITES" stickers all over his file. Victor handled him with welding gloves for weeks, and I didn't handle him at all.



Victor took the lead in trust training. Every night he'd sit with Bandit, not letting Bandit crawl away. We also worked out routines for getting him out of the cage without being bitten...basically, we let him have a box, and never, ever put our hands in the box. To get him out, we'd tip the box gently, and let him come out of the cage door on his own. Sometimes this took treats, and it didn't take long for him to start gaining grams. In weeks, we built up to regular playtime, and when Bandit caught the scent of other rats on toys and blankets he'd sniff around like he was looking for them.



We'd discussed having Bandit neutered as soon as we got him, but decided to try the forced trust training first. Since he was calming down, we hoped that lowering his testosterone would be the edge we needed to get him to quit biting all together, plus we'd be able to introduce him to Oliver (who'd been neutered) and the girls Neiko and Roo.

It didn't stop the nips completely (but he became much less aggressive about when he bit), but he did enjoy the rat company. We took the introductions very slowly, only letting the rats play together in neutral territory. But one night when Victor was out, I had Oliver, Roo, and Neiko in a tray, and opened Bandit's cage door to get him out too. Neiko hopped right off the tray into Bandit's cage, and started marching around like she owned the place. I was horrified, but Bandit kept his cool, and returned the favor by checking out the other cage the next week. We moved them all in together uneventfully after that.



That really marks the end of the nervous "Will in work out for Bandit?" time. The vet took the red stickers off the folder, I started picking him up, and life returned to normal.

Of course, normal here means sad endings. Both Roo and Neiko passed away during the summer, and Oliver started showing his advanced age. Bandit stood by his buddy, though, grooming him and cuddling, just like he'd done for the girls. When Oliver passed away, Bandit got to go from young whipper-snapper to grouchy old man, moving in with the young and fiesty Artax.





Artax and Bandit made a great pair, but trying to introduce Don Oliver did not work out so well. There were no injuries, rat or human, but we abandoned the idea of getting the three together. It wasn't long after that Artax declined, rapidly and shockingly. It was only a few weeks before we lost him, but during that time Bandit was again the thoughtful nurse, grooming and comforting his mate.

This was last summer, and Bandit was coming up on two years old. Being alone didn't suit him; he started nipping again. We were up to three single rats, too: Don Oliver, Bandit, and Larry, who we'd just adopted, also from Celynny. So I suppose there's some nice symmetry to how things turned out, that when we did get the three boys together, it was Larry that really took to Bandit.



Unfortunately, Bandit's back legs started to drag, and we had to move him to the cage without ramps. (Remember Leather, where I began the story? She started having trouble with her legs, but I thought she was fine dragging herself up the ramps until the day she got her rear foot caught in the wire mesh. Trying to get free, she broke her leg. I didn't want to risk that with Bandit.) He neurotically groomed all the fur off his front legs, but other than that he seemed to adapt, and continued to enjoy visits with Larry every evening.



And then we saw the lump on his face, and I'll leave it there, since it's just been a few weeks. That's the part I don't want to relive again right now.

Goodbye, Bandit. You were a challenge. I'm not sure how you ever felt about me, but I did love you.