Rat in a Box

I'm sorry to report that Chet, our little dumbo, passed away today. I'm not surprised; he's been battling respiratory problems since early spring, and back in April his prognosis was guarded. We don't know how old he was, either. When we first got him in February we thought he was young based on his slight size, but then with his health and demeanor we decided he was probably fairly old. He was a little trooper, though, and I'm grateful for the time we had.

This is a picture of him last week with his cagemate Marco.

Maui and Mulan are two older (estimated to be between 20 and 24 months) ladies that were recently brought into the rescue. At their age and with their health issues (more on that in a second), instead of trying to adopt them out, they are being placed in the twilight program, which means Victor and I will care for them for the rest of their lives.

Health-wise, both girls had multiple tumors:





However, they both made it though surgery last week and are healing up well (although Mulan is scheduled for another round in a couple of weeks, and we do expect that the tumors will come back...but hopefully this bought them quite a bit of time.)

Here they'll be sharing the retirement condo with Remy, the old man we adopted last summer. With his failing back legs, we were worried about his safety in a multi-level cage, but we didn't want him living alone (and none of his other cagemates were ready to scale down their housing.) So the timing of this worked out nicely, and Remy gets to spend his golden months with two new girlfriends.

I wonder if the Annie's Organic people would like to use any of this footage in their commercials? My guys really do love those cheese bunny crackers...

It's been mercifully quiet with the obituaries lately, but I'm sad to report that we had to have Ned put to sleep last night. He came down with a nasty respiratory infection over Memorial Day weekend--it came on so suddenly we actually thought he was choking at first. He saw the emergency vet over the holiday, and another trip to our regular vet, and we tried a gamut of antibiotics and steroids. Sometimes it seemed like he was rallying, then he'd slide back to not feeling well. Tuesday night and Wednesday morning I couldn't coax him to eat, not even chocolate pudding. It was painful to see him struggle to get air. We had to let him go.

Ned, along with Dusty and Lucky, were our first fosters...failed fosters, since we adopted them ourselves. I'm not even sure how old he was, although I think under two, so too young for this. He was never as outgoing as his brother Dusty, but more of a rat's rat, often found at the bottom of a pile in an igloo or cuddle cube.

I could turn this in a hybrid food-rattie blog: "What My Rats Had For Dinner"

Okay, most nights it just isn't that exciting. But tonight we had takeout from a Caribbean place, and I was wondering how the rats would react to jerk chicken and curried vegetables.

Apparently the spices are fine with them. And the food looks much better in real life than in the picture. That's Remy, by the way. He doesn't bother to take food away to stash it any more, he just hangs out by the bowl until he's done.

Our CSA started up last week, so we had nice fresh vegetables, including the rat favorite, romaine lettuce.

You should hear the sound of sixteen rats crunching lettuce. It's as loud as vuvuzelas.

Now I can take pictures again.

It has been one year since Isaac, Gino, and Fausto joined the family.

The two-headed rat!

Okay, I'm not doing so well with the promised updates...hope the pictures makes up for it a little.

I owe you an update or two. But first...



That's Timbit in the front, with Newkirk behind him. I pan over to Ralph, then Sam climbs up the back of the camera, jumps down over the lens, and goes into the tube (until his next close-up.)

This picture of Sam just cracks me up.

Thanks to Lynn for the reminder!

I finally found the battery charger, so here are a couple of pictures of the boys and girls, who have indeed settled into one cage now:






That's Dixie and Isaac in the second picture. They were the two who were not quite so sure about cohabitation (I assume because each prefers being in charge of the cage), but it's been peaceful after the first hour or two of huffiness.

Don't panic! The boys are all neutered!

Unfortunately, the battery in my camera died right after we brought T.S., Dixie, and Bianca out to meet the guys. As I thought, it did get those fat old men moving a bit more than usual. Everything went fine, though. Hopefully playtimes will continue uneventfully this week, then we'll open up the Critter Nation and have all ten rats in one cage.

I can't believe it's been over a month since I updated...it hardly seems like a few days since I picked up Chet and Marco. On the other hand, all three feet of snow melted, the crocuses came and and faded, and now the daffodils are in bloom, so maybe it has been a long time.

Here's the current rat line-up, just to refresh my own memory!

In the Critter Nation (which I mostly love, by the way, if you are cage shopping), we have the neutered boys: Isaac, Lucky, Dusty, Ned, Remy, Gino, and Fausto. We have plans to move the girls (T.S., Bianca, and Dixie) in with them eventually, but the last month was a bit hectic on the family front, so we held off on the intros because we didn't want any trips to the emergency vet.

In the foster cages, we have just four boys remaining from the babies we got in November, and they sure aren't babies any more. Sam and Ralph have passed through their obnoxious adolescent phase and are becoming squishy sweet boys, while Newkirk is taking over as Mr. Testosterone. Timbit also has his moments of throwing his weight around. To add a little spice to life, it appears that Timbit has allergies (we were seeing his face swell up some nights, at his worst he looked like a boxer dog with a big square muzzle), and the guys are now on a wheat-free diet.

And the new boys, Chet and Marco, are already not so new. They are almost Walter and Jimmy 2.0...goofy, sweet, a bit rambunctious. Poor Chet, though: if he were an NHL player, he'd be listed as day-to-day with an unspecified lower body injury. And in this case, I really don't know what he did, just that he's been favoring his back left leg, and after being worse/better/worse/better, last Friday his foot was red and swollen. Right now he's on Metacam and Baytril (just in case there's a bone infection, which is a scary prospect) and he's by himself in a small cage to keep him from jumping around too much and re-injuring it. But...



I took this with my phone the other night when I got home. I'm pretty sure the vet did not say that climbing on his box was okay, but what can we do?