Rat in a Box

Happy October, everyone! Things are busy (as you probably noticed) and the blogging has suffered. Unfortunately, as our resident rat population has been aging, much of the "busy" has been medical. This summer we lost Ned, Chet, Mulan, and a foster rat named Skinner who was here for just a week. Fausto has a Zymbal's gland tumor (which we immediately recognized, having seen it in Bandit), Gino has a pituitary gland tumor, Lucky is battling persistent respiratory issues, and I found a mammary tumor on Dixie just last night.

On the non-gloomy side, Remy and Maui have become a happy old couple...well, happy with each other, cranky toward people unless there are treats involved. Marco is neutered and moved into the Critter Nation. Fosters Sam, Ralph, Timbit, and Newkirk are still here, and Isaac, TS, Bianca, and Dusty are doing well.

We also had a cage of lovely foster girls who came to the rescue literally hours away from being euthanized. We only had them for the weekend, though, before adopting them out to a new rat mom, who is now spoiling them rotten. Every time she sends me a picture, I remember why we do this.

I knew it had been awhile since I updated, but I didn't realize it's been over a month! It's been a very busy summer...some goodbyes, some adoptions...I need to gather the pictures for a proper update. But we are still here!

(I wish I could get the rats to do the updates while I am at work...)

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.