Ratablog

Artax is a chunky monkey

Kado is getting along pretty well without his teeth. For the first few days he was pretty lethargic, likely from the pain or the side effects of the pain killers, but he seems back to normal now. He still isn't using his mouth to pick up things, and mostly he's drinking Boost Plus for his food.

The hard part is keeping the Boost away from Artax, who clearly loves it as much as he clearly doesn't need the extra calories.

Fingers crossed for Kado

Kado is back at the vet today for some heavy-duty dentristy.

For reasons we haven't figured out, he is not grinding his front teeth, and hasn't been for weeks. He's not eating hard food (or using his mouth to take treats, or any of the other normal rat stuff) and his incisors are growing like mad. We've needed to take him to have the teeth trimmed every week, and it bothers him so much that the vet has needed to knock him out to do it.

Today, the vet will try pulling the teeth, since Kado isn't using them anyway.

I'm not too worried about how he'll eat without them...since he's not been using them, he's gotten pretty good at ripping food apart with his paws and feeding himself, and he loves his chocolate Boost. (Today when Victor dropped him off he was up 13 grams from last week.) I'm just worried because surgery always makes me nervous, and Kado has had so many weird health issues.

Victor sent me a picture with the camera phone: Kado at the vet.

Neiko: ??-August 19, 2006

Abita and I made the decision to help our last girl, Neiko, to her final nap today. As we had discussed before, she had developed some tumors. Even with the tumors, she was pretty active up until about last week, she could (and would) climb the ramps to the upper levels. Recently, though, she started spending all of her time in the lower level. Also in the last couple of weeks, she started losing weight at a faster pace, and I think most of her nourishment was from the Boost and yogurt I gave her daily.

She first came into our lives on September 4, 2004, when we adopted her, along with four boys and two other girls, from our friend in Pennsylvania. She was an adult at that time, and in fact, had given birth to a litter of rats. We're certain either Misto or Rabskuttle was one of her sons; it's sad when you think she outlived her children. She was a sweetie, as all of our girls have been, with the softest fur you've ever petted.

One of our first pictures of Neiko, walking around like she owned the place. Maybe not the place, but certainly us :~)

Our last picture of Neiko--I'm sorry it's out of focus. I think you can see how tired she is, but still, she held her head up with dignity.

Neiko and her bodyguards

It figures that when I get home from work and see such cuteness that the only camera handy is the lousy one, but you get the idea:

Queen Neiko in her box, protected by her boys.

Links

I've been busy trying to catch up with all the work I missed while on vacation, but I do have a couple of good links that Eanna and Lesley were kind enough to pass along.

HELLO SAILOR is all about our rats' cousins, the Rattus rattus. Look at the gallery...these guys are cuties.

I'd heard that rats were trained to sniff out landmines, but to be honest, I never looked hard for more infomation because I assumed that the rats, well, didn't last long when they found the mines. Now that I've read the APOPO page, I'm glad to see that I was wrong. The rats are living healthy lives doing this very important work.

And I'm happy to say that through HeroRat.org, we have added a new Rat in a Box, albeit remotely. Hopefully we'll be updating with news of our adopted rat soon.

We're back

Quick update on Kado, who saw the vet as soon as we got home: He's gained 6 grams, which isn't as much as I'd hoped, but at least he's going in the right direction. His lungs still sound good. His teeth grew enough the last two weeks that he needed another trim, so now our challenge is to get him to eat some hard food to keep them ground down.

We were worried also about Neiko, with her lumps and general old age, but she made it through the week fine, as did the rest of the boys.