If you’ve been following along at home, you know this. Until recently I had three little girls: Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. A couple of weeks ago I added two more to my mischief. (For the record, a group of rats is called a mischief. Really.) The two new girls are about six weeks old now. They came from two litters that were born at my favored rescue, the mothers of which came in as surrenders from feeder colonies--the ‘human element’ decided to stop feeding their reptiles live rats and switch over to frozen. One is a gray and white Masked, and the other, well, we can’t quite tell yet if she’s a fawn Berkshire or a fawn Argente (it’s determined by the color of the undercoat) but as she grows it will become clear. Sticking with my Powerpuff Girls theme, I named the gray girl Maggie, after Miss Keane the kindergarten teacher, whose name was a tip of the hat to artist Margaret Keane, the lady in the ‘70s who painted all those pictures of the terrifyingly huge-eyed children. The fawn girl is Sara, as in Miss Sara Bellum, the clever red-headed assistant (whose face is never shown) of the mayor of Townsville. They are tiny and adorable and I love them.
As with any other variety of pet, when introducing new additions you have to do so gradually so that the animals can get used to each other. They have to establish a pecking order and come to terms with sharing their space. Even though rats are social animals and need to live in groups, they won’t necessarily take kindly to interlopers right off the bat. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing supervised visits, trying to get the big girls to play nice with the babies, and that is how I have discovered that my furbabies are (even) weird(er than I was originally aware.)
Rats play-fight. This is normal. They can get really rough with each other. They make a lot of noise and throw a lot of bedding about and if they get too excited they’ll stop fighting with their original playmate and turn on whoever happens to be the next nearest. They get all puffy--it looks like they’ve been playing ‘stick your tail in the electrical outlet’. Normally this goes on for a bit and then everyone finds a quiet corner and has a bath. Grooming is a self-soothing tactic. My little doofuses take this whole thing one step further, of course, because why stick to what’s normal when you can be strange? On multiple occasions I have watched the big girls sit over the openings to the little box I put in the cage for the babies and wait for them to stick their noses out, at which point the big girls bat at them. Like cats. My rats are secretly cats in disguise.
Another thing the big girls like to do when the babies are in their little hidey-house is to shove all the bedding up against the openings, effectively burying the babies alive. I can’t rationalize this one. It’s not like I’m only paying attention to the babies and thereby making the big girls jealous--this doesn’t work on two levels. One, I take the big girls out more than the babies at the moment on purpose to make sure that they don’t feel neglected, and two, I’m pretty sure that this kind of a jealous reaction is a weensy bit too advanced a thought process for a rodent. I’m not saying they’re stupid, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that “these babies are going to require more of Mom’s attention, thereby diverting said attention away from me, ergo I should KILL THEM BY BURYING THEM ALIVE” might be a little advanced. So why the heck do they do it?! The world may never know.
This last one is equal parts cute and funny. When the big girls are feeling particularly snuggly, they will sit on the babies. And the babies don’t mind. The babies are used to being sat on. They got sat on by their moms and their siblings for the majority of their lives before they came to live with me. They still sit on each other. For the big girls this must be a two-fold kind of a thing. It’s likely that their maternal instinct is telling them that babies are for sitting on, but it also affords them a bit of peace from the babies tearing around the cage making noise and being generally bothersome. I mean, if you sit on something, it’s a lot less likely to be able to play hopscotch. Just sayin’.
Also, a tiny baby ratty snoot sticking out from underneath a great hulking mass of napping grownup rat is kind of the cutest.
No comments:
Post a Comment