1082: Squeakers

Apologies for the lateness of the hour, but I’m on the Very Definitely Final Dungeon in Trails in the Sky, and it was getting rather difficult to stop playing. It was one of those times where you start playing at an eminently reasonable hour in the evening, look up and it’s suddenly nearly 2am. Oops. I will likely push on to the finale tonight, since it’s the weekend and all.

But I don’t want to talk about Trails in the Sky today. (Well, I do, but I am specifically choosing not to.) Instead I thought I’d talk a bit about our pet rats. Those who have been following for a while will remember we got Lara and Willow back in June but Willow sadly died a few months later. We left Lara on her own for a little while to see how she was, but she became much less energetic and looked very sad, so it wasn’t long before we went out to try and find her a playmate.

I was a bit worried about this, as Lara and Willow knew each other and got along very well with one another despite being polar opposites personality-wise — Lara is adventurous, curious and mostly quite gentle; Willow was nervous, jumpy and had a habit of biting. (I didn’t get bitten, but Andie assures me that a rat bite fucking hurts.) I’m not sure if they were related, but they certainly got along well. What would happen if we introduced a new, unknown rat into the mix?

We found out when we got Lucy, who was younger than Lara and thus about half her size when she first arrived. We introduced them to each other on “neutral territory” (the bathtub, in this case) and they both had a wander around and a bit of a sniff and didn’t seem to mind each other, so we put them both in the cage to see how they got on. Lucy just hid in the corner not moving for several days, with the exception being the time she terrified us by lying down on her back and pretending to be dead to stop Lara hassling her. We were worried that Lara was being too aggressive towards her, so we tried putting Lucy in a carry box for the night so she could get some rest, but put the carry box inside the cage so that Lara could get used to her scent.

Lara’s behaviour when we did that was both adorable and heartbreaking. You could see her panicking. She thought that we were taking her new friend away from her, and she was frantically scrabbling away at the box trying to get to Lucy. Lucy, meanwhile, was happily getting some rest at last. When we opened up the box in the morning, both of them were fine, and over time they got to know each other, established a pecking order and Lucy started behaving a bit more normally.

The thing that surprised me about owning rats is how much personality the pair of them have. I’ve never owned small furry creatures before, so I didn’t know much about them. (My family had cats when I was younger, and my brother has dogs and cats, but no small furry things.) But the pair of them do obviously have different attitudes and responses to things. I’m not sure how much of this is me projecting human characteristics onto them, but it certainly looks that way, anyhow. As I said above, Lara is adventurous, curious, mostly gentle, protective of Lucy and absolutely loves coming out of the cage to explore all the nooks and crannies of the room. Lucy, meanwhile, is cheeky — there’s no other word for it, really. She regularly sneaks up on Lara and tries to bite her playfully, and you can see Lara just gritting her teeth and putting up with it most times it happens, though occasionally she’ll give Lucy a slap on the nose. As Lucy has grown, she has become more confident, and will hold her own in the play-fights the two of them have now rather than losing every time. She’s also just started coming out of the cage to explore, though not quite as far afield as Lara just yet, and she’s much more talkative than Lara, who stays quiet most of the time. Lucy, meanwhile, is always squeaking (I never knew before owning rats that they squeaked like mice!) and makes a hell of a noise when the two of them are play-fighting, which made us worry a bit the first few times they did it.

Rats are great pets, then. They’re very social — they’ll get up and climb up the side of the cage to come and see you if they know you’re nearby or if you talk to them — and they’re fun and relaxing to watch. They’re amusing and entertaining once they get brave enough to step out of the cage and wander around the room, too, though they’re almost impossible to catch standing still, particularly if they’re female, as apparently female rats are much more inquisitive than the somewhat lazier males. It’s also a bugger to get them back in the cage if you’re in a hurry, but both of ours will return of their own accord when they’ve had enough “playtime”, so I assume this is fairly common behaviour.

I’m glad we got them, in short. It’s nice to have a bit of life in the house when I’m stuck here working by myself (or on evenings when Andie is elsewhere, like tonight) — it helps the place feel less “empty”. I sort of wish I’d learned this a bit sooner. 🙂