rat picspam

[ratcreature]

It's been ages since I posted photos of my rats, and it's just not right for my journal to miss out on pet picture spam for this long. *g*


This is Ignatz eating pasta (he edged away from the camera, obviously worrying about the noodle, that's why he's in the far corner of the cage and the light isn't great):


This is Ignatz grabbing his share of the scrambled eggs:


And Emil enjoying his (scrambled eggs are their favorite food ever):


Another one of Ignatz:


Here I try to hold Emil back from the camera so that he'd remain in photographing distance, but he'd rather investigate. Or possibly beg for food:


Krümel looking cute while he grooms himself:



Here is a series of Ignatz and Krümel playing with each other:

Comments

[brownbetty]

Yeah, I guess rats are pretty well adapted to eating most human foods. Are there foods they need to avoid, like dogs and chocolate?

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I've heard from some that some kinds of avocado can be actually toxic for rats, it somehow seems to depend on the species of avocado though. I'm not entirely sure about this, but have never tried to experiment, for obvious reasons. All kinds of cabbages are bad for them because of gas, same with pulses, because they are even worse equipped than humans to digest either, and you are supposed to be careful about stone fruits, because they have small amounts of cyanide compounds, presumably mostly in the stone, but most pet books say to feed at most small bits, probably because rats are so much smaller than humans. Citrus fruits are supposedly bad for rats' kidneys especially for male rats, so they shouldn't have that.

Also apparently they metabolize common cinnamon (the cheaper kind of the two) differently from humans which can have toxic effects on them, the latter I only know because here there was this huge press thing some years ago around christmas about how large amounts of Christmas cookies could have harmful effects but most said it was kind of nonsense because they tested on rats which digest the spice into different compounds, so I took away from that that I could eat them, but not my pets. But of course you aren't really supposed to feed rats spicy, salty or sugary things anyway, not that that prevents them from trying to grab your tastier food when they can smell it.