no rat pictures yet, but...

[ratcreature]

I've just come back from getting my three baby rats, who are tiny and adorable. They are still a bit shy, mostly hiding in one of their tubes, but they've already found the food and water and are coming out to grab bits of food only to hide again to eat it. So they are not easy to photograph yet, but starting to settle in.

Comments

[caiusmajor.livejournal.com]

BABY RATS! :D :D :D

--incidentally. I enjoy your tales of your rats and I am wondering how it works to have rats and comics at the same time. Do you have to keep the rats away from the comics at all times?

[ratcreature]

Yeah, if ou want to keep the comics intact, you can't let the rats reach them. I once didn't block access to a shelf well enough, and wasn't quick enough to find where the rat had vanished behind (not until I located the gnawing sounds) and it chewed on some hardcover editions. I'm just glad they didn't get to the signed (with with sketches!) comics that were also in that shelf much. Most of the comics in the room with my rats are either behind doors or in boxes. Any room in which rats run around has to be rat safe, and anything within reach will be chewed (and marked with pee).

Rats will do damage, but then most pets do, and at least you can keep rats just to one room and supervise their play time. My sister's cat took revenge on her stuff when she felt slighted and my sister wasn't at home, and ruined her handwoven oriental rug, peed on her bed sometimes, and dragged animal corpses in from outside too. And at least the cat's victim were fresh, her dog once dug up a half rotten corpse of something, and smeared that all over.