straggler drawbles

[ratcreature]

Four more people commented on the drawble post I made last week:

hsavinien wanted "Iguana festooned with socks"


Despite my caution against asking fanfic illustration sg_fignewton prompted with a passage from their story "Their evil dopplegangers march inside, waving their weapons threateningly. Carter's hair is tied back in a braid that reaches down to her knees, Jackson and O'Neill each have shoulder-length hair and flowing beards, and Teal'c sports unruly dreadlocks."


lolmac wanted "something with SG-1 and penguins, especially if the penguins are dressed as ninjas, Spartans, the French Foreign Legion, or any other military group."


sulien77 asked for 'your take on a Rat Balrog, saying "Do I look like a people person?!"'



In unrelated good news, Leo's weight loss seems to have stopped or at least slowed since Friday (he moves around while I want to weigh him which increases inaccuracies), and he's been a little livelier and ventured out of the cage more the last evenings, climbing and checking out all his favorite spots instead of just sitting in the cage like a picture of misery. So I hope that he maybe wants to hang in there a little longer despite having lost his brother and last rat company.

Comments

[paian]

Love all of these drawbles.

[ratcreature]

Thank you!

[droolfangrrl.livejournal.com]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-new-model-of-empathy-the-rat/2011/12/08/gIQAAx0jfO_story.html?hpid=z6

Saw this, thought of you and yours.

[ratcreature]

I'm not surprised that rats have more empathy than the researchers who spend their time squeezing rats in tiny plastic tubes inbetween keeping them in already small plastic boxes without decent opportunities to climb or play, that already amount to animal abuse instead of species appropriate housing.

[droolfangrrl.livejournal.com]

ee gad, sorry didn't think this would cause you distress.

Hopefully they don't live in such teeny boxes and that was just for the experiment.

What I thought you might find funny is "Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat."

[ratcreature]

Rats always tend to hide some of the tastiest food for later if there is a bit more of it (you always have to look for and remove potentially rotting food with them), but won't necessarily watch it, and then another rat may eat it if they find the place. Only obviously in a small plastic box there are no good hiding places to be had, so it may just drop it in a corner or the like. In such surroundings you just can't tell how it would normally act. So I'm not convinced that the rat necessarily intended to save it for the other rat, unless the experimental setup offered a way to distinguish general food storing behavior from sharing. Also not all rats actually like chocolate. I had some that didn't like it at all or just nibbled. Though if it only has pellets otherwise and already ate the larger portion the rat probably liked it well enough.

Unfortunately these awful, small plastic boxes are how lab rats are usually kept afaik, only that often they won't just put in two in a box of that size but even more. There are actually a growing number of researchers who realize that the way rats and mice are kept for things like drug research and illness models distorts all kinds of results even if you accept premises like the "mouse model" being like humans for their research purposes, simply because they don't research on healthy animals, but on stressed animals that can't move around and don't have anything to do but eat to combat boredom.

[droolfangrrl.livejournal.com]

hm... interesting, I'm kind of tempted to sign in and quote you on this. Would you mind if I do?

[ratcreature]

Quote what where? This on the newspaper website? I'd rather not have my fanart drawble post linked on a newspaper discussion board.

BTW, if you are further interested in the problems with how they are kept in disease research, there was a Slate article not too long ago:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html

[droolfangrrl.livejournal.com]

wouldn't link it, just say something along the lines of, someone who has rats as pets told me that it's quite normal for rats to cache part of the food that is available to them.

*reads article.*

[ratcreature]

Yeah sure, that would be no problem.