Hi, playing on DW this morning, only to come across your post on rats - they are so mellow! When we shopped for a small pet, the clerk reached into the container to show us a hamster, which promptly bit her. She mentioned that rats would be a better fit, and so we had rats for about ten years, one pair after another. Yes, their lives were shorter than our cats (15 years for one of them) but rats on the whole proved very sweet, riding on my shoulder, playing on the "carnival" rides I constructed for them, and so on. I'm glad to read your opinion on them.

I kept ours in the kitchen island, entirely devoted to them; we had several sets of brothers each time. We never had females.