YokaiRatRAR
Active Member
but you guys can only help me with two of those.
I noticed my pet rat Oracle has a lump on the side of her head, right about the jaw. And I have a cute little intact male named Petey who I need to rehome. Both will have seperate forum topics. There's nothing wrong with Petey, and obviously something's wrong with oracle or I wouldn't be talking to you about her.
Between them both, trying to figure out why I'm so upset and snatched her littermate away is the outspoken greedy little glutton named Glados (pronounced Gladys). As you can tell, they all have names that are computery or sci fi-ey in some form. I decided when i got Oracle and Glados that if i got a critter from a pet store or an adopted critter didn't otherwise have a name a sci fi name would be picked at random from a game or show I'm currently or was in the past obsessed with. (My guinea pig is named after the engineer in star trek voyager to boot! Only Smokey, my adopted cat, doesn't have a sci fi name out of my critters because Smokey is the only thing he's ever answered too not counting my cutsie nicknames for him.)
Oracle is named after Batwoman's hacking handle. Petey is named after Spiderman (because he was literally climbing the cieling of his cage at the petshop trying to escape his sibs, long story and will be in his post), and Glados is named after the tyrannical and neurotic female AI in Portal and lives up to her name by being extremely pushy.
I have aspergers syndrome, depression, and anxiety and first got rats because I heard about a little boy on the spectrum like I was who used rats as therepy animals. I knew that small animals were generally inexpensive to take care of. Unfortunately, all the research I did was on wild rats! :scolding: my mistake. oooooops.
Still, I fell in love with my two tailed homegirls. Wouldn't trade them for the world. They get chicken, and cheese, and berries, and flowers, and nuts, and when I eat an apple they always get a piece. They love peanut butter, licking it off the cage bars or carefully whittled maple sticks. However, they can't have egg. I've tried. Every time I feed them egg they fight over it. Glados always wants the entire egg and won't let oracle have any. Oracle gets mad because egg is soft and I suspect she's had something wrong with her jaw since I got her. Its also nutrient rich and an easy to access form of protien (rather than saaaay, roasted peanuts or brazil nuts, which have to be 'opened' to get the 'prize' inside. By the way, they go nuts over pecans and brazil nuts are wonderful chew toys that take days to open up and become as much a toy as a food source.)
But Oracle... she has a thing for berries. She goes wild over raspberries. She goes wild over orange slices. She goes wild over roses. No, really. I once watched her rip apart a miniature rose from the florist and eat it.
But my favorite memory of them came when I bought a package of durian flavored candies from the asian market only to find out they tasted terrible. I let the rats run around on their cage shelf for awhile and abandoned the candies in a canning jar three feet away on the same shelf.
I get up to check on the girls, only to find Glados with her rear legs and tail sticking out of the jar, which was still upright. As I watched, Glados snatched the stinky durian candy in her teeth, feet and tail waving in the air, and ever so carefully backed out of the jar. Then she ran back to her cage. I start poking around in their bedding, and find candies they'd ripped the wrappers off of with tiny little rat bites taken out of them. Needless to say, the jar of durian candies quickly disappeared across the room where neither rat could find it. PPPPPP silly Glados. Candy isn't for rats!
Then there's the time I was drinking coffee with Oracle on my shoulder, I put my mug down, she scurries over and shoves her nose in, and I think... she couldn't possibly... I lean in to take a closer look. V.V;;;; shoulda known, her little jaw was motoring up and down licking up the coffee.
I firmly scooped her up and removed Oracle to the cage. eeeewww, rat cooties *.* but so cute. Sorry sweetie, I don't share coffee, not with a rat, not with a cat, not in a box, not with a fox. I do not share it here or there. I do not share it anywhere.
The girls live in a birdcage now, and they have a wheel and a ball between them. I had to curtail their adventures or they would have torn anything they could reach to pieces. There is a photo of Oracle hiding in a bookshelf floating around my internet accounts somewhere, crouched on top of a wicca guide by silver ravenwolf and a couple of books of mythology.
The end of their free roaming adventures came when I caught them sampling a piece of my pothos plant, something I KNOW for a fact is toxic to pets. Although roses didn't hurt them and they seemed adept at avoiding the thorns, I knew for a fact that this would. They took maybe two bites, one apiece, but I caught Oracle trying to sheer off a leaf for nesting material.
Rats in the wild have an instinct to test new food sources for toxicity. They have a scout rat take a tiny nibble, nowhere near enough to kill and then wait to see if the scout rat gets sick. If he does, they take a deep whiff of his or her breath, which allows them to identify the toxin by scent later on. This sampling behavior can lead them right to peanut butter to lick, candy to steal or roses to rip without ever having seen one or can result in the silly little dears poisoning themselves by mistake.
That birdcage seems to be the only logical choice for any rat now that they've shown how much they love it. A simple wooden dowel from the hardware store makes a very good perch and the both of them sit on it and watch me get ready for bed. Not even the vacume cleaner scares them.
Glados occasionally shows her wild side. Once when I forgot to feed her, she chewed open a plastic tupperware container of organic wheat berries, a treat she loves and I love because it has the wheat protein or gluten, the fiber from the germ, the guerantee of no pesticides that comes with organics, and they're cheap, about a dollar a pound. Plus I can grow them into grass, which has my girls doing this... :ratwave:
Glados has also reached through the cage bars and ripped off the top to her food container and ripped, yanked and wrecked the fly trap set to capture the fat, drunken summer flies that spin around apartments here in the berkshires every year. Store bought toys do not satiate her curiousity, only a good hard run in her ball or on the wheel. However, mother nature seems to make more entertaining things for rats than I could ever buy.
using maple wood, willow wood, strips of leather, pinecones and wooden dowels, as well as brown paper coffee bags emptied of their contents but still smelling of coffee beans tend to make for grand fun. The girls are more than willing to clean my cat's empty wetfood cans and never seem to get hurt on them. They'll rip tuna fish pouches to smithereens to get at the delicious juices and fishy bits inside. Glados goes gaga for the smell of eucalyptus oil, even going so far as to chew on the mouths of aromatherepy oil bottles in pursuit of that STRONG TREELIKE SMELL... *rat impression* "ooooh, smells so good, where's the tree, I wanna rip a hole in the tree where's the tree that smell is coming from? Can I rip it to pieces oh can I ma can I?"
In fact ripping things, like newspaper, seem to be Glados' favorite form of "play." Along with bags, anything either rat can pull into the cage from her surroundings can become a toy, empty jars that smell especially strongly, flowers (violets, dandylions, clovers and roses are their favorites) long wonderfully snuffly braids of grass, my ponytail, my glasses, the spoon or stick peanut butter is served to them on... unpopped popcorn kernals that still have bits of coconut oil and sea salt on them.
Yes, I have two little thieves. I love them dearly and check their cage for unmentionable or forbidden loot regularly.
I noticed my pet rat Oracle has a lump on the side of her head, right about the jaw. And I have a cute little intact male named Petey who I need to rehome. Both will have seperate forum topics. There's nothing wrong with Petey, and obviously something's wrong with oracle or I wouldn't be talking to you about her.
Between them both, trying to figure out why I'm so upset and snatched her littermate away is the outspoken greedy little glutton named Glados (pronounced Gladys). As you can tell, they all have names that are computery or sci fi-ey in some form. I decided when i got Oracle and Glados that if i got a critter from a pet store or an adopted critter didn't otherwise have a name a sci fi name would be picked at random from a game or show I'm currently or was in the past obsessed with. (My guinea pig is named after the engineer in star trek voyager to boot! Only Smokey, my adopted cat, doesn't have a sci fi name out of my critters because Smokey is the only thing he's ever answered too not counting my cutsie nicknames for him.)
Oracle is named after Batwoman's hacking handle. Petey is named after Spiderman (because he was literally climbing the cieling of his cage at the petshop trying to escape his sibs, long story and will be in his post), and Glados is named after the tyrannical and neurotic female AI in Portal and lives up to her name by being extremely pushy.
I have aspergers syndrome, depression, and anxiety and first got rats because I heard about a little boy on the spectrum like I was who used rats as therepy animals. I knew that small animals were generally inexpensive to take care of. Unfortunately, all the research I did was on wild rats! :scolding: my mistake. oooooops.
Still, I fell in love with my two tailed homegirls. Wouldn't trade them for the world. They get chicken, and cheese, and berries, and flowers, and nuts, and when I eat an apple they always get a piece. They love peanut butter, licking it off the cage bars or carefully whittled maple sticks. However, they can't have egg. I've tried. Every time I feed them egg they fight over it. Glados always wants the entire egg and won't let oracle have any. Oracle gets mad because egg is soft and I suspect she's had something wrong with her jaw since I got her. Its also nutrient rich and an easy to access form of protien (rather than saaaay, roasted peanuts or brazil nuts, which have to be 'opened' to get the 'prize' inside. By the way, they go nuts over pecans and brazil nuts are wonderful chew toys that take days to open up and become as much a toy as a food source.)
But Oracle... she has a thing for berries. She goes wild over raspberries. She goes wild over orange slices. She goes wild over roses. No, really. I once watched her rip apart a miniature rose from the florist and eat it.
But my favorite memory of them came when I bought a package of durian flavored candies from the asian market only to find out they tasted terrible. I let the rats run around on their cage shelf for awhile and abandoned the candies in a canning jar three feet away on the same shelf.
I get up to check on the girls, only to find Glados with her rear legs and tail sticking out of the jar, which was still upright. As I watched, Glados snatched the stinky durian candy in her teeth, feet and tail waving in the air, and ever so carefully backed out of the jar. Then she ran back to her cage. I start poking around in their bedding, and find candies they'd ripped the wrappers off of with tiny little rat bites taken out of them. Needless to say, the jar of durian candies quickly disappeared across the room where neither rat could find it. PPPPPP silly Glados. Candy isn't for rats!
Then there's the time I was drinking coffee with Oracle on my shoulder, I put my mug down, she scurries over and shoves her nose in, and I think... she couldn't possibly... I lean in to take a closer look. V.V;;;; shoulda known, her little jaw was motoring up and down licking up the coffee.
I firmly scooped her up and removed Oracle to the cage. eeeewww, rat cooties *.* but so cute. Sorry sweetie, I don't share coffee, not with a rat, not with a cat, not in a box, not with a fox. I do not share it here or there. I do not share it anywhere.
The girls live in a birdcage now, and they have a wheel and a ball between them. I had to curtail their adventures or they would have torn anything they could reach to pieces. There is a photo of Oracle hiding in a bookshelf floating around my internet accounts somewhere, crouched on top of a wicca guide by silver ravenwolf and a couple of books of mythology.
The end of their free roaming adventures came when I caught them sampling a piece of my pothos plant, something I KNOW for a fact is toxic to pets. Although roses didn't hurt them and they seemed adept at avoiding the thorns, I knew for a fact that this would. They took maybe two bites, one apiece, but I caught Oracle trying to sheer off a leaf for nesting material.
Rats in the wild have an instinct to test new food sources for toxicity. They have a scout rat take a tiny nibble, nowhere near enough to kill and then wait to see if the scout rat gets sick. If he does, they take a deep whiff of his or her breath, which allows them to identify the toxin by scent later on. This sampling behavior can lead them right to peanut butter to lick, candy to steal or roses to rip without ever having seen one or can result in the silly little dears poisoning themselves by mistake.
That birdcage seems to be the only logical choice for any rat now that they've shown how much they love it. A simple wooden dowel from the hardware store makes a very good perch and the both of them sit on it and watch me get ready for bed. Not even the vacume cleaner scares them.
Glados occasionally shows her wild side. Once when I forgot to feed her, she chewed open a plastic tupperware container of organic wheat berries, a treat she loves and I love because it has the wheat protein or gluten, the fiber from the germ, the guerantee of no pesticides that comes with organics, and they're cheap, about a dollar a pound. Plus I can grow them into grass, which has my girls doing this... :ratwave:
Glados has also reached through the cage bars and ripped off the top to her food container and ripped, yanked and wrecked the fly trap set to capture the fat, drunken summer flies that spin around apartments here in the berkshires every year. Store bought toys do not satiate her curiousity, only a good hard run in her ball or on the wheel. However, mother nature seems to make more entertaining things for rats than I could ever buy.
using maple wood, willow wood, strips of leather, pinecones and wooden dowels, as well as brown paper coffee bags emptied of their contents but still smelling of coffee beans tend to make for grand fun. The girls are more than willing to clean my cat's empty wetfood cans and never seem to get hurt on them. They'll rip tuna fish pouches to smithereens to get at the delicious juices and fishy bits inside. Glados goes gaga for the smell of eucalyptus oil, even going so far as to chew on the mouths of aromatherepy oil bottles in pursuit of that STRONG TREELIKE SMELL... *rat impression* "ooooh, smells so good, where's the tree, I wanna rip a hole in the tree where's the tree that smell is coming from? Can I rip it to pieces oh can I ma can I?"
In fact ripping things, like newspaper, seem to be Glados' favorite form of "play." Along with bags, anything either rat can pull into the cage from her surroundings can become a toy, empty jars that smell especially strongly, flowers (violets, dandylions, clovers and roses are their favorites) long wonderfully snuffly braids of grass, my ponytail, my glasses, the spoon or stick peanut butter is served to them on... unpopped popcorn kernals that still have bits of coconut oil and sea salt on them.
Yes, I have two little thieves. I love them dearly and check their cage for unmentionable or forbidden loot regularly.