Rat romantically attracted to another species 🙄👉🐈

[Ruthie_is_Rattified]

My rat Mouse habitually pursues all 5 of my cats during her estrus. This has been going on ever since she moved here as a youngster, and it interferes with 3 of my cats' comfort and well-being being when she sneaks up from blankets to mount them. My other 2 cats remain uninterrupted & swat the fire out of her, which makes her shriek & cower, but then she immediately keeps crawling back for more beatings - over and over again, which is bad, because she's white & her bruises really stand out.

For the sake of her health, she is the only rat permitted whole-house access and 90% of her life is spent on free roam. She drastically dips into lethargy and depression when placed behind bars. Her sisters & neices readily engage in mock-humping amongst themselves but she doesn't so much as take interest in their nightly cuddle clump, because she just wants to bury her head in a tunnel & forget about life if she can't hop and skip all over the house.

On the occasion when her sisters & neices get to roam free, they each proceed with an abundance of caution, but those in heat do bravely make their way 10 feet across the room to waft their butts in front of the boy cage and intoxicate themselves with the smell of their soiled bedding & unwiped hineys
...returning of course to the cage to role play the whole "mating" romp with their sisters. MOUSE however does not have this same reaction to the boys. She climbs up their cage at least once a day, only because it's on her list of 20 things she must climb per day, but she is immune to their charms. It is cats, cats only, that arouse her. She wants to possess them and be consumed by them.

So - does anyone know what the deal is with this, and any suggestions on how to get her to cut ties with the cat fetish?

 

[Ruthie_is_Rattified]

 

[MinisterPumpkin]

I admittedly know next to nothing on the topic, but this all sounds a little eerily similar to the symptoms of a toxoplasma gondii infection. I think the classic symptom in rats is a reduction in fear toward cats and, more specifically, an attraction to cats.

I don't know anything about the long-term survivability of rats with the infection, so I don't know whether it would even be a possibility given how long you've had her. Though, "SPECIES AND STRAIN DIFFERENCES IN SENSITIVITY TO TOXOPLASMA INFECTION AMONG LABORATORY RODENTS" published in 1983 in the Japanese Journal of Medicine and Biology seems to suggest that rats exposed to a sufficiently low number of cells can survive at least short-term and potentially show no persistence of the parasite in the brain after just a couple of weeks. So, it may be possible to survive long-term with the infection and I wonder if it's also possible for rats to be infected, overcome infection, and then to be re-infected sometime later. I just did a super fast google search though and I'm sure there's more information out there. The only thing I know about biology is something-something, mitochondria...

I'm also just really concerned about that she's being swatted around (and hard enough for bruises to form). This situation, to me, seems dangerous enough that I think it would be best to just keep the animals separated rather than trying to modify her behavior regardless of the cause.