Rat Post

First, let’s just get this out of the way. This post was going to include pictures but some dumb ass *looks guilty* left the camera on so the battery wore down to dead. This was, of course, discovered when I grabbed the camera to get the pictures. So no pictures.

I don’t know if I mentioned a few months back that was lost skittles. All the rats were sick for a short time but Skittles never got better. He wheezed for a couple of weeks when he finally passed. So we are left with three. We have our originally rat, Imp, and the twins, Harry and Larry.

Anyway there are two main points to the post and they are as follows:

Rats love oatmeal. My cousin David has correctly named it rat crack. I made them two packets of cinnamon roll flavored instant oatmeal and I had all three of them digging in. It makes for a good healthy treat every now and then. I haven’t gotten figured out what their main food will be. Even though we’ve had them for almost a year. We’ve switched between bird food (with seeds and corn ) to hamster food and back. They seem to like the hamster food the best but it comes in such little bags and the 3 of them go through it so fast. The bird food (I don’t think it’s technically meant for birds but I don’t know what to call it and it’s found with the bird seed) comes in a huge bag and is less expensive but it isn’t their favorite. No matter what we give them we do supplement it with table scraps. I wouldn’t say they get table scraps daily, but at least a couple times a week. They love when my dad makes mashed potatoes because they get the peel. However, he hasn’t really cooked anything in quite a long time now. But that’s a whole other post not for tonight.

The other point to this post was my creative ingenuity. For awhile now I’ve wanted to give the rats a hammock but I knew if I bought one they’d just tear it to shreds. My cousin David, or maybe it was his wife Kim, suggested I grab an old sweatshirt or some scrap fleece from a craft store and make my own. Well I don’t have any old sweatshirts to cut up and I never seem to have the cash to get to a fabric store to buy fleece. So last night I got to thinking about what I could use. It’s only taken me a year but I found something. We have an old towel (well actually it’s a bath mat) that already has holes in it. Nothing major that I have to worry about rats falling through, but it isn’t in any condition to be used for it’s proper use. Especially since we have a really nice bath mat. So last night I cut holes in each corner and used zip ties to attach it to the cage, and my fur babies now have a nice, homemade, hammock. It’s huge. Seriously it takes up about half the cage in length and hangs down quite a bit. But that just means it can be climbed on and the bottom is big enough for a cuddle puddle. All three rats can use it at the same time with easy. The bad news is they still prefer their corner, it seems. I’m hoping they just have to get use to it.

Anyway there is your not so regular update on the rats. They are all happy and healthy and properly spoiled.

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