I have, ever since that happened, suspected that my friend’s mother was mistaken, or just didn’t like the idea of a pet mouse in her house. I was sad when my friend had to get rid of Ziggy- he was a cute little white mouse. I liked him, even though he pooped on my hand, once.
Can you housetrain pet rats?
How many baby rats are in the average litter?
How old are the babies before you’ll send them to their new homes, away from their mothers? How long does it take a baby rat to grow up?
I want to thank you so much for starting this thread, and also for the work you’ve done helping to make healthier pet rats. People are so prejudiced and misinformed, and it makes me so sad. I would never say there is a perfect pet for everyone, but if anything comes close, in my opinion, it’s the rat. All the intelligence and love of a dog, all the curiosity and silliness of a cat, and the ease of care inherent in smell pets. If only they lived a bit longer…
Anyway, thank you, and your rats are simply gorgeous!
I suspect lots of parents tell their children things like this when they don’t want a pet in the house. My mother told me that rats are “escape geniuses” and would not allow me to have one because it would escape no matter what. When I was 18 I bought a basically escape-proof cage, and a rat, and brought it home without her permission. It was then I discovered that it wasn’t escaping she was worried about, she was simply terrified of rats. Luckily, my grandmother (her mom) was extremely fond of them, and told her she was not allowed to make me get rid of it 
I wouldn’t have gotten the animal until I moved out if I’d known she was THAT afraid of them, though. And of course, she got over it and learned to love them!
You can housetrain rats to a certain extent. They are latrine animals and prefer a “potty spot,” and you can help train them to it. But some rats are too lazy or too interested in their surroundings to ever be 100% trained.
There are 12 babies in the average litter. Some bloodlines produce smaller litters or larger - your best indicator of how big a does’ litter is going to be is projected by looking at their mother and grandmothers’ litter size. Rats only have 12 nipples, so in the case of larger litters you often lose one or two. Smaller litters tend to be big and fat!
I separate babies from mom at 5 weeks old. By then, all the boys have “dropped” and it’s not impossible that the little girls or mom COULD get impregnated by a brother. Mom’s not nursing anymore, so she starts going into estrus again. Little boys USUALLY aren’t fertile at that age, but I don’t like to take chances.
I move the little boys into an adult boy cage, and the little girls into a cage with adult females (who are not mom. Mom needs a break!) This provides vital socialization for the babies to learn how to act and socialize as adults, as many adopters only adopt 2 babies. It’s very good for them to learn how adults interact, especially if they ever get new companions introduced into the cage at later dates. Then at 7-8 weeks, I send them home to their adopters.
At 3 months they’ve finished their final adult coat moult, and are basically grownups, but the long bones keep growing until about 1 year.
Do show rats have pedigrees, the way show cats and dogs do? Can anybody with (say) a blue-coated rat enter it in a show and have it judged alongside other blue rats? It doesn’t work that way with cats, AFAIK. I have a blue cat that looks like a Korat, but, since I have no papers proving she is a Korat, I can’t enter her in a cat show as a Korat.
My rats have pedigrees - not all rats do. A pedigree is just a listing of all the animal’s ancestors, when it comes down to that. A pedigree just proves that someone has taken some amount of care in selecting that animal’s forebears.
Who can show depends very much on the club in charge of the show. For our club, anyone who is a member of the club can enter any rat they wish, whether or not that rat is pedigreed. The rat does, however, have to be registered with the North American Rat Registry (NARR - http://www.ratregistry.org/) and have a registration number, for paperwork purposes. Anyone may register a rat in NARR for the sum of $1, even if they are not NARR members and even if the rat has no pedigree.
The reason we do not allow non-club members to show their rats is for health safety reasons. Rats have several very contagious and deadly viruses for which we cannot vaccinate them. In order to keep our shows from becoming events where you win a ribbon and kill your animals, we practice a strict pre-show quarantine, and the only way we can enforce it is to only allow members to show. Other rat clubs practice lesser or no versions of quarantine, and I can’t speak for them.
Nope. Capys need a pool to swim in, and believe me, you don’t want them to share your backyard inground. They poop in the water, distressingly large boluses, which then break down. They’re also big eaters, difficult to house break, etc.
Stick with domestic animals, folks!
Really? I’ve known some handraised baby wild rats (well-meaning but misguided Aussie wildlife rehabbers thought they were some kind of native marsupial :D) who seemed just as sweet as domestic. Of course, this is anecdotal, and I’m sure you know best.
I am in Australia Feyrat 
It makes life hard, because we’ve got to try and force breed traits into our bloodlines, we can’t import blood from externally. A breeder in the eastern states tried to import sperm, but I don’t know how far she ever got with that, I stopped reading the forums a while ago.
Not that I breed. I have a bachelor cage, and no wish to get any girls
Well, I’ve known people with wolves and wolf mixes that seemed very sweet, but I still think it’s a bad idea. I mean, you might get lucky, but why risk it, especially when domesticated rats are out there?
That’s pretty much the crux of the matter. While you CAN hand-tame almost any wild animal, they will never have the hundreds of generations of domestication behind them. While domestication may sometimes fail us, its successes are certainly of a greater number.
I had a pet sparrow when I was young. We raised her from a basically just-hatched little pink thing that had fallen out of a nest being removed from a bank sign. She was alone and never had any idea she was a bird. She could not be released into the wild, had no fear of humans or furry animals (she loved my pet rabbit and used to bathe in his water dish, and he could have been a cat for all she knew,) was afraid of trees, and was agoraphobic. However, even though we raised her the exact same way we handraised the cockatiels my mother used to breed, she was never really tamed. She hated being touched, didn’t like being caged (she lived loose in my bedroom) and did not seek me out for companionship, though she did not fear me and understood I was the provider-of-food. She certainly wasn’t a better pet than a domesticated bird would be.
In the same way, a wild rat or a hybrid simply doesn’t have the generations of being attuned to human beings that a domestic rat does, not to mention the generations of breeding for specific traits like health or pretty colors.
Can rats teleport?
No, seriously. A friend of mine had rats. They lived in a glass-sided aquarium on a tall shelf, with a wire-mesh lid weighted down by several heavy books and an action figure. Their food lived in a bag on a tall shelf across the room. One day, we played with them, then put them back in the aquarium and reset the lid, including the weights and the action figure, then left the room. I mention the action figure because it was standing on two legs and would have fallen over if the lid had moved. We left the room and locked it, so nobody could have entered after us.
When we came back several hours later, we went to feed them, but all the food was gone. When we looked at their aquarium, we saw that it was all piled up on one side, under a layer of shavings. The lid was still on, and the action figure still upright, so we don’t think there’s any way they could have moved or shifted the lid or wire mesh. Had the lid been open, they might well have jumped out, although the shelf was high enough to make for a hard landing- but then they wouldn’t have been able to get back in, especially not while carrying the food.
Personally, I blame NiMH.
Uh… well, mine can’t. Thank goodness.
I DID have several rats over the year who were capable of INSANELY complex problem solving that allowed them to open and leave their cages - including one that figured out how to unscrew things, several that figured out pressure latches, and one who forced his cagemates to form a “human pyramid” while he chewed a vulnerable plastic latch.
I used to keep my rat cage in my bedroom, and when the door to the cage was open it formed a bridge to the side of my bed.
I discovered the boys could open the cage if I didn’t set up a more complex latching system, the day I woke up to find one of them sat next to my head, trying to peel the bandaid off my freshly-pierced nose (that I’d put on there to stop the stud catching on the sheets or getting hair tangled round it).
After that day, I started using an excess cage ladder to latch the door to the upper bars, so it couldn’t just be pushed open.
Ooh, you’re lucky he was just trying to peel it. A majority of the rats I’ve had really HATE band-aids. I don’t know why, but they will ATTACK one if I have one on my hand and put it in their cage. Which is, y’know, not so great for whatever I’m wearing the band-aid on in the first place…
Heh, I went to sleep after a long day at work once with several girl rats running around on my bed. Woke up with no fingernails past the quick (they gnawed all the white off) and no EYELASHES. I dunno why, but my rats have all loved the taste of mascara. 
O_O
…
They ate your eyelashes?!
Flashes back to that scene from 1984
Wait, these are rats you bred yourself, or rescue rats?
This thread is awesome. I used to have three rat girls when I was in college. They were really friendly and smart and just generally lovely. It might sound weird but I loved petting their rough little tails.
Your pictures are adorable. I wish everyone understood what great pets rats make.
Rats I bred myself. I think it’s the smell. They just don’t like it.
Not every rat is like that, but lots of them seem to think band-aids need to be killed.
Olives - I love stroking my boys’ tails. One of my boys, Bester, really loves having his tail pulled (gently of course, and never EVER to pick him up by the tail)
Man, you guys should get to handle baby rat tails. When they’re super soft and pink and they twitch while they sleep… squee Seriously, baby rat tails may be one of the best things about being a breeder. They’re still nice when they go to new homes, but not BABY. I get them for all that