One other thing: I got bitten by hamsters on probably a weekly basis at the pet store. I’ve owned more than fifty rats and handled many thousands of them. I’ve yet to ever be bitten by a rat. I’ve met a few skittish ones, but they’re definitely the exception.
As far as mice go, I think of them like the mammalian version of guppies. They’re fun little critters, and also come in an incredible variety of colors and patterns, but while I’d have a pet rat out on the counter at my pet store, and had rats that would come when called and do tricks for raisins… mice would be more fun in a setting where you set them up with an elaborate gymnasium cage with lots of toys and then sit back and watch them play.
Like anything, pocket pets are fun for different reasons, depending on what you want out of their company. Have fun!
I had guinea pigs and hamsters as a child, and I agree with the guinea pig recommendations. I don’t agree at all with the earlier poster about the bathroom problems. We had one guinea pig litter box trained. Seriously. We’d put her out of her cage to run around the living room (supervised) and would put out a little pan of pine shavings. She’d go in, do her business, and continue running about. YMMV.
They do get fat very, very easily, though. One of mine had a double chin, full jowls and everything. It could be that they tend to get fat because they have the cutest way of begging (squeaking) for food, a noise that seems to be reserved exclusively for humans. In addition to the regular pellet diet, we’d hand feed ours lettuce, baby carrots, celery, and just about anything green that was left over in the fridge. That was amazing fun, and they sure become affectionate towards the person who provides the lettuce and will even “purr” over it.
Gerbils! Had them for several years as a kid- made the mistake of mixing genders and quickly had a LOT of them.
Get a big glass fishtank- at least 10 gallons, better yet 20. Wire the screen top on securely- they can jump and can gnaw through lesser substances. Put some sand on the bottom and then a pretty thick layer of wood chips- gerbils love to burrow. Put a big coffee can in there for their house, and get a wheel or two. They use the wheels a lot, so get some 3-in-1 too. Do NOT EVER give them plastic anything. Gerbils will chew it to shreds and harm themselves. These critters are fine if they’re raised to be handled, but they’re very active and holding them is like handling a amphetamine fueled fur Slinky. DO respect them- when startled, their bite can really take a hunk out of you.
Gerbil food comes in little boxes like a box of cornstarch. Give them the tubes from TP and paper towels- they LOVE that! Oh yeah, and a glass or ceramic food dish. And water bottles- set the little ball-bearing spout within reach, but high enough so they don’t pile litter against it and soak everything.
Gerbils are actually pretty clean and low-maintenance. They ARE desert animals. Every now and then, see if you can set up a larger enclosure outdoors and let them play. Make it pretty tight; they burrow and jump, remember? Change their litter when…well, it’s pretty obvious. Get a book on raising them.
Do NOT overcrowd gerbils. If you do, they can turn cannibalistic- not a pretty sight. Having a rock or something in there for them to perch and bask on is cool. Something I liked to do was, when their food box was empty, I’d put the food box in the tank, and there were like a dozen or more gerbils, and they’d smell the food and squeeze into the box, and after a few minutes I’d have a box full of gerbils and could pour them out like a furry cascade! Then they’d chew up the cardboard box for bedding. And that coffee can serves a purpose. It gives them something to gnaw on, which is important. Pay attention to that previous post about not leaving the tank in direct sunlight.
Dunno about them personally, but some friends have a chinchilla! It’s way cute, and its fur is softer than you’d believe possible.
Thanks for the advice, everybody. We will look into rats. When I mentioned a “friendly” animal in the OP, it wasn’t so much that we wanted something the kids could play with, as simply an animal that wouldn’t get moody, hide from us constantly, and bite, which are all things I’d heard about hamsters from people. Although according to several of you in this thread, gerbils do plenty of biting also. Will take this into consideration. Also, Whatsit Jr. and MiniWhatsit saw the pictures of rats linked by NajaNivea and have now pronounced that we must have “one of those.”
I’d advise poking around the American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association site or the various yahoogroups and find a hobby breeder in your area. Even the fanciest of rats doesn’t cost much, and most are around ten or fifteen bucks–not much more than pet store prices, but in buying from a hobby breeder, often smart and enterprising kids and teenagers, you get friendly, well-socialized, healthy, and neat-looking rats. If you buy from a pet store, there’s an excellent chance you’re buying rats that haven’t really been handled much and aren’t terribly healthy. Hooray for rat babies!
One last thing–don’t get just one. Rats are extremely social critters, and will be happier, friendlier, and more affectionate if they have a buddy to hang out with. Solo rats get bored, skittish, and cranky. In general, girls are more active and playful, while boys are more snuggly. Get a pair of females, a pair of males, or best yet, one of each and have the boy neutered.
Yep look into finding a breeder in your area. You will have a healthier pet overall. You will also need to find a competent small animal vet in your area. This can be harder than it appears. If you don’t know of one, ask the breeder, or look for vets that handle exotics.
We’ve had several gerbils, innumerable hamsters, one rat, one mouse, and one guinea pig in total (besides the birds, the snakes, the fish, and the dog), and the guinea pig was by far everyone’s favorite of all the rodents. He was a sociable critter who we were happy to share the living room with, a warm pleasurable bundle to have on your lap, and everyone was immediately comfortable with him from Day One, and vice versa. Couldn’t say the same for any of the others, sorry. The rat, in spite of his advance press as a friendly giant, did not really hit it off with us, although we did try.
The biggest downside to the guinea pig was having to haul him out and clip his toenails when they got too long, but I found that wrapping him up in a dishtowel so he couldn’t see what I was doing, and giving him a carrot to nibble on as he reclined in my lap and I gently withdrew one tiny foot at a time from the dishtowel, helped a lot.
Other than that, he was quite an easy keeper, too. Maintenance didn’t involve anything messier or more fragrant than mucking out a horse’s stall, which again wasn’t something I could say for any of the others. The hamsters in particular tended to make crusty urine deposits that were very difficult to clean off the tray.
My brother had hamsters and gerbils as a kid, but I don’t remember any opinion on them one way or the other except when the rodents had to hit the wheel in the middle of the night and the squeaking would drive me nuts. My son had a guinea pig that had a great personality. He would go absolutely nuts when he heard his food bag being opened.
Master Marcus had rats when he was small - they were really friendly and sociable pets. Two problems - they tended to set of an allergic reaction as they cuddled up and, worst of all with a young owner, they only live a couple of years
Miss Marcus had Shaw’s Jirds (not sure if they are available in the States). These are like an overgrown gerbil - same sort of personality but slightly slower and easier for a small person to handle. Brilliant pets.
I will step in in the defence of them here. Hamsters are fastidiously clean, in their own mentality. “I piss in this corner and NOWHERE ELSE.” Which means that yes, you will need to clean out the bedding material frequently (i.e. every 2-3 days) to stop stalagmites appearing, but it also means that the rest of the cage, let alone anywhere else you let them go, is as clean as it was before they were there.
The only downside to them is they do need a larger cage than a gerbil / hamster. Recommended minimum for a single pig is 4 square feet; additional 2 square feet for every additional guinea pig in the same cage.
They’re not as smelly as hamsters. They don’t spend all their time trying to escape unlike hamsters. They don’t climb - which means if you have no predators in the house (dog / cat) you can have them in an open-top cage. They like to be petted: hamsters put up with it - sometimes (the last one we had never did get tame). They’re hysterically funny when they hear sounds that mean “food” - ours wheek hysterically when they hear plastic bags rattling. They love being in the thick of things.
They do have limited “toilet” control - their bladders only hold about 20 minutes worth. I remember once holding one of mine (early days, I didn’t know their limits) who became progressivly more squirmy, then quite clearly thought “oh, the hell with it” and peed all over my lap.
I went into guinea pig ownership knowing very little - I’d always been a hamster owner. So we bought the pig and cage at Petco. I always assumed pigs get maybe double the size of a hamster. So then I did some reading. And quickly realized the cage that claimed to be large enough for 1 pig was NOT going to work long-term and we made a cage per http://www.guineapigcages.com. Oh - and the pigs wind up being roughly the size of an adult foot (size 12-W here).
We are in fact now leaning towards guinea pigs. (Sorry, NajaNivea!) Our house has plenty o’ room for a nice-sized cage setup; our “formal dining room” :rolleyes: is currently housing my son’s train set and my sewing machine and ironing board, either of which can easily be pushed to the side so we could devote at least half of the room to a peeg cage.
I am getting really excited about this. We never had pets in my house as a kid because my mom is kind of animal-phobic, so this is a fun new adventure.
One assumes that you are, of course, aware that any small rodent pet will also give you the grand opportunity to teach your children about death in small scale, right? I mean, it’s the fodder for a million jokes, but it’s also quite true, particularly if you’ve never had pets.
Second this. We had “Charlie” before we had Daisy the Beagle, so Charlie lived in a Rubbermaid blanket box, which sat in the living room. Our house is extremely drafty, so I didn’t want him in a wire cage; I felt the solid sides made it cozier. I gave him one of those small plastic potato bins for an upside-down house to hide in, and bedded him in regulation hamster/gerbil bedding. And he got handfuls of hay from his very own bale of hay that I got at the garden center IIRC, because those teeny bags of “guinea pig hay” from Wal-Mart are always terribly musty and stale, really just dried-out grass. And he had his water drinker, which I added infant vitamin C drops to (this was 15 years ago, and apparently they don’t sell just Vitamin C drops for infants anymore). At first we would take him out of his box for walkabouts in the living room, but he never seemed to know what was required; he would just sit there on the floor, looking around. So eventually he settled into a lifestyle of lounging around his blanket box interspersed with lounging around on someone’s lap. Which would account for why his toenails kept growing so long, as he never wore them down with running around the living room.
I had a dog and a cat when I was growing up, as well as a parade of hamsters. And the first pet that I as a young mother obtained on behalf of my kids was a painted turtle, which lived temporarily in one of those round glass fishbowl/terrariums on the dining room table for a day until I got its home set up. And the first night, it kept bumping around its fishbowl, and I sat there at the dining room table, and it was freaky in some way I can’t quite pin down.
There was this…living creature.
In my house.
A living creature that was a wild creature in some way–not a dog or a cat, but a turtle, something that up till that moment had been one of “those things” out there in a pond, or at the zoo. It was quite a unique sensation, for about 10 minutes there.
This is wisdom. Attend, all.
Finding both my daughter’s gerbils as dead and bubbling, rotted corpses lying on the bottom of their aquarium on top of her dresser was a formative experience, both for her and for me. For her, because she learned a valuable lesson about “paying attention to your pets”.
And for me, because I’d never had to scrape a couple of dead, rotted, bubbling gerbil corpses out of an aquarium before, and now I know how it’s done.
And the morning we all came downstairs to find Charlie stiff and cold in his box, I briskly bundled him up in newspaper and put him in a Hefty sack, while my children watched matter-of-factly. By that time, we had already dealt with so many other deceased corpses of so many other pets that it was no biggie for them.
Don’t apologize, cavies are great–I didn’t suggest them originally because with the mention of mice and hamsters I thought you were looking for a low maintenance, couple-years-duration rodent.
I had one as a kid that I talked my parents into. I saw an ad in the paper for guinea pigs, $5. I begged my parents for one, and they said sure, as long as I could come up with the money for the pig and accessories–assuming I’d forget all about it in a week or two. A few weeks later I came back with cash in hand, and off we went to get a piggie. Zsofia–my parents had sort of expected the same thing, small critter = short lifespan, but ten years later off I went to college and she was still kickin’. She lived to eleven! She had a mohawk and would yeep! yeep! when she heard the veggie drawer in the fridge open.
They do live a long time and are a little higher maintenance than the rest of the critters mentioned, but they’re extremely personable, friendly, sturdy, and gentle little critters that make fantastic kid pets. All that having been said, there’s just no excuse for this.*
*I don’t know about you all, but I hear “I keel you!” in a heavy Peruvian accent
