Ratataties: More rats

It didn't take me very long to accumulate 5 female rats. I would use the excuse of Valentines Day or Trey's birthday gift, but we all know it was for me ;). The next one to join the family was Oreo. She's a white with black markings. After her it was Pop-tart. She was about to be a rolo but we couldn't figure out her color. She was a very light brown, like caramel. It was supposed to end with 4 rats but of course that didn't happen.

I had a good couple of months break from buying rats until my boyfriend found a rat with beautiful markings. We decided to call her starburst. The other rats socialized very well. They had their pecking order already so when Starburst came along it messed up everything. The top rat was Kitkat and she would try to run over starburst all the time that she would hide in the corner. What I found interesting was that Oreo seemed to befriend starburst and try to keep her safe from Kitkat. She would get in between them. It may be my imagination but I swear it seemed like she was protecting her.

I began to read about rats. Their behaviors and personalities. At the time I only had girls and they were a variety of colors since the pure black ones reminded me too much of sewer rats. My bf always wanted black ones though so I started looking into breeders. I found a woman who had black bucks. You can guess what happened next. Odin and Anubis became our first bucks. They were also the first i had while they were still babies. They were so tiny and i was so afraid when I put them in the girls old cage. They just looked to small for it. I started sowing pillows and hammocks. I didn't even know how to sow! I didn't have a sowing machine or a lesson but it seemed simple enough. I eventually figured out how to make tunnels. They would chew through the fleece pretty fast though so it seemed my hours of work would be gone in minutes. I can tel they enjoyed though so I kept up with them until my fingers were covered with band aids.

I joined a rat group on facebook and someone had a blue buck =0. Blue is my favorite color and every time I looked up blue buck I just fell in love. My boyfriend agreed on getting ONE more but that was it.

Poseidon became the last addition. He had it rough. The other bucks were not kind to him at all. Ironically Poseidon became the biggest of them all and is now the top rat.

The bucks out grew their cage in no time so it was time to split the critter nation.