Obligatory Pet Post

It's time for my obligatory pet picture post!

I'd like for everyone to meet my "kids".


Trigger (top) and Winks (bottom).


A close up of Trigger.


A close up of Winks.


Cali, my burrowing 5 year old female feline.


Winks and Trigger are male Rattus norvegicus. They're the same species of rat as the typical "vermin" type, except these have been bred for domestication and carry practically no zoonosis because they are removed from the environments which cause most of the diseases rats carry. And to answer the inevitable question, no, my cat doesn't try to eat them. In fact, she's paranoid of them and goes out of her way to avoid them.

Yep, I have pet rats, and I love them to death. These two aren't the first, actually.
In November of 2001, my wife, who was a bit upset that I had a pet cat and she didn't have a pet to call her own, decided she wanted a rat. So off to the store she went. She ended up getting a rat from a, uh, less then reputable pet shop who only kept rats to sell as snake food. To our surprise, the new rat took to us immediately. To my wife's dismay, the new rat took to me more than her.

Here is our first rat, the one who started it all: Boots.

Remember how I said the pet shop was "less than reputable"? Well, "feeder" rats aren't separated by sex. This is a fact my wife did not know when she went to get a pet. Two weeks after getting Boots, we were given seven other little gifts in the form of small, pink baby rat blobs. Boots, surprisingly, was not only comfortable with giving birth to these kittens (yes, rat babies are called kittens), but also literally demanded we help her. She would give birth, break the sac, make sure the kitten was alive, and then literally pick them up and bring them to me to clean. She had 3 female kittens and 4 males (they can easily be sexed at birth by looking for areas of discoloration on the underside which will become female's nipples - by the time they're "of age" and have to be separated, you can easily distinguish the males for obvious reasons).

This sealed the deal for us. Pet rats were now the greatest pets ever. Sadly, rats have a very short life span, 2-4 years, depending on stock, environment and maintenance. The last of our original colony passed away in mid-2005, 3 years after being born. As you can imagine, their deaths were hard to bear because, having raised them from birth, they treated us as though we were one of them (or they were one of us), so watching them get old and sick was VERY depressing.

Without further adieu, some links to my original "colony", from birth to adulthood.

Warning: Cuteness lies behind some links!
001: Boots the night we got her.
002: Boots immediately after birth/the kitten's first feeding.
003: The kittens on day 3.
004: One of the kittens on day 6, getting initial fur fuzz.
005: One of the kittens on day 14, full fur, opening eyes.
006: Day 20. The two PEW (Pink Eyed White) kittens. One male, one female.
007: The entire colony at day 21.
008: Two of the kittens hamming it up for the camera.
009: All grown up. These are the same two in picture 008: Cliffy and Dio (males).
010: Close up of Cliffy.
011: Dio exploring an off-limits area.
012: Gimli (male) drinking from the faucet.
013: Pink Eyed White male, Legolas, appearing to be scheming.
014: Pink Eyed White female, Ghirri, attempting to get to the camera.
015: Lazy and shy Kahlua (female) lounging in a homemade hammock.
016: Nibbles, female, staring me down as she always did.