About 15 years ago I started raising rats as pets. The first 2 I got I named Patches and Misty. Misty was kinda grumpy and would bite at me at times. Patches on the other hand was very friendly and adventurous. For about 2 hours each night I would let them out of thier cage to play and roam around the room. I set up barriers so they were limited in where they could go. One day I was on the phone in the other room and was not watching them. When I went back into the room there was Misty eating some corn but I could not find Patches anywhere. I looked under the furniture, behind things, pulled everything out of thier cage etc. I was going nuts. I then thought maybe she was able to jump the barriers I set up and started looking down the hall. I then wondered if she could get under the doors so now I am going through each room afraid that she got into a place I would not be able to get her. After about 3 hours of searching and putting food out to tempt her I was defeated and sat on my couch thinking I lost the rat. Out of the corner of my eye I see movement up high in the room I started in. She was up on top of my vallence walking back and forth. I could not for the life of me figure out how she got up there because I had no curtains or anything hanging down low enough. Finally I got her down and she immediately jumped back up on the window ledge, climbed through the closed blinds and then climbed up the back side of the blinds, stretched out and half jumped up onto the vallance. I swore I would never get another rat again! Since those first 2 girls Ive had 14 more rats :-)
I heard that rats were very intelligent and made good pets...never had one but had Guiana pigs
Guiana Pigs and Rats are very closely related. Guiana Pigs are much bigger and less agile than rats so you would never see one of them up on the valance in my house. I have only had the opportunity to handle 2 Guiana pigs in my life and thier personalities could not have been more different. The first one I held bit me and was extremely jumpy and wanted nothing to do with people (I guess similar to my pet rat Misty) The other could not have been more lovable, always wanted to be pet but was still squimish about being held.
I only had those two when I was little
Ma never allowed any pet in our house
so when they bit the dust I just had
outdoor pets and never in a cage again
Some of my rats I let free roam after they were litter trained and I made sure they did not chew things they were not supposed to. Id say about half my rats have been caged and half free roamed as adults. One girl I had "Nikita" would follow me around the house and if I was sitting at my computer would climb up my leg nestle into my arm and nudge my hand to pet her til she fel asleep in my arm which usually made doing anything on the computer very difficult. She was very sweet and the softest rat I ever had. She was the one that got my mother over her fear of rats because she would climb into anyones lap looking to be pet.
did you ever let your pets have babies or were they all fixed?
Nope never let them have babies. They were not fixed either. I always had either all males or all females and the rare occasion I has overlaps they were kept totally seperate. I do not know enough about breeding to know when to seperate them and with any rodent 2 can turn into 50 in a very short time if you do not know what you are doing
good point
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