DO Trudy and Oreo snore?

No.How do I know? Trudy is sleeping with her head tucked under my ear and Oreo is asleep, using my hood as a hammock, and neither of them are snoring, even slightly

Yeah, it’s cute. But if Oreo is marinating my hood, I’m putting her in the shower.

The hoody

I put on my Wisconsin Badgers hooded top. Trudy has declared it the best thing ever and has taken up residence in the hood, whether it’s up or down, and doesn’t seem inclined to ever leave. I think Oreo’s been spending a little too much time kicking her out of the nest and otherwise leaping up and down on her.

The Rat Pen

Trudy hates new places.

And now for something not very different

Vermintrude curled up apparently sitting on her own head while napping. Oreo behind her eating one of the ratfood nuggets form the quite impressively huge stash they managed to hide under a piece of paper.

I have real bedding for them but they tend to kick it around and ignore it. Show them a scrap of brown paper or some paper kitchen towel and they’re in ratty heaven. The glee with which they dash around, dragging it all back is a wonder.

Oreo is so keen to build her nest that often she doesn’t wait for Trudy to move first.

Counting my rat’s nipples

So there I am, trying to tempt a rat into climbing up the bars so I can see if she has nipples.

If you’re a rat owner you know why. For everyone else, the reason is that Oreo is looking suspiciously like she swallowed a pingpong ball. I think she might be pregnant. She’s been getting moody, she’s been wolfing down food, she doesn’t like to leave the nest unless there’s nesting material around in which case she’s manic. Also I’ve had them just about three weeks, about right or Oreo to have been knocked up and about to produce a litter… in fact it’s about the last practical date. Any longer and I can safely assume she’s just a fat moody so-and-so.

And if she is pregnant, her nipples should be showing. Maybe.

So there I am… trying to see her nipples. I feel like such a perv.

Rat stuff

I mean “stuff” as in “Stuff to put in the cage”.

Toys mostly. a ball that drops treats a mini Kong or doing the same. a jingle ball… and a carrier box to put them in when I need to move tehm around or simply clean the  cage.

Oreo poked the jingle ball and treat ball and went back to bed.

Trudy ignored them. I tried the mini ring size rat groomer… they loved it, but only insofar as they seemed to want to eat it.

The carry box? Oreo sat in a corner and looked mildly perturbed. Trudy wigged out. I mean she was scrabbling and chewing and clawing at the lid to get out. I’ve never seen her so freaked.

Let sleeping rats lie

Trudy just draped herself across the back of my neck and went to sleep with her chin on my shoulder… and my camera is upstairs so I can’t get a picture…

I’m not letting them go to the cinema any more.

It warps their tiny fragile minds.

Did she fall or was she…

Pushed. Oreo just pushed Trudy off the upper ledge. It’s not a far fall and the landing as if not soft, at least yielding.

I knew I shouldn’t have let them name each other as beneficiaries in their life insurance policies.

Rat update

Well apart from my mother turning out to be Queen of the Rats, with the ability to stick her hand in the cage and make the secret rat summoning signal which cause both Trudy and Oreo to wake up, leave the nest and come and be BFF, sit on her shoulder blow kisses, etc. the big news is that Trudy is manic to get out of the cage and explore.

I mean manic. Every time I go in she’s rattling her little tin cup on the bars and shaking the door. When I open it she hardly ever takes a treat, she wants to be OUT.

Which is hilarious because I let her climb up to the top of the cage and Oreo loses her mind – she scampers around frantically and follows Trudy from the inside. Eventually Oreo works out how to climb out and then I have both scampering around the top of the cage.

After that it’s rat snuggling time.

Trudy likes to cuddle up after some scampering and do some teeth grinding, which is nice. I’ve only had them a bit over a week and a half but I’m worried they don’t have enough to gnaw on, so today I bought them a little edible alfalfa log  to chew.

I also bought them a rat sized explore-ball. One of those hollow plastic things you insert your pet into so they can run around your sadly un-rat proof house and be entertained.

Unfortunately half the clips that hold it together are missing so it will have to be returned. Once it’s back I can let Trudy run around a little more.

Handing stuff to my rat

Trudy, who has now discovered the joys of Stuff Outside The Cage is pretty much banging on the door. She’s desperate to explore.

In fact I assumed she wanted treats so I popped open the door and she leapt out, I handed her a cornflake… and she ran in, then came back. Odd. Normally she sits in the cage and eats. But now she grabs the cornflake and takes it off, then drops it and comes back. Oreo is delighted. She’s hoovering up all the loose cornflakes and running off to snack.

I recall Tserisa Zlatorbitek-Peledragon saying she handed her rats various objects and they scuttled o to stash them so I wondered i Trudy was trophy hunting.

I got a penny and two large glass fake gems – too big to swallow  and some cornflakes and let Trudy take her pick. She tried chewing a gem, then dropped it. She grabbed the penny and took it bac to her cage though.

New theory. She wants something to chew and for some reason doesn’t like the wooden stick that was in the centre of her hanging treat stick.

Cleaning day

The procedure should be more or less like this:

1. Chase all vermin to their nest.
2. Remove wire cage
3. Pick up Nest and empty contents into box.
4. Scoop out cage
5. Add new lining of cat litter
6. Replace rats.

Actually it goes more like this:

1. Rattle tube. Trudy looks out and goes “Yyyyyyyyes?”.
1. Rattle tube some more. Rat clings on for dear life.
2. Blow into tube. Rat moves and begins to wash her ears.
3. Various blowing rattling and tapping activities to no avail.
4. Start pondering some sort of rat poking activity.
5. Rat leaves and heads to nest under her own steam.
2. Examine cage. Unclip our retaining latches, and remove wire half.
3. Pick up nest and…
• Two rattie pink noses stick out from different holes.
• Start juggling nest around to try and keep them in until box is ready.
• Tip nest.
• Shake gently.
• Shake firmly
• Rat leaps out of top of nest.
• Try and catch rat one handed and guide her into box while attempting to evict other rodent
• Try and catch other rodent as she tries to escape, while holding nest and trying to prevent first rat from exiting box which she is levering open.
• Think “Airholes, knew I’d forgotten something.”
• Put one huge airhole in box lid, because it’s so funny to see the Vermin sticking their noses out.
4. Scoop cage.
5. New cat litter
6. Open box, have conversation with rats:

Me: All cleaned!
Oreo: You have defiled the sacred land of our ancestors!
Trudy: The spirits of our ancestors who were buried there will curse you!
Me: Actually guys, I think you’ll find the only thing buried in there was about 8Kg of rat poo.
Trudy: I’m still cursing you.
Me: The only curse you know is “Squeak”.
Oreo: He’s got you there.
Me: Surprise rat snuggles!
Oreo: AHRG! Jings!
Trudy: BEGORRAH! AIEE!

Thirty seconds later, Oreo was curled up washing her whiskers and getting pets and Trudy was laid on my arm bruxing. After ten minutes of playing and petting I put Oreo and Trudy back in the cage. Trudy immediately climbed back out so I picked her up, and she came and sat on my shoulder and stuck her nose in my ear.

In fact I put her back a few times and she seemed so eager to come out and play I ended up letting her out several times, and yes, she really does seem OK with being petted and even handled now.

Actually I put in a new swinging treat stick and she practically climbed on my hand to see what was up. A good sign, I think. Oreo’s still pretty sulky though but eh.

More rat oddity

Oreo is in a bit of weird a weird mood.

I walked in an hour ago and she had her head sticking out so I waved a cornflake at her... no reaction. So I bapped her on the nose with it. No reaction. So I tickled her chin with it. No reaction. Finally she just sort of went "You want me to hold that?" and grabbed it lightly. Then just sat here staring at me with a cornflake hanging out of her mouth.

Also I took up a “Near UV”" blue light – it’s like a UV light but it’s just… really blue. It makes stuff fluoresce, but kids can’t use it to turn their eyeballs into lumps of pale white goo. I wanted to see if it would make rat pee light up. Mostly because I was bored but it occurs to me it’d make it easy for me to see which corner they picked as their toilet.

Anyway it didn’t work but it turns out Trudy fluoresces white when lit up. Yeah. I have a fluorescent rat. JEALOUS YET?!

Rat fail

Trudy likes to sleep in the tube that goes from the first deck to the top deck in her cage. I pop in to check on the raties a fair amount. Once they wake up I generally go sit with them but I don’t like to go wake them up by cluttering around.

This time I peeked in and saw Trudy on her belly, asleep in the tube and as I watched, she slooooowly slid down the tube on her belly and WHANG! –Smacked into the bars of the cage.

Great. I thought she’d killed herself or broken her nose, but apparently she’s dragged enough torn up paper into the tube as bedding that she only got startled.

That said I think she blames me. She was definitely glaring a little…

Rats in motion

Oreo's still skulking, but Trudy has wrapped her tiny mind around the concept ofbeing hand fed with aplomb:

Oreo is starting to get the idea but she is hampered by Trudy's new hobby: Leaping off the top of the nest, onto Oreo's head and from there to my hand where she demonstrates her ability to hoover up half the treats in one pass.

Rat snuggling

There’s a joke. It goes like this:

Q: How do you know if someone has ADD?
Reply: I don’t know, how do you know if someone has ADD?
Punchline: Wow, let’s go ride bicycles!

Ok, so now I’ve set the tone, I actually managed to pick Oreo up. Mind you, she wasn’t too pleased and lodged several objections. It pretty much went down like this:

Me: [Traps Oreo in the play pipe and uses it to extract Oreo from the cage] I have you now!

Oreo: Darth Big Scary Hand! I should have known!

Me: Come out of the tube!

Oreo: No you’re going to eat me. I shall escape. [Starts running from one end to the other to find one end that doesn’t have a big scary hand nearby]

Me: I’m not going to eat you!

Oreo: [Leaps out of one end of the pipe, goes “AAAAAAAAH!” and runs all the way back in as I pick it up, then comes zooming out the top end, where she’s picked up]

Me: Worst escape ever.

Oreo: AAAAAH! I’m gonna DIE!

Me: [Gently stroking as Oreo runs around like mad] No, seriously, just calm down…

Oreo: Aaaaah! Aaaaaah! Aaaaaah! Ooh, this is nice *snuggle*.

Me: That’s it?!

Oreo: What’s this? What’s that? Hey, that looks interesting! Ooh! What’s this? More pettinz! What’s that?

Me:  Tomorrow I’m buying you some Ratalin.

Oreo did calm down and when I came to put her back in the cage, she even clung to my hand a little. Once she was back in, she didn’t run and hide out and even went back to playing with the tube. She seemed a lot less skittish and in turn, Trudy calmed down too.

However, while she’s quite happy to come and snarfle treats from an open palm, she still doesn’t want to come out and play again, and I couldn’t trap Trudy with the same trick when I tried.

The Penthouse Suite

There are three levels to the Rat cage.

1. The bottom where all the poo happens, and where the cardboard tubenest is, and the play tube
2. Mid level platform, where the food bowl is. From there to the top platform, is a tube.
3. Top level. Nothing much here right now, because the ratspush everything off onto each other's heads from up here.

I put in some brown paper folded into a bag for the girls to play with, chew, tear, hide under, use in the nest, etc. Trudy immediately started hanging out of thetube and tried to drag it in with her.
It seems that she's decided all the tubes in the cage are nest areas - she's often found curled up in the top tube.
I'm not sure what makes them move up there - maybe the other nest gets too warm, maybe Oreo irks Trudy who goes off to get some peace, and Oreo comes looking for her in case there's food or she just wants a snuggle...
This time I caught them settling down an took a few snaps:

Oreo the bully

Trudy was running around last night so I gave her a little nibbly treat. She scampered over to the far side of the cage to eat it... and Oreo came zooming out, grabbed it and hid out in the nest to eat it.
Clearly Oreo is the dominant one... And abit of a bitch.