Martin Malmkvist wrote:
Anyone ever had rats or other rodents as pets? Care to share some experiences?
I don't have any rats, but I have 1 regular syrian hamster and 2 blackberry dwarf hamsters. Hamsters are notorious for being escape artists. Our hamster Ginger got out of the first cage we had for her (which is the one the dwarf hamsters are in now) about 3 days after we got her, and was out for almost 24 hours. Her cage was upstairs in our bedroom but we found her downstairs in the dining room behind a duffle bag on the floor desparately trying to get behind a bookshelf because the cat was trying to move the duffle bag. The stress from that led to her developing wet tail and almost dying (several months later now, she's healthy and happy).
After getting home from a weekend stay with our veterinarian (who has a clinic in her own house) under intensive care, and then a week of being fed twice a day by eyedropper, she was pronounced healthy, and we moved her to a new cage. She got out of that one within 24 hours, but we actually heard her drop to the floor and caught her again within a couple of minutes.
Her current (3rd) cage is a 10 gallon glass aquarium with a narrow-barred multi-level cage that sits on top of it and has ramps to let her move from level to level. She hasn't yet figured out how to escape from that, but she did have one other escape. In addition to the wheel in her cage, we let her exercise by placing her in a ventilated plastic globe available at most pet stores around here called a "hamster ball." She can roam around the house in that and be safe from the cat (in fact, she likes to build up a good amount of speed and bash into the cat, which annoys the cat to no end :-). We found another kind of hamster ball which is actually just a large wheel with what looks like a car built around it. The first time she was roaming around the house in that, suddenly the dog went into our bedroom. The dog *never* goes into our bedroom, so we caught on pretty quickly that something was up. The cat went to investigate about 30 seconds in advance of my wife and me. As I was walking across the livingroom to the bedroom door, I looked down and saw that the door to the hamster car was off and the hamster was no where to be seen. The hamster was in the bedroom under the dresser, and the dog had gone in there to alert us and also to keep the cat from getting to the hamster.
The dwarf hamsters have not been nearly as much trouble. They are much too small to exploit the escape route that Ginger used (both of our dwarf hamsters combined are probably half the size of our regular hamster). But just today we had a minor scare. I was carrying Gimli, one of our dwarf hamsters, when suddenly for no apparent reason, he decided to dive out of my hands and onto the floor, landing about a foot (1/3 meter) away from the cat. Fortunately the cat was looking the other way and I managed to retrieve Gimli and return him to his cage before the cat even figured out what was going on.
The dwarf hamsters (Gimli and Puck) like to fight each other, but they make the cutest little sound when they are doing so. I find the sound very difficult to describe (it's sort of a "puff-squeek" but that really doesn't do it justice). Maybe I'll be able to get a recording of it and post it on a web site (when I eventually get around to writing one).
Duncan and Liam, our guinea pigs, also fight each other when put into a space together, so they live in separate cages, although they can see and hear each other and seem to get along well from a distance....
Reggie Bautista
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