Rats

The house has been very quiet this weekend, as son and grand-daughter are away and I only have the three cats and two rats for company.  The rats are in a cage, and not there to keep the cats entertained!

I am not that keen on rats, even tame ones.  I cannot bring myself to touch them, although I do appreciate their intelligence and sometimes find their antics quite entertaining.  Son loves them and has made an awesome cage for them out of an old cupboard.  It has different floors, connected by ladders, with various sleeping nooks and activities.  He likes to change things around every now and then, giving them a new toy or different food to try.  They seem to like the mental challenge.  One is named Pepper and the other is called Mayo – but I can never remember who is who so just refer to them as The Boys. 

Baby Me

Perhaps it is my experiences with wild rats that has put me off these rodents.  As a child we had rats living in the outside room we called the wash-house.  My mother would set traps and I would hear them when they snapped and the poor creature would be thrashing about for a while.  She hated rats with a vengeance, apparently after discovering several of them surrounding my bassinet after she had placed it on the ground in front of the fire one night.  Rats have been known to gnaw the faces of babies because of the smell of milk, so I am very thankful she found them in time!

As an adult we often lived in houses where one could hear rats and mice scurrying around in the ceiling, but we didn’t usually see them.  Only once did I have a close face-to-face Rat Encounter, and that was in my kitchen.  It was probably more terrified than I was as it leapt as high as the window, trying to escape this screaming woman doing her best to chase it away with a rolled up newspaper!

Probably the most awful Rat Experience I have had was watching four very large rats feasting on scraps in the farm rubbish dump.  I have been told they were most likely “water rats” as they were as big as an adult cat, so fat they almost looked like they had been blown up like a balloon.  I stood on the hill above, watching them with a kind of enthralled horror.  I never even knew that rats could grow that big.  I only saw them the once, but have never forgotten the experience.

Rats in our bush can create havoc for native birdlife (that is a man in the photo, not a rat!)

I was never one to jump up onto a chair when I came across rodents, which is just as well because that would be near impossible to do now!  The last time I came across wild rats, we had visitors and were sitting out on the lawn beneath a tree one sunny afternoon.  We could see a couple of rats as they raced back and forth across the lawn to feast on a broken pumpkin sitting in the shed.  They must have been so hungry, as they don’t normally venture out into the open during the day and especially with people around.

Back to The Boys.  I have to feed them over the weekend – a little bit of cheese and some unflavoured popcorn in the morning, and in the evening give them a mixture of peas, corn and different seeds.  If I feel like it, I am allowed to give them a lunchtime treat of a couple of blueberries.   And that is it.  They have plenty of water and lots of room to exercise, so I don’t need to do anything else with them.  They can wait till son returns before they get any more cuddles.

Enjoy your weekend,

Margaret