Spot's Curse

Okay, I'll be honest. I uploaded pictures over a week ago for a post I planned to entitle "The Least of These". The tone was, in retrospect, shamefully self-congratulatory--focusing on the effort I was putting into providing as much comfort as possible to this rat dude in his last days. This rat, who, let's be honest, never liked me. Or any human. He did quite like his brother, Stripe, who passed away over two months ago. 

Initially, these two boys had lived in my daughter's room, and I didn't really have much access to them in their formative months. Once we brought the cage down into the living room--my guess is that they were about a year old at the time--I made persistent efforts to present myself to them as friend rather than foe. Or at least as "mostly harmless". Food bringer. I made significantly more progress on that front with Stripe, but Spot never stopped flinching when he saw me approach. Mind you, as soon as he spotted a morsel in my hand, he would eagerly grab it and scarf it down.

Spot is the one on the left.

Over the course of the past month, Spot has still flinched at my approach, but was happily accepting my increasingly creative offers of sustenance. In addition to putting his food on the cage floor so he wouldn't have to reach into the food dish, I started offering grape halves, bits of canned peach, dabs of yogurt---basically anything that would help get some additional liquid into him.

He was pathetic to look at, an the human residents of this household looked at him as little as possible. But he did still seem to be enjoying life to some extent, thanks in part to my efforts. A week or so ago, I noted that fresh cooked broccoli was apparently the most awesome stuff on earth. Anyway, I took a certain amount of pleasure in these little daily acts of kindness (mitzvas?) I was performing for what was objectively the least lovable creature I had ever intentionally lived with.

The end is near for Spot. We've been saying/thinking that for weeks now, but yesterday he started refusing food and drink. I suspect he is unconscious most of the time. Anyway, we keep checking on him. Yep, still breathing. Later on...still breathing. Seriously, boy, do you have something to prove? 

Please indulge me as I turn to a bit of dark humor here. This is not fun, so sometimes you've just got to try to find a way to laugh at a predicament, you know?

A while ago, I jokingly speculated

Spot the rat genuinely seems to be slowing down now. He's over 2 1/2 years old, so he's definitely led a long life for his species. I was starting to wonder if he'd made the rookie mistake of asking the gods for eternal life without clarifying that he wanted that to come with a side order of eternal youth and heath.

I've revised my fanciful hypothesis since then. I now propose that Spot actually angered one of the Greek gods. My money is on Hera. Hear me out. You know how Zeus had a reputation for not being able to "keep it in his pants" (robe?) And also, when looking for some action among the mortals, I seem to recall that he didn't strictly just go for the females. 

So, here's how I think it went down. Spot (Spotocles?) was caught by Hera in flagrante delicto with Zeus. Spotocles' punishment was to be turned into a lowly rat, and, just for spite, Hera threw in the part about living (practically) forever, but without the eternal youth and health that would make such a fate more bearable.

Zeus' punishment, in my estimation, was remaining married to Hera. Forever.

Stripe does some (tentative) exploring

As I shared yesterday on Facebook,

The rat boys, Spot and Stripe, will be 2 years old in November. So far I am still only Food Bringer, but I aim to befriend at least one of them before he shuffles off this mortal coil.

 

Still pictures are a real challenge with the ratties, so I videotaped a bit of Stripe's session of exploring the wild wild world (or at least a little bit of it) today.

The rats that share our home

Once upon a time, my daughter had three pet rats: Vladimir, Shiroyuki, and Dango. She got Vladimir first, and the rat rescue lady said she would let us know when another young rat became available, because she preferred to only adopt out ratties in pairs. A month or so passed, and no young mail rats were available, so I started looking elsewhere. There was a woman in town who had a litter of babies ready to be adopted. I went to her house to pick one out and bring it home. Daughter was happy to have her single rat and was less than interested in following through on getting Vlad a cage mate.

And I came home with two rats. As Vlad was a dark color--I believe the technical term is agouti--it seemed to make sense to choose a rat that was a distinctly different color. There was a mostly white rat with dark markings that seemed to fit the bill. But then there was this other boy, a "dumbo" whose color was described as blue. Or, what normal people might call gray. But it was an adorable gray. A cuddly stuffed animal gray. And, knowing that whichever rat I took home was going to need to be quarantined for a period of time, I hated the thought of putting one of these cuties in "solitary confinement".  So, two little four-week-old ratties came home with me. Daughter dubbed the mostly white one "Shiroyuki", and the blue dumbo "Dango".

Vlad only lived to be about a year and a half. He was rescued from becoming snake food, so we reasoned that good longevity genes were not a big consideration for that breeder. Shiroyuki lived two years. So that left only Dango.

By now, I may have made it clear that I had a soft spot in my heart for Dango. He was the "bonus" rat, and truth be told, I really would have liked to have him as my own. But they were Daughter's rats, and the cage was in her room.  I tried to give him some extra attention while Daughter was at school. I would take him out and put him in a little "playpen" with things that he could crawl over or through. I painstakingly wove stretches of toilet paper in and out of the bars on his cage, in order to give Dango some "work" to occupy him. He was able to get that tissue out of the bars in no time at all, and then added it to his collection of bedding.

So, here was this rat, two years old--the oldest I'd ever known a rat to live. But he didn't act old. He showed no signs of slowing down. And, in my opinion, he was lacking in companionship, intellectual stimulation, and grooming--and all of these needs (again, in my opinion) could be best fulfilled by other rats.

When I again found baby rats available in the area, we went to choose two of them. (Given that Dango was two years old, it really did make sense to get him a pair of same-age companions). And I think the companionship was good for Dango, who went on to live at least another half a year. Toward the end, he started showing signs of illness--a couple of tumors--and one of the younger rats bit him pretty hard. Daughter was horrified that they could be such "jerks", but I tried to point out that "respect for your elders" is probably not a deeply ingrained value in rat culture.

Dango was separated from the other two rats (which Daughter had named Elemenope and Doctor Shemp) and lived out his last month or so in a smaller cage in our office. We all decided that it was time for the other rats (in their huge two-story cage) to be moved downstairs to the living room so that they could become more of a part of the household. As Daughter had not really wanted these two rats in the first place, I sort of  "inherited" them at that point. I now call them "Spot" and "Stripe"--rather uncreatively naming them after their head markings. I felt it was important to call them by individual names, rather than just referring to them as "the rats"--which I was sorely tempted to do, as I found the names my daughter had given them impossibly unwieldy.

Unfortunately, I wasn't given much opportunity to interact with them during their formative early months, so I took things slowly with these guys, working on getting them to see me as "mostly harmless". I was, after all, the Food Bringer. They still don't want me to hold them. I have tried, from time to time, especially with Stripe, who seems somewhat less fearful. He tolerates it, sort of, but really wants to get back into his cage. And then I remember, "Oh yeah, I actually am allergic to rats!" (I didn't used to be.) When I held Stripe briefly yesterday, I became aware of a small tumor near one of his front legs. I guess they are hardly "young-uns" any more--I think they will be two years old in November.

Today, after being hit by a fresh wave of guilt that Spot and Stripe really hadn't enjoyed the level of care that our other rats had received, I decided that it was high time that I gave them...a bath. (Spot and Stripe: "No, really, you shouldn't have. Really!")

But we all survived, and we now have two clean rats in our living room. They don't seem to be any more fearful than they were before the experience, and still take food from me. So I'm going to call today a success. :)