Anyway, rats are cute at times and after taking a few pics a couple of days ago, I decided to get a bunch more tonight, with them out and romping.  I'm going to do a pets page, with shots and theoretically-amusing anecdotes about the little rodents.  I'll just throw a few pics in here, to whet your appetite.  Or perhaps send you screaming from the room, depending on your degree of rat phobia.

This one on the right is the larger of my two young females.  No, none of them have names.  Though I might have to make some up if I'm going to be doing more pet info pages about them.

I don't expect everyone will really care about such a page. I mean they are rats, filthy little rodents.  It's not like I've got stories about training them to rescue orphans from burning buildings, or posting photos of them on naked and oiled (human) models.  I will work in humorous captions and such; it won't be just some stupid geocities type "look at my cute kitty!" page.  Half the fun of rats is that they are horrid little Black Plague-bearing vermin, and some people are repulsed by them.  As a man with a penis, I can identify with them to some extent.

The funniest thing about rats is their socialization.  Usually they just sleep in big heaps, girls with girls and boys with boys.  At least that's how I organize them, since I don't want perpetual pregnancy, and my males and females tend to fight when they meet.  The boys always have sore swollen fingers, or scabbed finger tips, or missing claws from one female or another being in a fury at them (this varies day by day, depending on how far the female is from going into heat) and biting them through the mesh, when the male foolishly places one finger through the side of the cage.  The males learn pretty quickly to not touch the side mesh, since the females are indifferent to them 99.9% of the time, but the .1% can be very painful.  I have a spacing layer of mesh on both sides of the bed, so they don't have to worry about an ear or tail being bitten while they're sleeping, but imagine if the walls of your house were chain link fence, and there were wild dogs just on the other side, trying to snap at you every second.  It can't be real fun.

Aside from that, they are fun to watch romp around. In the cage they tend to sleep and not chase that much, but when they get out they go into turbo drive.  The two boy rats are just worthless in terms of entertainment value when they are in their portion of the cage, but when they get out they are just non-stop.  Both are adult now and not as playful, but a month or 2 ago they'd wrestle like 13 y/o's hopped up on a six pack of Jolt and a jumbo bag of Jolly Ranchers.

The youngest two now are females, and they don't play that much, but they will get into the mood to tackle once in a while, and race after each other, taking turns being the pursuer and pursuee, and giving each other knock downs and flip overs and paw boxing.

The real entertainment is male and female though.  Sex is funny, how they go at it, (I'll detail it at some point.  Think "sewing machine" in very brief bursts.) but it's more fun when the females aren't receptive (which is most of the time).  A non-horny girl rat's reaction to a male ranges from total indifference, to fear, to annoyance, to murderous rage.  You never really know if you'll have to separate them to save the male from being mangled, or the female from being tormented. And whichever it is, you can bet it'll be different 12 or 18 hours later.

This is by far the best pic I got today. The left one is a male, and right one is a younger female, who was doing her Russell Crowe impersonation, and jumping on any male she saw, while squealing as if in terror.  It's sort of a good trick; you sound like you're the victim, while you are trying to bite someone else's ears off.  The one on the left is an older male, the smaller of the two I have, and the much mellower one.  He doesn't know how to have sex, so is probably lacking in testosterone or something.

She wasn't really in a murderous rage, but she wasn't real friendly either, and was trying to bite, but half-heartedly, and was more content just with a bit of pouncing and getting out of aggression.

This pic is great since it looks like the left rat has just executed some sort of judo throw, and tossed his attacker aside.  Believe that if you want, in some sort of Stuart Little nightmare world.

In actuality, the girl on the right has been jumping at him for about 10 seconds, and is just giving up and moving off.  When rats semi-fight they both stand up and give each other stiff arms, while one or both squeak.  There is a lot of pushing, and the goal is to knock the other rat down on their back, which is a sort of dominance thing.  Sometimes the females will try to bite males in this instance, though I've never seen a male try to bite a female.  Rats of the same gender do much the same thing, but it's more playful, and they sort of enjoy being knocked over and sat on, since the rat on top tends to do this power grooming thing on their neck or back.  Rats don't like being on their backs with their bellies up, and they lie back and kick and try to twist over if they are scared.

This one here is my second oldest female, and the fattest of the lot.  She's on a semi-permanent diet, which involves me distracting her while I get the others to the food dish first, for a head start.  She works hard to make it up on dry food later on though.  She's not real pleased in this picture; that's a rat giving a sort of, "I'm not happy to be held but I'm tolerating it for a few more seconds before I start twisting and struggling to get free."  She's feeling pensive and anxious, and yes, I can tell that by her facial expression, angle of her ears and head, etc.  Rats gots funny feets.

Another odd thing is that their coats change colors.  First time is around six months, when they are starting to get adult size and bone length.  Dark rats tend to get silver hairs here and there, longer, harder ones.  Males especially, who get long "guard hairs" and start to feel sort of oily.  Females stay much softer and smoother, which is one reason I prefer them as pets.  Lighter rats don't change color as much, but they do get the silver hairs also.  Dark rats often change color in other ways; the scratching one here was jet black when she was young.  Around six months she got silver hairs, and since then has been steadily gaining brown fur.  All of her furs are maybe 2cm long, and black at the tip, but light brown near the body, so as she gets older and has thinner hair, she looks brownish, and even has some blonde patches, in addition to the white belly and paws she's always had.

I'll try to get some more action shots in the future, since those are pretty funny; none of them were really in the mood tonight other than the one female, and my camera was low on battery power anyway.  It's hard to catch it, since they tend to stage running skirmishes, vanishing behind cushions and their cage and the dresser and into the closet, and the digicam can't snap off a pic instantly; it has to auto-focus for about half a second.  I'll probably try to put the 16 shots at .25 interval feature to work on this, though it puts the shots 4x4 in the same size image as a normal picture, so you have to really aim well, and expect smaller image sizes/lower quality.  Such difficulties to surmount!

Some of the funnier shots I took today look like these:

It's not so easy to get one to stand still for the photo.  Especially when the stand is your open palm, when they are trained to sit on your shoulder, and they can see it there, and know it's a much more secure perch, regardless of that odd rectangular thing you're holding your other hand and pointing at them.

In other rat news, the article about the Indian Rat Temple, featured in this rather horrifying photo I posted about a week or so ago, is just about insane.

If a rat scuttles across your feet in the temple, where visitors tread barefoot, it is considered a sign of good fortune. Even more propitious is a sighting of a rare white rat, revered as an incarnation of Karni Mata herself by worshippers who stand hands clasped in prayer. And, according to folklore, drinking milk or water from the containers the rats have sipped from brings surefire protection from the plague.

Since of course the rats are recently-dead human souls, reincarnated.  It's not some abandoned building; there are priests and various rooms where no one is allowed but the temple staff.  There's no mention of the clean up or sanitation needs, but I'd be interested to see how they handle that.  Rats aren't real smelly (unlike mice), but just my pet rats can generate quite a load of pellets in a couple of weeks, and I never have more than 4 or 5 of them, other than occasional litters of babies.  If you had hundreds or thousands of rats, they would create small mountains of shit every day, and they aren't like herd animals dropping it everywhere, they will drop their rocks in a corner if possible, but still, it would have to be pretty well everywhere in that place.  The condemn houses in the US all the time when some old woman gets too many rats or cats and they start breeding in the walls and take the place over.

Obviously I like rats, I've had them for pets for upwards of 10 years, but let's be honest; they're vermin.  They are relatively clean when given the opportunity to be; they'll groom themselves as eagerly as cats, but when there are great stinking hordes of them, say in some temple in India, they're going to be dirty.  Walking all over each other, young rats aren't real good about crapping in the corner or getting out of the bed to pee, and they're not flea-proof, if they live outdoors in warm weather.

My rats are relatively clean and quite tame, and I'll pet them and maybe give them a peck on the back of the head, but I sure as hell wouldn't let them touch my food, and I always wash my hands after petting them.  Funny the (illogical/insane) things religions compel people to do, and how often they are in direct opposition to common sense. In fact that's almost the point in some cases; like it's a way of testing or demonstrating faith.  See snake-handling, holy-rolling, suicide bombing, etc.