ats!  Filthy, disease-carrying, parasitic vermin.  Or something like that.

Rat discussion in daily updates:

• May 31, 2002
• July 2, 2002
• August 6, 9, 11, 16, 23, 28, 30
• September 3, 5, 12, 18
• October 5, 6, 20, 24
• November 7 and 16, 2002
• December 2, 2002 (at the end of the gay animal discussion)
• January 24, 2003
• February 12, 2003
• March 17, 2003 -- Rat Names Uberlist
• Bo R.I.P., April 2, 2004.
• Janky R.I.P., June 2, 2004.

This is the Rat Action page, where various rodents are shown in action shots. Chasing each other, wrestling, fighting, climbing, humping, and more. Photos are grouped by type, with newer additions on top.

(The two sisters I brought up with me from San Diego got old and died a few months apart in early 2004, and have not been replaced. I may get some more rats someday, when we've got a bigger place to house them, or when we need breeders to feed our future tegus. Or both. I do miss the little furry scurriers, at times.)

This ball, which you can see on top of the lower cage in the bookshelf photo below this one, was meant to give the rodents exercise.  Unfortunately, it does nothing but make them seasick.  They don't run in it, they just stand still and try to keep it from rolling, which is easier when Malaya or me aren't poking at it.  It hardly moves at all on the carpet, but can roll around a bit until they get their balance on the linoleum floor or the cement back patio.

Our hope is that if we get a younger rat, or breed one of these two, the babies could be raised in this thing the whole time, and would be used to it and would run around the house in cute fashion, providing amusement for us and a reason to keep on living for the kitties.

As it is, neither Jinx or Dusty pays any attention to the stationary rats in their clear plastic ball.
-- November 22, 2003

Here's a photo of the rats' new and semi-luxurious digs.  I left the dresser-sized wire cage in the dumpster when I moved away from San Diego, and replaced it with a 30g aquarium.  You can see it on the bottom shelf in this photo. The middle shelf has a 20g aquarium where the Ball Python lives, and where small thawed rats go to vanish.  The top shelf has a little plastic rat carrier, which is connected to the lower cage via the long wire stovepipe on the left. The rats scamper up and down it at will, and always go up to the top to sleep in the wood shaving bedding.

They often carry food up there and pee in there as well, which leads to a rather foul bed, which I feel they should lie in, being as they made it.  This arrangement makes them somewhat less lovely to hold and snuggle, but how else are they going to learn?
-- November 22, 2003

It's not much of an action shot, but here we see two juveniles crawling around my legs.  They like to get out at this stage, and be carried around, but they are generally pretty nervous about exploring off of your shoulders or lap, and leaping from legs to the desk top, out in the open, in a strange room, is intimidating.

They always have a fascination with trying to see how far it is to the ground, and will do like the black one here is doing.  You have to be sure they don't slip and fall, though they very rarely do so, and never when they have a grippy surface.  It's mostly on shelves and the edges of tables and such that you have to watch them closely, since they'll slip and fall.

The one on the right is the adorable little clown-faced one pictured near the bottom of the baby rats page. How fast they grow.

In reality the peaches is the male, and the brown/white is the semi-horny female, but as often happens, a semi-horny female rat is pretty nasty and attacking, and she was chasing the poor non-aggressive male all over the bedroom

Rat fighting is mostly a formality where both parties stand up on their hind legs, balancing with tails, and they do this still arm pushing stuff, with occasional attempted nipping.  Mostly the nervous one (the female in this case) gets the stiff arm thing going, and makes a high pitched whining noise the whole time, while the other rat just wishes he/she could be left alone, but feels a need to stand up and stiff-arm to not give up dominance.

As it happens in this pic he's getting his wish, as she's tired of pushing and squealing and has just turned away.

This photo is also the inspiration of the first fan art I've ever received here.  This edited version of the shot comes courtesy of Agent Director. The snappy outfit is a nice touch, as is the blood spray from the mouth of the other rodent.

More of the pushy male/nervous female non-mating ritual.  There is far more of this sort of sniffing and chasing and pushing than actual sex. The males love to sniff the females, and will actually bulldozer them, lifting their hind ends up as they sniff and push their snouts right in where the best sniffing is.  If you've ever been around an overly-inquisitive Great Dane, you can probably imagine.

In between the pushing and sniffing there is a lot of this. The female runs, the male chases.  The runner is always much more charged up and speedy, but they stop regularly and turn to push, or present for sex, or just freak out. They are cute when they run, with their tails flipping up and down in sinuous fashion.  They hold them high to run, but they whack the ground when they leap, and when they corner fast their tails whip into the wall or whatever is near.  It actually sounds quite painful if one runs across a bed and dives off the edge by a hard surface.

You also get a nice view of rat locomotion here.  The orange one is running, and they go both front and both back legs then.  The black/white male is trotting, which they do with four feet individually, usually in a front left + right rear, then front right + left rear.  Running rats are pretty comical, they bang up and down so much.  They aren't very fast, too big in the body and short in the leg, and too much up and down motion.

And at last, actual rat sex.  The female is the orange one, as you could probably have guessed. It's like this, every time. Each penetration is very brief.  I'm talking 1 or 2 seconds, and then the female squeals and leaps away, and the male almost always bends double and licks at his penis.  I've often speculated that male rats just want sex to have an excuse to lick themselves.  Sort of like eating chips just because you really like the onion dip.

Females in heat are the ones that change, the males are always ready to go.  The females present by arching their backs and pushing their butts up, (lordosis) like the orange one is doing in the pic on the left. The funniest aspect of sex is that female rats lose what little brain they have when they are in heat, and will squat and present to anything.  Male rats, baby rats, female rats, even humans. It's quite funny to pick up a female in heat and cradle her; if you squeeze a bit on her rear hips, she'll tremble and squeak and arch her back, assuming the sex position even though she is technically upside down.  And being held by a human.

They go into heat all the time, but much more frequently if a male is around, in sniffing range.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.