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Pet Photos | ||||||
 ets!
In photos!
I like animals. I've had pet rats for over a decade, and snakes for nearly that long. Then when I moved up to live with Malaya in summer 2003, I gained partial dominion over her cat Dusty, and we added a second cat, Jinx, in September 2003. As part of that move I gave away one of my two snakes, and all but two of my rodents. Malaya has a fish, but it doesn't count. At this rate I'll be a left open door away from being petless by early 2004, but let's enjoy what we have while we have it, shall we? Pet Cat Photos: The greatest challenge faced by Dusty and Jinxie in their daily lives is seen below. They must push through this door (the string isn't usually holding it open) to get out to their litter boxes. They generally do so without much fuss, though it took us a couple of endless weeks to get Jinx to stop using the litter box we put down for her in the bathroom, and to start using the one in the shed all the time.
¤ Jinx Photos: Jinx is our second cat. She was adopted at 3 months old in mid- September 2003, which would make her birthday near mine, in mid June. She is a cute silver tabby with tiger stripes on her sides and legs, splotches on her neck and head, leopard spots on her belly, and plenty of attitude. ¤ Jinx
& Dusty Photos:
Pictures of the two kitties, documenting their frequently-stormy
co-existence as they head down a path towards eventual ¤ Prrowf: An orphan cat who hangs around my dad's house and enjoys lying in the dirt. As you'll see far too often on this page. ¤ Darwin: Malaya and her mom share ownership of this beagle-mix, purchased in early 2006. Darwin lives at mom's house for now, since we're in a small condo with two cats and there's no room for Darwin until we move to a bigger house. As my dad says, "I better write a good book." ¤ There are several more photos of Dusty and Jinx on the Interspecies Dating page.
Rat Photos Pictures of my formerly main pets, the rodents. Lots of them, over time. I've had pet rats since about 1990, and have owned at least 100 since then, usually 3-5 at once. My pets have birthed at least 60 litters in that time, averaging around 10 kits per batch, so if I counted the total of all rats I'd be up into the 700+ range. Owning rats is sort of like owning a furry ant farm, but you can take them out and they won't vanish into the walls. Well come to think of it, they probably would, if there were a large enough hole. Okay, but ants won't chew the paint off the walls and eat electrical cords! Oh wait, that's not a bonus either. Hmm... The rat photos are divided into three sections, the content of which should be pretty obvious from the title.
There are also some rats visible on the Interspecies Dating page.
Snake Photos: Pictures of my two auxiliary pets, both snakes.
Neither snake has a name since come on, who are you fooling? It's a reptile; it's never going to learn a damn thing. The snakes look sufficiently different that I never confuse one for the other, so just calling them by their breed is sufficient for my identification needs. They don't do a lot other than sleep and eat when they are presented with a thawed rodent and climb on their overhead jungle gym. Photos of that below.
¤ Interspecies Dating Photos: Various cats with rats and cats with snakes. Dogs with snakes/cats/rats photos to come, someday. ¤ Miscellaneous Pet Photos: Various domesticated animals we've come across, but not gotten to know well enough for them to warrant their own photos pages.
Fish Photos: Well actually, there's no page for fish photos. Why not? They aren't real pets, for one thing. They're just a form of sculpture or artwork. Of course the same thing goes for snakes and most reptiles, but at least you can handle those without them asphyxiating. I'm sorry, but any animal you can't pet without getting your hands wet doesn't count as a pet. Fish are like house plants or sculpture or wind chimes. Something to look at, but nothing that you can actually interact with, other than watching them eat from time to time.
These are my dad's Koi fish, in the lovely pond in his backyard. This photo shows about 1/15th of the pond area, and about 1/3 of the koi. There's a waterfall and everything. I've taken quite a few pictures of the koi pond, but in 90% of them the reflection of the flash or the sky or the waterfall ruins it.
As for my pets, I've blogged about them quite often. It used to be pretty much any day I didn't have a more pressing topic, I'd just write about the pets. Especially when there were new rat babies to coo over. Once I realized just how often I was boring everyone with that topic, a revelation I came to in November 2002, I cut way back on the discussions. Or tried to at least. The following links go to days when the subject was discussed, usually in some detail. I tend to discuss them with some amusing stuff, but more like informative articles about owning the creatures. You can also Google this site for "snake" or "rat" and get a ton of hits, or just skim through the daily archive listings looking for the key words (which is mostly how I complied the following list).
The pictures on the rats and snakes pages in this section are some new but mostly just ones selected from the dozens I've posted on the site over time. So if you (for some unimaginable reason) want to see every shot, and read more about them, you should click through the links listed above.
Here are a few general shots.
The weird wooden stick thing here is the snake's climbing toy. It's made from several sticks I collected over time, and the pieces are screwed together with holes drilled and heavy wire (clothes hangers) wrapped around them. The big snake often gets her entire weight on the end caps and would pull any sort of nails or screws right off, she's so heavy. Not to mention the whole lower limb tearing off. When one of them is restless I let it out and put it up here, and they move around but can't get down. Well, the little one can't unless it falls, which isn't all that uncommon an occurrence. Ball Pythons are ground snakes, and not physically suited for this sort of thing, even when its not clinging with just the tip of the tail and hanging straight down. The Boa could reach from this to the ground, if she hung straight down, but she doesn't do that. What she does do is potentially worse, in that she goes out the ends and then down at a diagonal. From there she can reach the candles on top of the TV, or my desk, and would pull everything off before she got low enough to hook her neck around something and truly descend.
Yes, this is the rodent enclosure. Godawful looking thing, isn't it?
While it looks quite dingy and ugly here, in actuality it is even dingier and uglier. Plus it sometimes smells. I built it myself, if you can believe it, given the razor straight edges and right angles. *cough* The way you make such a thing is you get these 25 foot rolls of 1/2" wire mesh at Home Depot, and you just start cutting out long pieces. I might write up more on cage construction at some point, since this is the 4th one I've built, each larger and more suited to rodents than the previous ones. Cages you get in stores are pretty crappy, since they are large, but have tons of wasted space. Rats don't need more than about a 10" high area, and they would be fine with less than that. The lower right area on this cage is like 6" high, so they can't stand up on their back legs, and they have no problem with that. This cage is basically the front and back, 4' high, and 5' wide. It's logical to make one major dimension identical to the width of the wire. Less cutting. So for the front, back, sides, and the three internal side pieces, I just cut them off the roll. It's 2' deep, so that's actually 20x4 feet right there, not even counting the top, bottom, and all the internal levels. Yes, I needed more than one 25' roll. The connections are easy to do, since the wire mesh is very flexible and when snipped there are always a bunch of 1/2 inch tabs poking out. Quite sharp they are, but with needle nose pliers it's easy to bend them around other pieces and make a very secure contraption. It basically bonds to itself, and holds itself together. The bent wires are very strong, you could probably make one of these hollow inside, and keep a big dog in it if you bent over every 1/2". They are that secure. I could easily stand on the cage and not collapse it more than the raised feet at the bottom. The internal sideways pieces are to divide it into sections; there are four separate compartments that can be cut off by simply sliding a narrow piece of wood into slots (all built in as I made it) that block off the one entrance passage from each quarter. Mother rats need privacy for their babies, and when I have males I have to keep them separate. And this makes it real easy to do so. The only openings are on the top, one trap door for each quarter (and yes, the left section is a lot wider than 1/4, but just for the sake of the argument...) and they are trap doors that are a lot wider than the hole, so there is overlap and rats can't sneak out when I have something heavy on top. I use four old 3 pound weights. Past cages had opening doors on hinges along the front, which left the top entirely free for storage, but they were hard to keep closed, since the rodents would shake and shake them at times, and rattle them open. The drawback to only top access is that they eventually drag junk down to the bottom, mostly newspaper bedding, and I eventually have to cut open something to reach inside and drag out the mess. There are patches of mesh over big holes in several spots now, and I can easily pry off the patch to get access, though it's hard to reach, being as it's two feet deep. The side and front/back pieces are 4' tall, but the actual cage is about 44", since the whole thing is sort of built on stilts. Easy to do, just put the bottom up 4" from the lowest extent of the sides. The point of that should be obvious; that way all of the crap (literally) falls down below the bottom of the cage, and you don't have rats walking in it. No need for pine shavings or whatever; I just have the whole cage on a really big sheet of plastic, which I put a bunch of newspaper over. About once a month I put more paper on the floor, lift the cage over onto that, and then carry out the plastic sheeting, gathered up by the corners, and dump the paper and all into the dumpster. How often I do that depends on how many rats, and what time of year it is. Hotter weather means it starts to smell sooner. Rats are mercifully almost odorless. Pee and poo hardly smell at all, in large part since they have a very bland diet, just corn and dry crunchy food and pasta and rice. Very little meat, and they don't smell much. Cats and dogs have infinitely smellier crap, and other small animals are much worse. Mice, in particular are hideously smelly, very ammonia-like pee. A week of that in a tank full of shavings and you can hardly walk into the room. Meanwhile the rats go two or three weeks and you can't smell it unless you really bend over to do so. I put some fragrant pine shavings in and shake it down through the cage after a couple of weeks, if it starts to smell. The cage was shiny and new and beautiful for about a year, but over time their pee and dropped food tarnishes the chrome, (they always crap while on the lowest level, so it pachinko'ing down isn't an issue) as does just general exposure to the air. Spare pieces of the stuff in my storage room are tarnished now also, despite never being peed on. At least not by the rats. They love the wheel. Some rats run all the time, some run when they are horny, some never run at all. Really no predicting, but the little rats all play in it and you do occasionally get the hilarious sight of one clinging and going round and round while two or three others run and hurdle the clinging one each time around. I've seen them do up to a dozen rotations with one going upside down each time, often with one larger rat running and a little one being propelled through the loop-de-loop. Anyway, I've been wanting to make a new, smaller cage for at least a year, (as of this writing in late March, 2003) but putting it off since it's a lot of work, and I think I'm just going to not have pet rats anymore, sometime soon. They are amusing and fun to interact with, but my joy in them is the mob/ant farm viewing, seeing how they interact with each other, and they don't live very long (2 years is a rat Methuselah. Around 12-16 months is more common.) So I have to keep breeding to have new babies, since they are fun, and grow up to be much better pets if they are hand-raised by me. And since they die off so often I need to keep 4-6 around all the time. Plus that many are more fun to see them interact. But that limits me since I wouldn't want to have a small cage, or just have them in an aquarium, since just having 2 or 3 is not much fun for them, or for me. So it's sort of an "all or nothing" or perhaps a "several or none" situation. And the cage is huge and keeps me from having a normal-sized bed in my bedroom, and isn't exactly attractive to the ladies either. I would like to be much busier with my work to the point that I didn't want/need furry pet distractions, and I'm working towards that end. But baby rats are such fun! Most of the pictures on the rats page are of them and their antics, as are the various daily updates on rodents, so you can easily get your fill with just a few clicks.
And yes, as you've probably figured out by now, the rats feed the snakes. The smaller snake eats a small rat about every 3 weeks, though it (the snake) would quite willingly eat more than that if I let him/her/it. The big snake eats a large rat about every 3-4 weeks, and would really eat more if I let her. As of March 28, 2003, I have probably 6 months of snake food frozen in the fridge, due to a number of die offs, retired male rats once they had bred, and the burst of baby rat breeding I authored early in 2003. The snakes only eat dead rats, thawed out for that purpose. Never live ones since it's a bad way to die for the rodents, plus they bite back. Understandable, but if your cat's/dog's food had the possibility of putting his eyes out every time he ate, you'd probably take measures to eliminate that risk. Hence the freezing. Obviously it's a storage issue also; small rats don't stay small for long. I'm thinking about selling the snakes also, as I have been (thinking about) for several years, and liquidating my aquarium collection (70 gallon, 40 gallon hex, 30 gallon, 20 gallon, 10 gallon) also, and I'd sell the frozen rats with the snakes, of course. It's not like I'm going to thaw one out and make rat-ke-bob or something. I had pet cats my whole youth, and would probably like to have one again, but I wouldn't do it with the snakes and rats around, and the nice thing about snakes is that they don't get sick, and rats do, but die so quickly anyway there's no point in worrying about medical attention for them. Which is good, since I couldn't afford it anyway. Cats get sick and you're out $400 and $30 for a pill prescription you almost lose a finger delivering two times a day, with food. At this time I can't afford a real pet, basically. If/when I can in the future, I'll probably get a cat. I had them always as a kid, with both my mom and dad owning them, though neither have for some years at this point. |
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