Rat in a Box

...not that we've been posting regularly anyway...

But we are off to the beach for a week. Alas, we have yet to find a vacation rental that welcomes rats (or even the dog), so the animals will be home with a petsitter. I just looked at all of the food I left. They should gain about as much weight as I do.

The boys love cucumbers, and the way they eat them (inside first) cracks me up. I guess the seeds must be the tastiest part.



I tried to get video, but it was too dark in the rat room. Still, you can sort of see the technique.



And here's what's left:



They do eventually eat the skin, too.

Mercutio seems to have mended. He is back to his normal (that is, shy) self, but he's eating and not wheezing, so he went off the antibiotics yesterday. I have no idea what it was that made him so sick, but boy, he really did have me frightened that first night.

I'm not sure if I even mentioned it, but a few weeks ago, Larry had a respiratory flare up, too. His only obvious symptom was very audible grunting...no lethargy, good appetite, stable weight...but the vet did hear congestion in one side of his chest. So Larry's been on nebulized amikacin, but when I talked to the vet yesterday, he decided to pull out the big guns and do a Baytril/doxycycline course instead. He's trying to avoid overusing the Baytril, but in both these cases, it seems necessary.

Other than that, the boys are enjoying the fresh summer produce, like berries, squash, tomatoes, and their favorite: cucumbers.

Mercutio seems to be feeling better...I can hear a nice puff-puff sound when I listen to his chest, and he's acting like himself again.

I tried to get a picture, but after being cooped up in the little cage to be nebulized, he had places to go.



Here we go. Still a lot of porphyrin stains around his neck, but he's looking much better than Monday. (Actually, he's always a bit stained, even when his eyes and nose are completely clear. We refer to him as the rusty rat.)

When I got home from work Monday night, Mercutio wasn't well. I found him sitting alone on the cage floor, breathing shallow, and when I picked him up, he didn't resist me at all. It was too late to actually get him to the vet, but I did talk to the vet by phone, and he told me to go ahead and give Merc Baytril and nebulize him with amikacin. To show how letharic he was, I nebulized him in a box with the opening covered by a towel, and he didn't even try to crawl away.

Most of Monday night, Mercutio just sat on my chest. He wasn't gasping for breath, he just wasn't normal...sort of like Horatio when he got sick. Mer ate a little bit of pudding, but not much, and when I finally put him in the cage for the night, I was afraid he wasn't going to make it.

Tuesday morning he was a little perkier, and when I got home from work Tuesday, he'd eaten some lab blocks. But when I picked him up to check his breathing, he bit me, and at the vet's, he got away from the tech who was weighing him and jumped from the exam table to the floor.

Since this actually wa a great improvement in 24 hours, we decided to stay the course for now with the baytril and amikacin, and last night Mercutio was eating and drinking. He hasn't bitten me again, although I admit when I took him out today I put on gloves (once bitten, twice shy)...but he's still not quite himself. I can't quite explain it.

He's by himself in a separate cage right now, so that I can monitor how much he eats, but tonight I think I'll let him out with his brothers, to see if that makes him feel better.

...but I'm pretty sure they were saying "Where's my supper?!?!"

(Oliver caught grooming.)

It's summer storm season, so I'm off line more than on lately. (A couple of weeks ago we had what passes for real adventure: a tornado warning sent all of us to the basement for the night. The boys seemed confused, though not terribly upset, by the transfer to small cages. I told them it was summer camp.)

Here are a couple recent pictures:



Mom, you have totally shown this same picture twenty times. Everybody knows the rats sleep in a big pile by now.

Ok, here's a new one. I got home from work tonight and found MoonPie on his back, fat little feet up in the air, sound asleep. Unfortunately the sound of the camera woke him up, but you get the idea. (That's Mercutio, looking curious.)



(And speaking of summer storms...while our weather has been a little wild, it's nothing like the tornadoes and floods in the mid-west. We hope our friends out there are safe and dry!)

The vet drained R.C.'s abscess today. The good news is, all the "gunk" came out pretty cleanly, so we probably won't have too much to drain at home, we'll just need to keep the area clean as it heals. The doctor is doing another culture, to see if we need something other than Baytril. Wouldn't it be nice if this is the last abscess?

In the meantime, R.C. will be in the hospital cage. I was going to put him in alone, but he was breaking my heart: every time I walked by, he ran to the door and jumped up, as if to say "Mom, why am I in jail?" So I think he'll get a buddy tonight.

I have all eight brothers out right now (here they are on the web cam on my laptop)...nobody is paying any attention to R.C.'s wound.

...how this can be comfortable:

The vet came in this afternoon and said "Who's here today?"

When I said it was R.C., with another lump, he was shocked...and crestfallen. Abscess number one was the left preputial gland, which he removed, then abscess number two was the right preputial gland, which he removed...so we really thought R.C. was done.

We've started R.C. on Baytril, and if the lump hasn't gone down in a few days, he'll drain and culture it again. Since there are no more glands down there to remove, at least it won't be full-blown surgery.

Oliver and Larry seem to be getting along fine again. Larry seems to be mostly over his sniffles (although I'm hearing some sneezing...but right now the pollen is so heavy that you have to scrape it off the car windows to see to drive, so maybe it's allergies. The dog is sneezing, too.)

And I'm afraid this is becoming the new normal: R.C. has another lump. We'll have a vet report tomorrow night...

We broke up three rat fights this morning before leaving for work, all in Larry and Oliver's cage. I'm not sure what started the bruhaha, but in fight number three, I witnessed Oliver run up two ramps and jump Larry.

It's easy to assume that Oliver is the bully...he's intact, he's literally twice Larry's size...but I have seen Larry be pretty bratty sometimes, too. But as anybody who has watched hockey can tell you, the refs often just call the last penalty in a series of violations. So Oliver is spending the day in the small cage, which was a hospital cage last week, but is now the sin bin.

Longer term, though, the penalty box is not a solution. Though the boys scuffle fairly often, this was the first time I've seen such aggression, and if I see it again there's not much question that Oliver will be booked for that neuter we've thretened him with.