Francis, as she has often before, got the bookshelf treatment.  She’s been with me one year this month, and was already an adult rat when I got her.  She is still very healthy and active.  *knock on wood.

And here is Madame Curie.  I got her from the Recently married Tim and Stephanie Yates.  She is a small, wiry girl.  A dainty southern lady….who likes to play in the garbage.

And One of Two is starting to act like a grumpy old lady rat.  She didn’t want to leave her box at all.  She’s become a bit of a hermit since her sister passed.  She doesn’t fight with Francis and Madame Curie, she just keeps her distance most of the time.

We named her Nibbitz.

She was a TEENIE little thing when I first broght her home, just a slight handful, and afraid of the whole world.

She did grow up to be a strapping young rat woman though.  And lived a happy life with her sister One of Two, and their catemates.

Sadly, the last week of April 2010 we lost our dear girl.  She’s got her wings now and is flying with all the dear rats I’ve known before her.

I sometimes forget that a lot of people, even people who love fancy pet rats, think of wild rats as nasty sewer living creatures.  I forget that not everyone feel like I do, that wild rats are just as adorable, and just as deserving of love as their domesticated cousins.

Remember this one:

She was an injured wild rat my MIL found in her yard.  We took her in and tried to save her.  Her back end was paralized and I intended to let her go if she regained use, or keep her forever if she didn’t.  She was a wild animal, but never even tried to nip at us as we tried to help her.

To me she is every bit as cute as Nibbitz and One of Two playing in the bathroom.

Now I’m not advocating letting wild rats run rampant in your home.  Even I dont want them living in my walls where they can chew wires and cause major damage. 

However, I cannot think of someone flushing a rat down a toilet without it making my blood boil.  So does the idea of people using glue traps, which is a slow, painful horrific way for rats to die.  Imagine your body beign stuck to the groud while you slowly die of thirst and hunger.  That is AFTER trying to chew your own body parts off in an effort to escape what has you pinned down.

In a perfect world everyone would use a live trap to catch a release.  In a slightly less perfect world everyone would use snap traps that kill instantly MOST (sadly not always) of the time.

Um…what was I talking about again?

Oh yeah, rats are cute……even wild ones…..please don’t flush them down your toilet.

A Winston-Salem woman used a plunger and an empty container of kitty litter to wrangle a rat back into her toilet before flushing it.

In this video she says, “I was as scared of it as it was of me.”

Somehow I doubt that. I mean, what is so scary about a tiny little rat? Can you imagine how the poor rat felt having a giant after it.

And, yes rats can swim up into your toilet though sewers, but flushing it back down would be like taking your average person and dropping them in Grade 6 white water rapids.

I mean, do the parents really feel like a rat is going to decend from the air vents and attack their children?

Read more about it:

Rat sighting closes Saugus school, again

It looks like the baby is keeping Francis awake like he is me though.  See, she didn’t even make it INTO the box before she fell asleep.

Halloween always gets me in a tizzy at work, going through all our halloween decorations, trying to find a rat in there somewhere.

Sadly, when I do find rats they are usually skeezy rats, not cute ones.

Well, yesterday I was flipping through some gel clings at work.  Skull.  Bat.  Pumpkin, cat, mouse, skull, bat.

WAIT!  Did I just see a mouse?

I did see a mouse.  I found 2 of them actually.  And they are even cute in their own way.  Not adorable cute, but not skeezy at all.  I just HAD to buy them.

They were only $1 a piece, and with my employee discount I got them both for $1.61.

I had no idea where I was going to stick them, since I don’t have any glass in the rat room, and was worried that if I stuck them to the wall they might damage the paint.

Well, before I had left work yesterday I had decided they are going to live in my bedroom with me.  Two cute mice living on my bedroom mirror.

The Giant Wooly Rat, or Bosavi wooly rat, was discovered in an unexplored crater in New Guinea.

Well, now there is video of this rat, at night, in its natural habitat.

What I want to point out is around 1:27 in the film.  The people are PETTING this wild rat, scratching it like a pet.  Remember, this is a WILD rat, it is a GIANT rat as large as your average housecat, it has no fear of humans, and yet its letting itself be scratched.

More proof that rats are not vicious evil little demons.

“Scientists have now levitated mice using magnetic fields.

The researchers first levitated a young mouse, just three-week-old and weighing 10 grams. It appeared agitated and disoriented, seemingly trying to hold on to something.

“It actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented,” said researcher Yuanming Liu, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They decided to mildly sedate the next mouse they levitated, which seemed content with floating. “

READ MORE HERE

The Bosavi woolly rat had no fear of humans when it was discovered.

Click here to listen to Naturalist Steve Backshall on the exploration of a lost world in a crater in Papua New Guinea, containing 40 undiscovered species.