NOISY Neighbors Next to My Bed!

This weekend I built a rat cage that is five or six times the size of the critter cage I had them in before. I built it to fit a shelf in my bedroom because my sister, Jackie, is no fan of rats and shuddered every time she had to pass by them on her way through my living room, morning and night, on her way to and from the garage.


The new cage is more than two feet high, 14 inches wide and four feet long. My two rats have lots and lots of space now to run and climb and... build...

I never knew--until they were sharing a room with me at night--how industrious they are. I put several pages of newspaper on the bottom of the cage so their feet wouldn't be on the wire...but they aren't leaving all of it there.


Last night, three different times after the lights went out, they went to work and tore the top layers of paper into long shreds (rrr-rrr-rr-iii---pppp for six or seven long seconds each time), then carried them to a "secret hiding place" beneath another piece of newspaper to construct a rodent's version of the Taj Mahal in one corner. Tearing newspaper is NOISY. It drowned out the radio music I usually fall asleep to. It drowned out the dog that barks (at times) across the street. I couldn't help but smile. The noise didn't keep me from sleeping, luckily, because I have nowhere else to place a cage this size!

Today I went to a new pet store to find them a better variety of rat food. The new place, Champion Pets in Parkland, has a better option than most nationwide pet stores do, and the fellow there is ordering me a five pound bag of dog food that one of the rat experts on the Internet recommends so I can use that as their staple diet.

Casey and Jamie named the rats but I can never remember what they named them. Let me think... The hooded rat is Pepper; the white rat is Misha. Or maybe Mishka. I don't call them by name; all I have to do is show up near their cage early in the morning and late at night and they come over to see what I have to offer.

I got rats because I'm auditioning critters for when my kitties, Archie and Ashley, ages 16, go to kitty heaven. I want a pocket pet or a table pet for my old age, not a kitty whose litter box I'll have to clean or who I may trip over when I get less adept at walking. I know, I know... I'm prepping way before I have to, but cats live 16-18 years and before then these care-and-stability matters WILL be an issue for me if I get another cat or dog, so I want to find an easier pet to love on and care for.

The down side to rats (other than other peoples' reactions and the rats naked tails)is that they only live a couple years, and since losing a pet is my least favorite part of pet ownership, I don't want to have to go through that every other year! So I made the new cage roomy enough to contain a guinea pig, a chinchilla, a hedgehog, or a couple (or more) smaller size birds: finches, parakeets...

Jackie's all for me getting a small bird. In fact, she suggested I take the rats back to the pet store and get the new pets sooner rather than later. I smiled and said, "Sorry--when I adopt a pet, it's for the life of the pet. Next time I'll consult you before I get a pet, though!"

Poor Jackie. She has a definite "thing" against rats. Had I known that, I would have made another choice...