P
Pal4Pippin
Guest
Hi all,
My wife and I decided to get rats last summer, but we ended up getting two baby boys from what, in retrospect, was a bad breeder (smoked around the rats and had them on poor diets, etc.) Partly through our own inexperience and poor judgment and partly under pressure from a pushy breeder, one of the babies we took was sick with an upper respiratory infection (likely myco). By the fall, little Basil had succumbed to pneumonia and advanced myco despite many trips to our local vet and multiple courses of antibiotics. His brother Pippin seemed healthy, but started sneezing just a week or two after Basil died. We jumped in to get him on antibiotics and keep him from going down the same road, but the whole experience had left us both emotionally battered. After numerous vet consultations and a couple courses of antibiotics, Pippin seems to be mostly stable and has never done more than sneeze occasionally.
It wasn't until mid-winter after more reading online that I fully realized just how important it was to keep multiple rats together and that it was not kind to keep Pippin alone. Given our past experiences (actually had a couple bad experiences with breeders when first looking for rats), we were very wary to look for a rat from a breeder and were hoping to adopt a rescue rat from somewhere. After a couple weeks of searching for such a situation and coming up empty, we switched to looking at breeders again. We found one that we both really liked and decided to give it a try, despite the breeder being almost 2 hrs away. So a little over a week ago, we brought home a ~ four month old male rat we named Bilbo in hopes of integrating him in with Pippin. The male was super sweet when we held him and carried him around at the breeder's house and got along great with his brothers, but his personality turned quickly in his new home. We started them off in separate cages next to each other and I suspect this was part of the problem (did not give him time to just get used to us away from this new, scary rat). Bilbo bit me hard and drew lots of blood the morning after we brought him home and has been unpredictably aggressive (both in and out of his cage) since then. We moved him into a separate room and hoped that gentle, positive interactions and time might help him revert back to his formerly tame demeanor, but its been over a week with no change. I read all the threads I could find on the "immersion" technique with rats but after one attempt with this, I don't think its something that my wife or I can handle (he just gets too crazy and is hard to control even with gloves on). I read up on neutering too, but it seems that many people end up having to deal with abscesses or infections and that the recovery can take weeks and that it may not solve the aggression at all.
So we now have an aggressive rat (Bilbo) alone in one room and our very sweet Pippin still lonely in the other. We came into this knowing that keeping rats was not something super cheap and easy, but the multiple issues we seem to hit at every turn has really worn us down. I am constantly stressed and feel guilty that our rat has now been alone for a few months and frustrated that when we tried to fix this we just ended up with another lonely rat that's even worse off than the first. We've put lots of time, money, and emotion into trying to care for our ratties and it just feels like every move we make still ends poorly for the rats and only makes our home life more stressful. I have friends and acquaintances who bought pet store rats years ago and never had any health or behavior issues in the 2-4 years they were alive so I've got to think our experience is not the norm. It seems to me that we should try to find Bilbo a more experience rat owner that could deal with his behavior issues and integrate him in with other rats and then try to introduce a different rat in with Pippin. My concern is that we will just end up with another bitey/aggressive or sick rat.
I'm hoping against hope that someone here might have some insight or an idea of something we could do other than just give it another shot and hope it goes better. At this point, we are not really keen on getting another 2-3 rats at once because we are not sure we want to keep rats anymore after Pippin dies. However, it seems really hard to find a single rat to be Pippin's pal over 3-4 months old anywhere in the central Ohio area from someone that looks trustworthy. Every week that passes where we don't find Pippin a friend makes me feel awful for another week of his life spent alone. I apologize for the length of this thread, but wanted to fully explain our situation and I appreciate any advice anyone might have to offer!
-Andrew
My wife and I decided to get rats last summer, but we ended up getting two baby boys from what, in retrospect, was a bad breeder (smoked around the rats and had them on poor diets, etc.) Partly through our own inexperience and poor judgment and partly under pressure from a pushy breeder, one of the babies we took was sick with an upper respiratory infection (likely myco). By the fall, little Basil had succumbed to pneumonia and advanced myco despite many trips to our local vet and multiple courses of antibiotics. His brother Pippin seemed healthy, but started sneezing just a week or two after Basil died. We jumped in to get him on antibiotics and keep him from going down the same road, but the whole experience had left us both emotionally battered. After numerous vet consultations and a couple courses of antibiotics, Pippin seems to be mostly stable and has never done more than sneeze occasionally.
It wasn't until mid-winter after more reading online that I fully realized just how important it was to keep multiple rats together and that it was not kind to keep Pippin alone. Given our past experiences (actually had a couple bad experiences with breeders when first looking for rats), we were very wary to look for a rat from a breeder and were hoping to adopt a rescue rat from somewhere. After a couple weeks of searching for such a situation and coming up empty, we switched to looking at breeders again. We found one that we both really liked and decided to give it a try, despite the breeder being almost 2 hrs away. So a little over a week ago, we brought home a ~ four month old male rat we named Bilbo in hopes of integrating him in with Pippin. The male was super sweet when we held him and carried him around at the breeder's house and got along great with his brothers, but his personality turned quickly in his new home. We started them off in separate cages next to each other and I suspect this was part of the problem (did not give him time to just get used to us away from this new, scary rat). Bilbo bit me hard and drew lots of blood the morning after we brought him home and has been unpredictably aggressive (both in and out of his cage) since then. We moved him into a separate room and hoped that gentle, positive interactions and time might help him revert back to his formerly tame demeanor, but its been over a week with no change. I read all the threads I could find on the "immersion" technique with rats but after one attempt with this, I don't think its something that my wife or I can handle (he just gets too crazy and is hard to control even with gloves on). I read up on neutering too, but it seems that many people end up having to deal with abscesses or infections and that the recovery can take weeks and that it may not solve the aggression at all.
So we now have an aggressive rat (Bilbo) alone in one room and our very sweet Pippin still lonely in the other. We came into this knowing that keeping rats was not something super cheap and easy, but the multiple issues we seem to hit at every turn has really worn us down. I am constantly stressed and feel guilty that our rat has now been alone for a few months and frustrated that when we tried to fix this we just ended up with another lonely rat that's even worse off than the first. We've put lots of time, money, and emotion into trying to care for our ratties and it just feels like every move we make still ends poorly for the rats and only makes our home life more stressful. I have friends and acquaintances who bought pet store rats years ago and never had any health or behavior issues in the 2-4 years they were alive so I've got to think our experience is not the norm. It seems to me that we should try to find Bilbo a more experience rat owner that could deal with his behavior issues and integrate him in with other rats and then try to introduce a different rat in with Pippin. My concern is that we will just end up with another bitey/aggressive or sick rat.
I'm hoping against hope that someone here might have some insight or an idea of something we could do other than just give it another shot and hope it goes better. At this point, we are not really keen on getting another 2-3 rats at once because we are not sure we want to keep rats anymore after Pippin dies. However, it seems really hard to find a single rat to be Pippin's pal over 3-4 months old anywhere in the central Ohio area from someone that looks trustworthy. Every week that passes where we don't find Pippin a friend makes me feel awful for another week of his life spent alone. I apologize for the length of this thread, but wanted to fully explain our situation and I appreciate any advice anyone might have to offer!
-Andrew
A neuter surgery is very easy with a competent vet. Neuter abscesses can happen but aren't a big issue.
