Smidgen eating tissues

Petunia · Oct 23, 2012

Smidgen is Brenna's sister (Brenna died Sunday)

Smidge has a big inguinal tumor and is on metacam plus baytril for early signs of a resp infection.
she is around 21 mos old and is very overweight (weighs over 700grams)

anyway I gave the kids some tissues to nest with and she took one and started ripping off pieces and eating them!!
so of course I had to take the tissues away from her.

the only other rat I've seen who ate tissues instead of shredding them to make a nest was Paige, and she had a PT

after losing two in two weeks I'm worried and am probably looking too closely and maybe seeing problems where none exist
but what other reason is there for a rat to eat non food items?
:?

rhapsody · Oct 23, 2012

Would that be considered a form of pica? I was doing some searching on that the other day and found this:

http://www.ratbehavior.org/vomit.htm#WhyRatsCantVomit

Rats do experience nausea and have evolved an alternative to vomiting: pica, the consumption of non-nutritive substances. When rats feel nauseous they eat things like clay, kaolin (a type of clay), dirt and even hardwood bedding (eating clay and dirt is a type of pica called geophagia).

Rats engage in pica in response to motion-sickness (Mitchell et al. 1977a, b, Morita et al. 1988b), nausea-inducing drugs (Mitchell et al. 1977c, Clark et al. 1997), radiation (Yamamoto et al. 2002b), and after consuming poisons (Mitchell 1976), or emetic drugs (Takeda et al. 1993). The incidence of pica decreases in response to anti-emetics (Takeda et al. 1993) and anti-motion sickness drugs (Morita et al. 1988a). Pica in rats is therefore analogous to vomiting in other species.

hopefloats · Oct 23, 2012

Not in that case. If it was pica, she would be chewing anything that wasnt tied down.

I have rats that like to eat tissue.

jorats · Oct 23, 2012

Oh boy. For me, I would take that as pain. I hate inguinal tumours. They are the worst.

Petunia · Oct 24, 2012

I'm thinking it's pain too, she's not running around like she usually does, she's moving very slowly and staying low to the ground

but then stoopid me, I have been giving her the wrong dose of metacam, I wrote it down wrong when I transferred my notes to a clean sheet of paper, so no wonder the metacam isn't working

Here's a video of her and one of Evie, who is 23 mos and has two tumors, and is on metacam too because she's showing signs of pain (biting, mostly)

http://youtu.be/-XOhO_n9Drw

http://youtu.be/6bFY8X0Q8ZA
Smidgen was out for a little bit and was all shivering, so I put her back in the cage.

I think I need to leave them alone for a bit so they can grieve the loss of Brenna.....and stop fussing over them so much.
what do you think?
They've got a lot to deal with, losing their alpha and now Brenna

if I feel a bit overwhelmed I can only imagine what its like for them who usually sleep together-
although for the most part they are all sleeping by themselves since Brenna died

that seems weird to me, too. everything is jsut feeling so off balance