well this is somewhat disturbing.........

[Petunia]

my two young girls power groom each other quite vigorously, and often they'll be squeaking and squealing but when I check they don't appear to be hurting each other, so I've trained myself not to go running like a worried mother hen each time one of them squeals.

well, today I moved the cage out from the wall and in fact out of the room, so I could get the computer out of there and re arrange things a bit, and what do I see on the wall behind the cage?

blood spatters!! a LOT of them!! OK, by " a lot " I mean, considering that it had to be from one of the rats. Maybe about the amount of blood you'd get if you pricked your finger for a blood glucose check (if you're diabetic) and then shook that drop or so of blood onto the wall (not that anyone would, mind you, :giggle: but I'm trying to give you an idea of how much blood there was)

the splatters were all dry but it had to be pretty recent because I wipe down that wall often.
I also found blood on their food bowl!

So I take all the girls out and examine them for any cuts or wounds and I can't find a thing! no cuts, scrapes, bitten toes, nothing. They look fine!! Except that they are a bit annoyed that I keep flipping them over and over and examining every inch of their bodies :laugh4:



is there something else I should be looking for?
this was definitely blood and not porphyrin.


weird!

 

[jorats]

One of them might have scratched the inside of their nose and sneezed it out. If they are as energetic as before, which sounds like they are by their reaction to your physical exam...lol they probably are ok.

 

[Jems71]

I have a sheet of white coroplast on the back of my cage, and it too gets splatters looks like blood, I think its from their nose its mostly in the corner where they sleep and I find when they wake sometimes they sort of sneeze a bit...like clearing their noses... and when my rat kids had URIs this splattering on the corplast was worse...
If I was you I would watch for URI symptoms.

 

[Petunia]

well I'll keep checking them whether they like it or not :giggle:

I just didn't know if there was some odd rat illness where they cough up blood or something....

I've had rats with URI's and they'll sneeze some porphryin on things but that does not look anything like blood to me, this was blood, I'm sure of that.

The blood splatters were on the wall near where they had their most recent loud "disagreement" so I am pretty sure that's when it happened. Whatever happened.........!!

they sure do heal up fast!

anic: silly little maniac girls! anic: :laugh4:

 

[jorats]

That's true... if only we could heal so fast.

 

[PitLuvs]

You don't want to see what my wall and food bowl looked like when Stewart lost his nail.... uke: I sometimes get these little splatters on the wall too, esp when they had mites.

 

[Petunia]

aww poor Stewart!