This site began one lonely Friday night when I had nothing to do and felt like building a website.
The above is true, but honestly, I couldn't have made this site if I didn't have something
to make it about, so lets talk about the main subject here: My rats, or ratlets as I am so fond
of calling them. I mention somewhere on the site that I bred gerbils for a while. 4 years to
be exact. I loved all of my gerbies and breeding them was a blast. But soon, work and the normal
activites of a teenager got in the way and I didn't have time to care for millions of little gerbil
babies running around. So I found homes for a lot of my little guys, and kept the special ones
until they passed from old age. Some 6 months later, I got an offer from a regular at work of
a rat family, consisting of 3 boys. Father and two sons. Cage, toys, water bottle, and food included.
I did think about it
for a week or so before I decided that yes, that would be very neat to take on. Now, I owned
3 hooded rats for a short period of time several years ago but they died of respiratory infections
so I never learned the true greatness that is a rat. Once I brought these guys home, I immediately
bonded with the father, Edmond. He was much older than the two boys and so tame and sweet.
I loved that rat very much.
After several months, Edmond got in a scruff with his sons. I'm not sure what happened or why, but
he ended up with a pretty severe laceration on his eye. We decided it would be best to remove the eye. I took him into work, we gassed him, removed the eye,
and I brought him home along with a pain shot and some fluids. He recovered pretty well. The first few
nights, I fed him baby food through a syringe morning and night. Soon he was able to lick it out
of a bowl. Then finally, he could eat his regular food. Things seemed to be going great and his
blinky-eye was doing fine, and then suddenly I woke up one morning to find him lying in the bottom
of his cage, breathing heavily and having messed on himself. He had also apparantly tried to vomit,
but as rats can't vomit, he aspirated the liquid into his lungs. There's no recovery when that happens, so Edmond was euthanised.
Edmond has a little grave that I can look out on from my window.
He will always be missed, and the clan is named after him as a tribute.
The history and background info for my other ratties can be found on their pages.
