Wednesday, January 30, 2002

This really touched me for some reason. I have copied it from one of the Ratlisters on the "Rat List Serve" that I belong to, there are lots of great people who belong. His name is Ben Hubbell, I hope he doesn't mind if I used it.

Ben:
In order to understand how my rats' needs for love and affection were met it will help to give some background on my personality quirks. I have a long history of mental illness. I’m diagnosed with major depression, but there’s more to it than that. I take very small doses of a medication that is commonly used to treat schizophrenia, and it makes more of a beneficial difference than my antidepressant medication. Sometimes I go through periods where my emotions go away, and I can’t connect with other beings, be they human or be they rat.

In the face of this problem, I had to take special measures in order to see that my rats’ psycho﷓social needs were met. So I read up on wild rats at the public library, and tried to duplicate the social conditions the rats would choose for themselves.

I bred rats for an ethical pet store, and watched the ratlets closely as they grew up. I kept the ones that were the most loving towards other rats. I bred for temperament, and I judged this by how the rats related to each other, rather than by how they related to me. Traits I looked for included the grooming of other rats and sharing of food.

Once I bred a litter and unfortunately had a bad mental health episode by the time the ratlets were born. Now as I said before, I tried to duplicate the conditions that wild rats would choose for themselves. I had read in the Encyclopedia Britannica that the entire colony loves everybody’s babies, so I didn’t separate the mothers and babies from the other females. Inevitably, some of the does who hadn’t gotten pregnant would lactate at will and join in nursing the babies. So anyway, when this episode happened, I’d bred three of my nine females. When the babies were born three more females joined in nursing them. All the nursing does cooperated with each other
and everyone looked after all the babies.

Can you imaging what it would be like to be a ratlet and have six loving mothers? I really didn’t handle that batch of babies at all, yet when I brought the ones I was willing to part with to the pet store, the manager and the clerks found them to be the most lovey ratlets they had ever seen. “You must have handled them a lot.” they all gushed. I didn’t feel like volunteering that I’d been practically autistic for the last six weeks and that the ratlets had actually gotten that extraordinary amount of handling from other rats, so I said “Yup, I gave them lots of cuddles.”

Saturday, January 19, 2002

I finally figured out where my other BLOG was. Gee, how dumb can "I" be. I just had to many links on the page... so to speak. I am kinda excited I finished "Animal Luv" my first attempt at a WEB site. I really want to promote "Responsible Animal Ownership" and the like. I guess I was a bit afraid of diving in, now I can hardly wait to get my hands on a digital Camera. I have not published up to the host, they are not "connecting".