Actually my wife spotted a "headless" white animal in the yard one evening... we ran out and called her, but she didn't come back... it was still summer and she was very happy outdoors. When it got colder, she was apparently living with the neighbors house part of the time and possibly even in ours... This rat could literally evaporate into any shadow. She would watch your eyes from the shadows and when you looked away she would slink across the room, you sort of saw something move in the corner of your eye, but didn't know what it was... and she would make an opening into the bottom of every piece of furniture to vanish into if you looked. My neighbors spotted her eating alongside their pitbull terriers and she had tunnels through the walls in their house. He had met Fuzzy Rat and didn't know about Fluffy, so one day he spotted her in his living room and decided to catch her for us.. Which turned out to be a terrible mistake. He really got hurt bad. His wife came over and asked us if we had lost our rat, and I said no... then she showed us a pic on her phone... and there was Fluffy. When I got to my neighbors house with a live catch trap.. the fellow had his kids and dogs penned up in the bedroom and was starting to tear out the sheet rock. His arm was wrapped in a bath towel soaked in blood... He was x-special forces just back from Iraq and he was on a mission. There wasn't any time for live trapping, another special forces type showed up with implements of destruction and they were about to tear their landlords house down from the inside out. So I sat down on the floor in front of the hole in the wall and called her out, it took a while for her to calm down, but she finally came out to me... I was pretty terrified in light of what she had done to the neighbor.. so I plunked her into the travel cage and got her home... My neighbors wife had apparently recorded the attack and the recovery on her phone... I offered to take the fellow to the hospital but he declined. So as it looked like I wasn't going to get hit for a huge hospital bill and all was calm... I got the heck out of there before anyone changed their minds... I never saw the video. When I got home, I opened the travel cage and Fluffy came out and napped on my lap for a very long time... I think it seemed longer because I was still pretty terrified of her having seen what she was now capable of. My daughter came in... now about 6 years old and she took Fluffy from me and started playing rag doll with her... I think I died about a thousand deaths in the first few minutes, but Fluffy seemed happy to be home and everything went well...
A few days later she evaporated again... She could find ways into the walls. We found her nesting in the towels and when I pulled her out she turned into a ball of fangs and fur like the Tasmanian devil cartoon... she didn't bite me and I dropped her in surprise... and she evaporated again... but she came back when recalled... Lesson learned... when I call, she comes, when try to grab her she becomes unhinged and dangerous... I never tried to grab her again. On the other hand, my daughter would stuff her into doll clothes and toss her around like a rag doll. It would really have been a lot cuter, if I could breathe when she was doing it. One day I left Fluffy on a windowsill and she evaporated, when I recalled her I watched her put her back against a cabinet and walk straight up the wall, reach over and take the blind cord, and climb the cord back to the sill... She could do so many things domestic rats couldn't even dream of... like hop over 4 foot barricades I put between rooms.
Actually to hijack this thread a bit farther... One day I had Fluffy and Fuzzy Rat in my office. Fluffy was completely house safe, she never did any damage... her thing was being invisible... But Fuzzy Rat had cut some wires and I didn't want her free ranging at the time. Fluffy hopped over the barricade of computer boxes in the doorway and Fuzzy Rat couldn't follow. Then Fluffy hopped back into the room. There was a thick extension cord going from room to room draped over the boxes and Fluffy started running up and down the cord until Fuzzy Rat followed her up and over the barricade. I likely should have been thinking that teaching Fuzzy Rat to overcome a barricade was a bad thing. But I had never seen a rat actually teach another rat something before. This wasn't simply copy cat behavior... it was one rat assessing another rats situation and intentionally teaching it something to solve it's problem... Fluffy didn't need to climb the cord, she could easily jump over the barricade. But when she realized Fuzzy Rat couldn't, she taught her to solve her problem too. I was worth risking a few electrical wires to watch that.
Wild and part wild rats are smart and they are born with survival skills... and they are faster and more agile than domestic rats times ten... They have a deep and wide vicious streak, if pushed too far, they hunt and kill small animals (another story) but they are just like our pet rats in that they are pack animals and love their families, even if they don't generally learn to trust humans in general. When people say that wild rats are like wolves and domestic rats are like dogs, they are right. Pet wild rats are like pet wolves. I suppose I would adopt another one, if I got it as a very young pup and really had the time to work with it. They are friendly and furry little hand grenades they aren't likely to go off as long as you treat them properly.. on the other hand I'm thinking I might not want to be in a house with lots of super agile furry little hand grenades romping around me that might not be completely socialized. In any event keep them away from people they don't know or bad things can happen fast.