[pairaducks]

d'aww, that's adorable

 

[lovemyfurries]

They are so precious, look at those eyes. They're nice and chubby, Rita feeds her babies well. It's so great you getting to hold them. Praying for the day Rita let's you hold her too. That will be amazing thanks for the pics!!

 

[Kucero]

It took months, but Rita finally bit me. It wasn't because she was defending babies or because she was simply feeling hostile; I think it's because I've been feeding her too many insects.

Eastern woodrats are herbivores, so they're foragers, not scavengers, but insects account for a small part of their diet. Those babies are fat in part because I've been feeding Rita very well, and she LOVES crickets and mealworms. Whenever I'm giving her veggies, she's a docile little lamb, but she becomes a deadly little hunter if there's a bug anywhere near her. The first time I fed her a cricket, she actually startled me. The poor thing can't see much at all; can't even see a cricket right in front of her face, but her sense of smell and hearing is better than I would have thought possible. She can detect the sound of a cricket crawling over the paper substrate three levels down, and she becomes the predator, moving unbelievably fast to get near it and barely slowing down as she relies on her sense of smell to lunge out and catch it. Once the bug is nabbed, she sits back on her haunches and enjoys the spoils of victory.

My hand must have made the wrong kind of sound as I was withdrawing it from the cage, because she lunged out and bit, but must have realized her mistake, because she barely grazed the skin.

On a positive note, the twins are not even weaned, and they're already bruxing to show contentment. All it takes is repeated light strokes on the head with a fingertip. Their eyes get heavy, their little jaws start moving, and I can hear the clicking sounds they make. Remember that these woodrats are born with their incisors already erupted...and those teeth have grown significantly. I have been trying to get this on video, but I have to stop stroking their heads to get the camera, and they stop bruxing by the time the camera is ready. It also won't work unless I'm actually holding them with the other hand, because they're not used to not having something warm next to them at all times.

 

[lovemyfurries]

Oh wow! The fact that Rita didn't draw blood and barely scraped skin is a HUGE sign. My boys will also do that if I'm offering a tasty treat, but the minute they realize it's my finger they stop and let go. Sounds pretty much what Rita did too. I actually got excited when I read that and the fact that you know her well enough also to tell she wasn't trying to lunge at you specifically well that goes without saying.

I can't believe her babies are so content, bruxing already, that's just plain amazing I am so very happy to hear. Don't worry about the video yet. You have such an awesome way of explaining yourself that one can picture it anyway. Photos for now are fine. I'm just so glad things are going so well

Well done little wood rat daddy!!

 

[kksrats]

My goodness, so much has happened since I read this thread last! I'm very excited to hear all the progress you and Rita have made in your relationship and those babies are just too plump and adorable to bear. As far as the insect incident, I have actually encountered the same reaction after giving mealworms to my rats. They're ferocious little things when it comes to live prey and I usually have to space the mealworms out as treats with several days in between or they will start lunging at my hands expecting worms to be there. Even the baked mealworms cause this behavior in my girls lol. Glad to see all is well and I hope there was not too much damage from the fire. Keep up the great work!

 

[Rat Daddy]

As a teenager my dad gave me a container of gasoline and a couple cans of raid and sent me off to exterminate a nest of yellow jackets living in a tree stump... I don't remember that working out too well either. I've got to bet your incident looked interesting on the insurance claim form but I'm happy no one got hurt and hopefully things are getting back to normal.

It looks like you are making great progress with the pups. And yes, even brown rats have a tendency to go into hunt mode. None of current rats eat bugs, but my part wild rat did, she didn't so much hunt them as just hoover them up.... I got bit blocking her mid attack on a white mouse I was holding which I'm sure she saw as a extra special treat. But if she only barely grazed the skin I'd take it as a mock bite and not a prediction of things to come when the pups get older and you'll have to start working with her more.

If Rita's eyesight is really that bad, it's going to be just a little harder working with her, she might be easily spooked. But with brown rats, their eyesight isn't necessarily bad, just different. It's low resolution and sometimes they just don't recognize things either from close up or far away. It's not that they don't see them, they just don't seem to register right away. Some of my rats have proven they can navigate vast distances outdoors and distinguish my car from other cars at a distance, but then I've put food right in front of them and gotten a blank reaction... Then when I tell them it's food they are all over it. Try doing some tests with Rita and the pups as they get older at some point the pups should look towards motion in the room and perhaps try and get your attention and follow your movement with their eyes. With brown rats, my favorite basic vision test is whether they cross a room directly, or dart object to object or follow the walls... Rats that follow the walls usually have the worst eyesight, rats that run object to object can see better and rats that cross the room willy nilly can usually see pretty well. With brown rats, their eyesight actually takes pretty bright light to be most useful, in low light they are appear to be more blind than we are.

The same goes with smell, I've had some rats that could smell a few crumbs of food from several rooms away and come running, but when they got withing a few feet of the food they started running a search pattern to find it, then I've had rats that don't seem to be able to find food from a distance, but when you put them a few feet from the food they run straight to it. I think those rats with a super sense of smell get overwhelmed when they are too close whereas rats with a lesser ability at a distance can follow the strength of the odor like an arrow up close and personal... There are lots of fun experiments you can try. I take it the pups haven't shown any interest in sold foods yet. That should come as they start exploring a bit. With brown rats, I usually start with shredded wheat cereal soaked in milk (even the frosted kind if I have it in the house) but I've never had a momma rat around so it's eyedropper to soft cereal because I want to get them eating solids and off of KMR as fast as I can. You might be able to skip the mushy foods step entirely.

Judging from how well the pups are doing it looks like you are pretty well on target with Rita's diet I can't wait until the pups are ready to explore and interact with you and their environment more and you can start working with Rita more one on one.

Thanks for taking us all along on the adventure.

 

[lovemyfurries]

Rat Daddy that's so interesting. I had a black hooded ratty that developed a Pituatary tumor, before he would always just run all over the place, but after he lost his vision he used to only go along the edges of the room depending on what room he was in though. My PEW will walk or run in the middle of the room but if he gets startled he quickly runs to the wall. Shame the one day he tried to run back to my room and misjudged the doorway, he ran right into the skirting. He didn't get hurt though and mom was there to quickly reassure him

 

[Rat Daddy]

Rat vision is actually rather interesting, brown rats apparently have an awesome depth of field and can see into the UV spectrum. But their vision is Low resolution like a really old black and white tv. This is often translated to mean that rats have something like 20 x 400 vision... Which really isn't true, because that would imply their vision is out of focus. I need glasses, and when I take them off, my vision is blurry. Rats vision isn't necessarily blurry, it's just not detailed. Working with shoulder rats outdoors our Fuzzy Rat could navigate quite well visually and was pretty good at identifying people she knew and liked at a distance. With time and experience she learned to interpret her low resolution images pretty well. Like when I was a kid and the tv was snowy most of the time I could still 'see' what was going on and who was who. When we walked places with her she would ride on my shoulder facing rearwards, so if I put her down she could navigate back to the house or the car. When you start working with any rat outdoors, they pretty much run to any building... buildings are big and at first they pretty much figure every building is your house and every door is your front door, then with time and experience they become more accurate in how they interpret their visual images, and learn that your house looks different from the neighbors and what your front door looks like. So it's not only low resolution but understanding what the images mean. To some degree, the better the rats vision and the more practice a rat has at using it's vision for navigation the more competent a rat becomes. Your best true shoulder rat can really 'see' quite well.

When the sky is very overcast or it gets darker, rats seem to lose their eyesight more quickly than we do. I don't know if this is true or if there are just fewer visual cues to see in the dark so their low resolution picture gets even less pixels to interpret. When it started getting dark, Fuzzy Rat went back to the car or the house, especially when she got older, otherwise she would hang out on us.... This wasn't nearly as bad when she was young, but by the time she was over a year old, she wasn't going to be on the ground at night on her own given a choice. I don't recall her ever getting lost in the dark or acting confused, but I think she was uncomfortable because she couldn't make out predators and distant movement and that's what unnerved her.

Humans have a huge portion of their brain dedicated to eyesight and interpreting all of the high resolution visual data we take in and we burn a lot of energy processing visual data. Low resolution vision requires less brain size and power to process. Low light vision is useful to humans whereas rats have whiskers to navigate in pitch blackness. I might add that we followed Fuzzy Rat home from a playground once and she navigated the trip, about half a mile, absolutely perfectly right up to the front door turn by turn on the first try... Unless she could smell our footsteps, not likely she did it by looking rearwards when we carried her to the playground. At a certain point in her life, towards he very end, she started short cutting turns... Rats have a very remarkable mapping process. In other words they can memorize spacial distances and locations very well. In shorthand they can run mazes like nothing else... To a rat the world is just a giant maze.

Interestingly... rats process spacial information when they sleep. When we parked the car in a different space, Fuzzy Rat would always go straight to where we parked the car the day before then start a search pattern from there. You can witness this interesting mapping behavior with indoor rats too. When you set your rats loose to free range, most will scurry around their entire play area to re-map their space paying particular attention to things that weren't there before and things that moved. They will appear to be examining new things and climbing under and over them before getting on with normal play. Basically rats build very detailed maps in their mind. I suspect they can map in pitch darkness too using whisker touch.

Pink eyed rats and ruby eyed rats have worse problems with their vision. I had a black/ruby eyed rat that never seemed to be able to make out details smaller than a small house or a tree, she was terrified of being outdoors in the open and would run to any building or tree she saw in the distance. There was one PEW true shoulder rat her a while back, but in general bright light can damage pink eyes and ruby eyed and pink eyed rats make for less competent shoulder rats.

Black rats (ship rats) are arboreal and therefore have better vision. I guessed they should feel more competent and confident outdoors than brown rats do. And although there's only been one black shoulder rat this seems to hold true. Wilder was apparently quite at home outdoors in more open spaces.

It's been a pretty cheap cop out to say rats have bad eyesight when it comes to brown rats with normal eye color. It's more like they are differently enabled... Their vision is low res, and different spectrum, and likely inferior to ours, but bad eyesight doesn't nearly tell the whole story. It is going to be interesting to learn how and what wood rats can see and how they interpret their visual world. Perhaps their vision is low resolution too, or perhaps its more useful in certain lights or at certain distances... I expect it is adapted to their special needs and isn't "bad" at all just species specific and different from ours. Rodents have been evolving a whole lot longer than humans there aren't a lot of bugs left in the design. Every part of a rat is perfectly designed for its purpose. If a wood rats have eyes, and we know they do... there's a reason for why they are the way they are, now the fun starts in terms of figuring it out.

 

[bloomington bob]

Anothr fascinating post Rat Daddy, particularly the part about mapping - so interesting that Fuzzy Rat returned to the spot where the car had been th enigh tbefore

 

[lovemyfurries]

I agree Bloomington Bob, fascinating read,and also,in particular the mapping. Imagine being able to build detailed maps in your mind while sleeping. I wish I could, I'd never get lost thanks for the interesting info Rat Daddy!

 

[Rat Daddy]

I think it's important to mention at this time that training shoulder rats is hazardous and you are likely to get the wrong rat lost or killed. That said, it's what we do...

A lot of rat learning studies are done with mazes... which is really funny because that's what rats do best, it's like their brains are designed to map.... When training rats outdoors they tend to pick landmarks and run from one to another.... They stare at and identify them and then run to them, then they will pick the next landmark and run there... Rather comically there is a tidal drainage ditch between two landmarks Max uses to get to the parking lot... At low tide it's less than half an inch deep and she can easily walk across at high tide it can be a few feet deep. And one day at high tide she literally hit the water, didn't even try to swim until she was completely submersed... Now when she gets to the "creek" she stops and checks first. Fuzzy Rat always took the bridge across. And I always thought she only followed landmarks too, but one day she also discovered low tide and that she could cross the water, then she started taking a shortcut through the mini golf field to the car. There is a fence so she couldn't possibly see the car so she was obviously mapping the cars location based on a much more complex system than I had first imagined. Somehow she was able to plot the shortest distance between two points without actually seeing where she was going. The same thing happened on the trip back from the playground, she did it a couple of times and then suddenly she started cutting a diagonal through people's back yards... as we couldn't allow that we had to stop walking her back from the playground. If you drew a straight line from where she was to the house she would have hit the front door, but it would have meant going through fences and through yards that might have had dogs etc and places we couldn't follow her..... Sadly the short cutting behavior started towards the end of her life, shortly thereafter she became disabled so we really couldn't do much with it. It's just interesting to note that rats not only map their movements but fill in the gaps in at least a two dimensional, possibly three dimensional spacial model. But this makes sense, if you put something in a rat's path it doesn't get lost. It goes around, over or through. It's also a skill set that "evolves" with use.

It's funny when you think that we tend to believe that we teach rats to run mazes... when in all reality running mazes or better referred to as "navigating" or spacial mapping is what rats do completely naturally. In order to find food and water a pack of wild rats might range over many acres, perhaps farther to find food and water and shelter... they memorize countless hiding places and dig burrows along the way so they are always near shelter.

When we look at our little fur babies we tend to forget that these animals are really rats down deep... They are intrepid explorers, fierce fighters an survive and thrive in a world where just about everything is bigger, faster and stronger than they are. Rita and her pups aren't brown rats, but she's built to survive too, it's going to be so interesting to find out what their special skills are and how they can adapt them to life among humans.

 

[Kucero]

I've been trying to figure out how well Rita can see. I've read about the way rats perceive with their vision compared to our own sight, and I still don't understand it completely. I know Rita can't see past six feet in normal lighting, not even simple movement, and despite what I've read about their superior night vision, I haven't had any reason to believe she can see better in dim light than she can in standard room lighting. I'm sure she can see better than WE can with limited light, but I don't believe her night vision affords her more information than lighted vision.

On a side note, these woodrats are one of the few wild animals that can see red light.

I know I keep going on and on about how much online research I've done in my efforts to learn everything I can about rats. I can't tell you how many links I've clicked on, but a Google search for anything rat-related on this computer would probably require navigation to the 20th page before an unused link could be found. Though they belong to the same order, there are vast and significant differences between pack rats and Norways. I haven't made a list, but it wouldn't surprise me to find more differences than similarities.

Rita was almost impossible to read, at first. If she wasn't sleeping, she was on Defcon 1, with no stages in between. As I've mentioned before, toward the beginning, she slept with her eyes open, then partially open, and now she shuts them completely. If she's not sleeping, her eyes are wide open, with one exception:

This is the only time she's registered a different facial expression. Her babies were just born...you can see one of them beneath her...and she squinted like this for the first couple of days. This was Rita at her most dangerous level. She doesn't have sleepy eyes upon waking up; she's on full alert in an eyeblink. She wasn't squinting because of the light, either; her eyes actually narrowed like this during feeding times, and both of us were tense. I never did put gloves on; I figured the foreign smell might stress her more. It's possible that squinting like this aided her vision in some way, but I don't think it's likely. I think this was a conscious effort on her part to let me know she was ready to throw down if I stepped out of line. She had no trouble communicating two messages to me: tread very softly, and stop taking pictures.

I have no real experience with fancy rats; I've never even touched one, or known anyone that had them as pets. Despite this, I can speak from a semi-educated (maybe pseudo-educated) position in describing some of the physical differences and tendencies between species. I also want to add that Rat Daddy has been instrumental in my education, and he is essentially what I was looking for when I first visited these boards. He invested large chunks of time exchanging messages with me, and my knowledge base was greatly enriched not only by the literal content of his messages, but also by the alternative research venues I pursued as a result of the questions I came up with while reading those messages. He made no pretense of claiming to be an authority on things he had limited knowledge of, which would have hindered my efforts and/or steered me in the wrong direction, and I wanted to recognize the huge part he played in helping me, just by sharing some of his experiences relevant to my situation, which was once a predicament, but has become an adventure.

Rita can't see things that are inches from her face, regardless of the light. She knows when I'm going to feed her when she hears her name followed by two clicks. She hears the sound of the latch disengaging. But she doesn't know my hand is in the cage until she smells the food. If she's upstairs, she's inside the hut, and waits for me to put my hand right by the door. If she's downstairs, though, she's developed a bad habit of running straight to the door, which I won't open until she backs up. It's very unlikely that I have ever seen her move at full speed, but I have seen her move so fast she was just a blur, and even if she's a respectable distance from the open door, I'm sure that if she decided to bolt, she'd be out before I could react. To her credit, though, after I say "Back up" a couple of times, she moves to the second level and waits for me to click twice before she comes back to the bottom level, where I'm prepared with a tasty morsel and a semi-blocked doorway.

Now this is where educated guessing comes into play, so before I go on, I want to be clear when I say I'm not trying to invite a "which rat is better" discussion. That said, I think Rita has more heightened senses when it comes to smell and whisker proprioceptor sensitivity than introduced species. Some of her mystacial whiskers (the whiskers on the sides of her face) are over three inches long, more than half her body length, and she can "hear" sounds with them. On average, Eastern woodrats survive three times as long as Norways in the wild. Rita is geared toward predator detection and flight. Her skin is loose to aid in preventing predators from getting a good hold on her. She's not a fighter, and while I'm sure she would put me in a world of hurt if she ever had a mind to bite me aggressively, I don't think she would stand a chance against a Norway or roof rat. The latter two rats are more streamlined and muscular, and probably have better fighting instincts than Rita does. I think this is a HUGE factor in explaining why she has not intentionally bitten me. I think it would take a lot more for her to cross the "fight or flight" line that all rats have than it would for introduced species, and I've often wondered how successful my attempts to earn her trust would be if she wasn't a woodrat. I'd like to claim that the combination of my patience and methods have been the only key element in how well our relationship is progressing, but I have to admit that a substantial portion of my success so far has been due to her temperament.

 

[Kucero]

That was a long post, and I didn't even get to write an update on how the twins are doing.

They will be 3 weeks old in two days, and that's when weaning begins. Rita finally moved them downstairs two days ago, and I haven't been able to clean the cage since. It's not too much of a problem, though, since she is naturally litter trained and still toileting the babies. I put a box over Rita's latrine area and stuck a block of oak in it so she could perch on that while she did her business into the box. Sometimes, she faces the wrong way and leaves her gifts on the outside of the box, but most of it goes where it's supposed to.

Toward the last few days, the view from the outside alternated between Rita leaving her hind end hanging out...

...or leaving the babies hanging out. These pictures were both taken three days ago.

Most of the time, when she heard the feeding call, Rita would yank the babies inside so she could stick her head out. The other times, she'd be lazy and just wait for me to bring the food to the doorway (which she widened even more since my original expansion of the entry with a razor knife). During those feedings, it was virtually impossible to avoid touching the babies, not that doing so bothered either her or them, but she never failed to clean them of the remnants of whatever food had come in contact with them. She's become so funny about refusing food; if I'm offering something she doesn't want at the moment, she'll take it and drop it outside of the hut immediately, but she'll still clean her babies. Not that I would ever do this, but I'm pretty sure she would even clean vinegar off their little bodies.

I bought a bag of cat toys, which was mostly plastic balls with jingle bells in them. There was one ball made of a thin piece of wood that was wrapped in circles...you can see it in the edge of the first picture in the update I posted on 9-22. I thought she'd like to chew in it, and she exceeded my expectations when she grabbed it and pulled it into the hut with her and the babies. Since it was cramped in there to begin with, the claiming of her new toy was immediately followed by squeaks of protest from the little ones.

Newborn woodrats immediately attach to a nipple when they're born, and they remain clamped on until they are weaned. Their front teeth are erupted at birth, and they stay attached to a teat even when they're sleeping. If mama moves, she drags them along with her unless she needs some alone time, in which case she'll turn in a circle and pull them off. Everything I've read says that a mother Eastern woodrat turns circles and pushes them off with her nose, but I've seen her exit the hut, sit down, open her jaws, grab a baby, and pull hard enough to make me wonder why her nipples aren't as long as her whiskers by now. Without fail, removing a baby from her undercarriage is accompanied by loud protests, every time.

She's eating more now than when they were smaller. I don't know whether this is because she requires more due to the kids wanting more from her, or if it's because she's not having to forage. I hope it's the former.

It's amusing to watch her interactions with them whenever there's any kind of activity. She steps on them (squeak!) when repositioning herself in the hut, and when she's doing some baby cleaning, she just grabs it and tosses it around so she can access whatever needs to be cleaned. The contrast between how roughly they're handled to how we coddle our young just tickles me. This same contrast is also demonstrated in how I handle them. They like being rubbed behind the ears or on the tailbone, and stroking their heads makes them start bruxing until they fall asleep.

This was taken two days ago.

Even though weaning doesn't take place (under normal circumstances) until the young are between 3 and 4 weeks old, the kids have separated from Rita of their own accord lately so they can explore their surroundings on the bottom level. Earlier today, I saw one of them holding a small piece of a corn chip Rita didn't finish and nibbling on it, which subtracted one of my worries about how I was going to introduce them to solid foods. It took two days of persistent effort to teach Rita how to use a water bottle (woodrats typically get their liquid requirements from dew, rain, and succulent vegetation), but I'm prepared with alternative means of keeping the babies hydrated if I have any similar problems teaching them.

This was taken yesterday. I've noticed differences between the two of them already. I've read that male fancy rats make better lap rats than females because of the females' tendency toward exploration. I'm not sure if this behavior parallels all the way back into their infancy, but the opposite holds true so far for the twins. The little girl pushes her nose into my hand to hide from the light and will go to sleep like that if she's left undisturbed, but her brother wants to look around and wander, although he has yet to travel more than two feet away from me. Both of them will lightly gnaw on a finger, but the he does it twice as often as she does. Both of them are startled by certain noises, and they don't necessarily have to be loud noises, but neither of them shy away from me.

It's too early to tell if I will ever be able to handle Rita. She won't eat anything that I haven't given her by hand, so she understands the connection between a full belly and proximity to me, but I did make a few attempts at touching her before the babies were born, and she didn't take to it. She doesn't know what it means...how could she? But even though I haven't made any effort toward touching her since she tripled the rat population in my household, there have been some changes in her behavior that I see as a positive sign.

I used to feed her small things (such as corn) one grain at a time. Now, I just put a small pile of it in my hand and let her take what she wants at her own pace; corn, uncooked rice or raw oats, etc. Once upon a time, she would maneuver around so she could reach everything with her mouth with as little contact as possible, but now she takes the direct approach and puts one or both of her front paws on my fingertips so she can reach. The first few times, I could actually feel slight trembling through her little hand, which might have been fear, or it might have been muscle strain, but whatever the reason, she doesn't tremble anymore. Sometimes, she'll take a mouthful and retreat to chew it, but most of the time, she just stays there with her paws on my hand while she grazes, and her little jaw sometimes rapidly rubs against my fingers while she's chewing.

Another change came about around the time she couldn't stick her head all the way out of the hut because her babies were in the way. Rather than pull them inside so she could reach with her mouth, she reached out with one paw to pull my finger closer so she could eat without having to reposition the babies. I took this behavior a step further after she moved to the bottom level when I dabbed a fingertip with peanut butter and held it very close to the "ceiling" of that level (which is the bottom of the board that serves as the floor for her "safe" area). She twisted this way and that to get all of the peanut butter she could reach while I held that position, then put a paw on top of my finger and pulled downward so she could get the rest. I think that as she gets more comfortable with that, she'll get more demanding. Next thing you know, she'll be using both paws, and things will progress until she's just ordering me around.

Getting stuff on video is difficult, but I'm working on making a new one featuring all three of them.

As kksrats mentioned a few posts ago, much has happened since this thread originated. I've come a long way, but I still have a long way to go to reach my goal, which is to give Rita freedom to roam, but provide a space she considers home that she'll always come back to. I still don't know enough, but I want to express my gratitude to Rat Daddy for sharing his knowledge, gotchea for sharing her experience with Wilder, and everyone who has given me encouragement and/or shown interest in staying updated on how Rita is dealing with her abrupt change in lifestyle.

To anyone who expressed an adamant opposition to keeping a wild animal in captivity, I might have been just as unyielding about my reasons for keeping her, but you still gave me another perspective to consider, which paved the way for some deep thinking about making the right choices and whether the path I'm taking will be better for her in the long run. I don't know how Rita would compare her current life vs. the pre-woodshop life. I wonder what her pro/con list would look like, if she could write one. I know she'd rather be free, but I also believe she is no longer scared, she is far from miserable, and she is cared for. As someone I trust told me, I'm in uncharted waters, and I'm playing this by ear, but there have been some extraordinary developments in these past couple of months. I still don't know enough, but I am open to suggestions from -anyone- who has them.

 

[lovemyfurries]

Fascinating to the end, a really enjoyable read. I love hearing about the progress, seeing the photos and learning along with you. It's an awesome journey you're on and I count myself privileged to be able to be a small part of it, if only by reading the updates and marveling at how amazing these little creatures are.

 

[cccgina1]

Always glad to read the updates. The babies are so cute!

 

[Rat Daddy]

Overall, my rats are free... they go outdoors and can range the house at will. Today we took the girls to the public dock... Max went up under the dashboard and Cloud came out to play She had a blast scurrying around the dock chasing us about and even met a couple of people along the way that gave her a nice skritch... Max stayed in the car until I practically dragged her out kicking and screaming at about 1:00 AM... she prefers to nest in the dash rather than play outdoors at night or even go inside her home sometimes... Max is a strange rat... I think she got dropped on her head one too many times as a pup sometimes. But in any case I don't think she or Cloud see their life as "captivity". They've both had plenty of opportunities to "escape" if they wanted to... Max actually runs away from us and straight back to the car or house. Her idea of escaping is escaping nature and going home.

Rats aren't unique in this regard, my dogs always came home as did my pigeon and when I was a little kid, my mom "set my pet mouse free" and I found her under my bedroom window when I came home from school. Lots of animals will bond with humans and willingly cohabit with us. I'm thinking Rita might prefer a larger territory than her current cage, but that doesn't mean she would prefer life outdoors or on her own. But that is just speculation... we honestly don't know how wood rats think. This is one of the things Rita and her pups will either prove or disprove. One might argue that wood rats are solitary animals and will roam off to seek their fortune on their own, another guess might be that they might just build separate nests around your wood shop or divide the cage into territories.... Anyone's guess is as good as mine here.

Research on brown rat eyesight revealed that they have less pixels in their field of vision and despite having a greater depth of field than humans some author long ago likened fewer pixels to 20x400 eyesight... 20x400 eyesight is nearsightedness... I'm nearsighted. I can see things close to my face very clearly but at any distance I still have high resolution vision, it's just out of focus... so despite lots of pixels, it's a blur. Rats can have perfect focus, it's just that they see the picture like old newsprint photos. Yes small objects in the distance are going to be harder to identify. But something the size of a tree or a house is still going to be readily clear and in focus. So yes there's some similarity between low resolution vision and nearsightedness, but they are different things.

My experience with brown rats is that their eyesight degrades as fast or faster than ours in the dark and works best in bright daylight. Rats have their whiskers, mapping ability and sense of smell to navigate in the dark, they don't need good night vision. Max doesn't like to get out of the car in the dark and Fuzzy Rat always went to the car around twilight. It's during the daytime that they need good or at least better vision for the eventualities they have to maneuver quickly out in the open during the day. Sure rats tend to rely on their other senses above eyesight and they prefer to move furtively during the dark or twilight hours, but day vision really does complete their sensory package rather than support their other senses. So if it's noon or midnight brown rats can navigate a very dangerous world.

Part of the problem with getting a good read on rat's vision is that they don't respond like humans, so we have to make inferences... Fuzzy Rat almost always responded to someone entering the room, unless she was napping. Max and Cloud on the other hand don't always respond... sometimes they just stand there hanging their heads off the edge of the furniture and stay perfectly still until I tap them on the head. It's like I'm invisible. Humans respond to almost every stimulus by moving or by doing something, sometimes rats respond to stimulus by not moving or by doing nothing. This makes it difficult to read what a rat is seeing or not seeing. Rita may very well see you moving around your workshop but just be giving you her null reaction until the food is close enough to her mouth to take from your hand. The best test of her vision was when she got away from you... did she run straight for cover or did she run into things while she was escaping? If she were blind you would expect for her to have made a very graceless exit, if she could see she would have gone straight to the exit. Shortsightedness would most likely have her running the wrong way at first, finding her bearings and then moving rapidly and with purpose. Again Rita is a wood rat, her vision may be completely unlike brown rats and brown rats can see into the UV range, but not into the red range. Which makes for a very curious difference right there.

Basically, there's some pretty good science that's been done on brown rats, but sometimes it gets shorthanded like when someone writes rats see in 20X400 vision... It's a nice analogy and it's what people remember, but it isn't exactly true. In some cases out of focus human high resolution vision may be very much better or worse then a rats low resolution vision. A low resolution newsprint photo of Manhattan taken from NJ is still way better than what I see without my glasses. But none of this might be relevant to wood rats at all. It all comes down to doing the various experiments that will tell us what we are really dealing with. There really is so much we can all learn here.

I don't think any rat or any animal does well in "captivity", but most of our brown rats aren't in captivity and Wilder was never in captivity, they choose to live with us and share their lives with us, and for the most part they prefer to be with us than on their own... For all we know Rita and the pups, who live in a non rat proof wood shop are getting nightly visits from dad and the extended family to keep them company... There's so much we don't know and so much we have yet to learn... The most interesting part for me is yet to come.

As to brown rats being more fierce than wood rats, this is likely true and where brown rats go, other species often get wiped out. Brown rats can be aggressive and strong fighters, but they also work in packs which gives them one heck of an advantage. Black rats survive in places that are basically too hot for brown rats, but even with their superior eyesight and climbing skills they generally lose out in a brown rat invasion. Your observation that wood rats are more reserved than brown rats may not bode well for their survival in areas where they will have to compete with brown rats. It's going to be interesting to see how adaptable wood rats really are, it might give us some idea of what we can predict for their future success in a world of invasive species.

Kucero, it looks like you are doing a great job so far and I do love the pics...

 

[Kucero]

This isn't going to be a good update. I messed up bad.

Before Rita decided to triple my household's rat population without my permission, I used to bring her (read: I'd bring the entire cage with her in it) to wherever I was going to be for a while. She'd stress for 5-10 minutes after being moved, after which she'd be fine. After about 20 of these rodent withdrawal/deposit transactions, she wasn't showing any signs that she was any less stressed than she was after the first, so I decided to leave her in the house full time. I haven't moved her since she had the babies.

My bonding with the kids was smooth sailing since the first time I handled them. Even that first time, they were completely relaxed, and would take an occasional nap in my hand. As they matured, the little girl became progressively "twitchy," darting from this place to that object. Whenever I'd give her free roam on the bed, she would take a few steps away from me, sniff the air for half a minute, come back, and bury her face between my arm and the mattress.

Things started to go wrong when I came up with the bright idea to introduce the babies to the woodshop. They had never been outside before. So I took an empty 5-gallon bucket, dropped a clean sheet in it, added rats, and brought them with me to the woodshed, observing their reaction the whole way there. I took the boy out and held him for a bit while I rubbed him, and he didn't seem stressed, not even a little bit. I put him back in the bucket and took his sister out. Three seconds later, she suddenly jumped! Rather than allow her to plummet to the concrete floor, I caught her, which (as it turns out) was the worst thing I could have done. The next thing she did just broke my heart. She started screaming and didn't stop for about 20 seconds, during which time she was frantically trying to get away. She was completely terrified, so scared that she actually peed a couple of drops. Quite a feat, considering that she still can't relieve herself.

She eventually calmed down in my cupped hands, finally realizing that she wasn't going to be eaten, after all. I held her for a while like this, just quietly talking to her and giving her fingertip rubs, and then I put her back in the bucket and let her brother take a look at her so he'd know she was okay.

I took him out of the bucket one more time before going back to the house. He suddenly started struggling, which paved the way for screaming, and that's exactly what he did. I felt even worse than I did the first time.

I gave them back to mama and haven't touched them since. I'm still trying to make sense of what made them revert to wild while asking myself if I could have done anything differently to avoid what happened.

 

[ksaxton]

Well if anything I'm glad it isn't as bad as I was imagining! The entire read I was waiting for the worst to happen. Every rat has their limit before they become overwhelmed, so maybe this was too much for them? From my experience, rats will also freak out if you grab them suddenly and toughly and when they resist and can't escape it makes them panic even more. At least they weren't killed or lost, that's what I was thinking happened . Maybe With wild animals you just have to take it slow, two steps forward, one step back sort of thing?

 

[ksaxton]

*roughly

 

[Kucero]

Being overwhelmed is probably pretty close to the mark. They had never been outside, never been in the shop, weren't used to hearing outside noises, and all of that probably put them both on edge. The little boy shows a lot of curiosity, the girl has always been timid. I don't know where she was wanting to go, but I was afraid she'd hit the floor and get hurt. Of course she doesn't understand that.

I'll probably try again tonight, slowly, so I have plenty of time to read their cues. I hope they've forgiven me; feels like I betrayed them.