Domestic Rats are not like Wild Rats (Rats)

Member Name: CokaCola

Product:	Rats
Date:	16/08/09 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap and Easy to look after, whilst still being handelable and interesting

Disadvantages: They Smell if not cleaned every few days.

Rats are popular pets because they are quite intelligent rodents that are cheap to buy, cheap to look after and come in lots of different colour and pattern mutations. Although many still hate rats because of ignorance and fear passed on from previous generations. Pet rats are now sewer rats, they have been raised in clean conditions and should therefore be as free from disease as your average rabbit, gerbil or budgie.

A male rat makes a better pet than a female rat, the males are generally more robust and quiet, whereas the females are smaller and much quicker - less easy to tame and less docile in general. If you are buying from a Pet shop like Pets at Home then you shouldn't have too much problem with sourcing a male as pretty much all of the rats in stock are males. Rats can be kept together, but if you keep males and females together they will breed like rabbits at an extremely fast rate, with litters containing up to 18 babies. Therefore it is adviseable to correctly sex them (google for images) unless you want to be overun!

Rats generally are quite clean animals, but they do smell. The more you have the more they will smell and the more regular cleaning should be to avoid bad odours. A lot of the problem can be controlled by choosing a decent bedding for your rats, sawdust for example is not very good at absorbing odour, whereas something like "Excel Supa Forage" is very good at absorbing the odour. Carefresh is marketted as being odour absorbing and dust free but in my experience it's over rated, it doesn't reduce the smell that well and is pretty dusty, not to mention very expensive.

Buy a decent sized cage, and as long as they have food, water, bedding and some stimulants like tubes and toys, rats are pretty much fine. They can be handled if they are slowly introduced to it, and younger rats that have just weaned are much easier to tame than larger rats. Rats come in many colours, Siamese, Black, White, Black and White, Ginger etc. There are pattern mutations like "Hooded" rats, which are white with a different colour head and back stripe, most popularly black and white. There are also "Dumbo" rats which have large elephant like ears that apparently make them appear more cute.

Summary: Definately a Pet to consider.