Pet Rat Blog

Our Little Buddy Jerry has been making these strange sounds. We thought it was fine sine it sounded like he was just happy but Myles and Amadeus was not making those type of sounds so we decided to take Jerry to the Vet.

The good news is his lungs are fine but him wind pipe is smaller than it should be and the Vet said Jerry had a minor case of bronchitis and wanted to take an x-ray to make sure his lungs were ok.

We saw little white areas with black dots in the center which is not supposed to be that way and the Vet gave him 2 types of liquid medication.

One is Baytril and the other one is Doxycycline and we need to give him .06 milligrams every 12 hours and they are both flavored with grape so hopefully Jerry likes the taste. I know Myles and Amadeus will lick his Jerry's face after we put Jerry back into their cage so the taste must be pretty good.

So far the results seem to be good since Jerry does not breath as fast and the noise has pretty much gone away but we do at time still hear a little squeak when we hold him to our ear but its getting much better.

That visit cost us almost $300.00 so anyone who wants to get a Rat for a Pet please understand Rats need to be taken to the Vet from time to time and if you cannot afford the Vet fees then please do not get a rat.

Jerry was a little angle while he was being examined at the Vet.

We just put up our 5th Gallery. I hope you enjoy it.

Gallery 5

If you click on the thumb images it will open the larger image which are pretty large.

Our little buddies are in their cage eating some organic lettuce. This time they all three stayed around the bowl of lettuce while eating. Usually Jerry grabs food from the bowl and runs away. I guess he is a little shy but

Amadeus will always stay right with the food. I guess he is too lazy to move away or knows he can get more by staying at the blow.

Myles will stay at the bowl but sometimes he does grab and run.

We also have some images of them playing in their play pen. The pen is 29" high but we had to cut some pieces of plastic and drap over the top of all sides because they can climb out of the pen even with the wire pen having verticle wire.

We pretty much stopped using the wire play pen because it takes to long to setup. Now we put a water proof pad on the carpet and put up the wire play pen in the door way and just let them play around in our walk in closet and they love it.

You will see its pretty large so they have plenty of room to roam around and we put different things on the floor so they have plenty of things to play with. We also put in the Flex Drain Pipe after i twist it and hook the end pieces together so they can climb around which they love to do. We first started putting the Drain Pipe in the pen without hooking the ends together but after a while they just get in the Pipe and go to sleep so we put a stop to that so they can get some exercise which they need each day.

We hope you enjoy our little friends and if you ever have any questions please contact us.

Been behind on getting our latest gallery up on the site but I finally got it.

Gallery 4

We will be adding more in the near future.

I have to say having Rats as Pets is a great idea. They are so fun to watch and interact with and I never really knew how smart a Rat was until we got our 3 little ones.

We allowed them to get into the bath tub and sorry to say they were very scared of the water but hopefully they will get use to it as I have read online how much Rats love the water but then again one should not believe everything they read online.

Our little ratty friends have out grown their small play pen which was only 12" high so we had to get another one.

We decided to go with one that is a lot higher but once we put our buddies in the play pen the were able to climb up the verticle wire sides and get out so we had to cut some plastic from a shower curtain and clip that to the very top of the pen having a few inches hang over the inside of the pen which stopped them from getting out.

It was funny to watch them climb up the verticle wires on the cage and the truth is I never thought they were able to do it but no sooner than we setup the pen and put our pet rats in the pen Myles started climbing up the sides. He got up about half way and then slid back down but after a few attemps he made it to the top and started walking his way over to Jennifer on the very top horizonal wire so I had some plastic left over from making a bottom piece so the pee would not get on our carpet so I cut some pieces to fit over the sides and clipped them on with some heavy duty clips. We drapped the plastic over the insides of the pen so when they made it toward the top they could not grab onto the top and get out which worked just fine.

They tried for about a half hour to excape and finally gave up and wanted to sleep so we put them back into their cage so they could sleep.

Having this play pen will allow them to get some good exercise when they try to climb up the sides and they are determined to excape but hopefully the plastic we clipped on the top of the cage will stop that and I hope they do not give up since its great exercise.

Its funny to watch them get toward the top and then slid down the wires to the floor.

The pen we got is "MidWest Small Animal Exercise PlayPen with 8-panels - 29" height by 18" width which is pretty large area to play in and at this time its a little large for our little rats but when they become adults it will be just the right size and hopefully the will not excape.

If you want to learn more about this Play Pen just click here.

I really love this shot of Jerry. Not really sure what he's trying to tell us but a picture is worth a thousand words.

We took this image when we had all the rats on our kitchen table and put some different types food out so we could see what they liked best.

Looks like Jerry is trying to make his mind up on that piece of dog food... I love that shot.