Real Rats: Snoogie's Marvelous Mystery Babies, Part Three

After Pineapple's death (I'm never going to name rats after food again....), we had no more unpleasant surprises. When the babies were four weeks old, they started having playtime with the big girls, and the boys had an extra play session with their foster dads. Bonnie Bee, who was getting older and had a large mammary tumor, perked up when she got to play with the little ones. The remaining YRB girls simply looked at them all as if to say, "Oh, no, not MORE rats!". The babies' Aunt Softie for some reason was jealous of the Berkshire girls and kept chasing Ginger and Crème around trying to bite them. Quite often I had to rescue one or the other and send Softie back to her cage for a time-out!

The boys were split up in two groups and introduced to their adoptive fathers. I introduced the more robust boys Gurgle, Gregle and Coconut to Robin Hood, since he was an old tough rat. I was worried that Rob wouldn't like them, but he loved looking after the little ones and letting them climb all over him. They really hit it off well! In retrospect, I wish I had let all the boys play with him, since it would have helped if I needed to move them into his cage too, but I wasn't brave enough back then. Friar Tuck and Ben got the two mild-mannered boys Coffee and Monte to look after, and they seemed to have known each other forever. Tuck was thrilled to be interacting with baby rats and seemed to grow younger the more time he spent with them. Plus Tuck could take break from hyperactive, teenage Ben whenever he wanted while Benny was playing with the babies.

Snoogie was still very protective of the little ones. She taught them all to hide whenever a cat came to sit near the cage. Before I realized this, I walked over to the cage one day, moved a cat off the lid and then couldn't see a single baby! Terrified, I looked all around, then tried calling them. Slowly, one by one, they emerged from inside a box, under a cotton rag and out of a pile of bedding. It was neat watching how well they listened to her during her cat-alert drills. At the first sign of a cat - swoosh - all the babies disappeared! Also, she was very controlling of them when they were climbing. It was funny watching the babies trying to reach the top of the water bottle with Snoogie grabbing them and running them back to the nest. By the time she had taken the next baby back to the nest, the first was up the bottle again! This went on and on - I wondered if it was a game or just another test of their poor mother's patience.

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