Ratgirl

Hi in case you don't know the cages i'm referring to, here's the links:

http://www.cagesworld.co.uk/p/Liberta_Explorer_Rat...

http://www.cagesworld.co.uk/p/Savic_Royal_Suite_95...

So i want to buy a bigger cage for my ratties. Here's the deal, i'd like to split the cage to make two single levels. One to keep girls and the other to keep boys. I'd like to know which is easier to split into two levels and your experiences with either cage. The savic royale suite is more expensive...is it worth the extra money?

Both of the cages have doors that open to the whole width of the cage which is one of the things i like best, and i think they have similar bar spacing. So why is one more expensive? O.o

Any help appreciated!

Hi everyone,

So for Christmas my mum bought me some really nice fleece to line to rats cage as everything else was making them sneeze (even paper).

I lined their shelves and the base of their cage with red and zebra print fleece and not only does it look really nice but they have stopped sneezing completely and the cage smells better as they seem to prefer pooping in the litter tray more than on the fleece. There's just one problem...they wont stop chewing holes in it. At this rate it will only last two cage clean outs and it helps so many problems.

They have a hanging wooden garland chew, two cereal chews, four little wooden chews loose in their cage and decorative Christmas chewable string and treats oh and a little wheely chew. And they chew all of those as well!

They chew holes in the base fleece and burrow underneath it even though i filled their houses with large sheets of fleece blanket as well as other strips of material. They slept in thier for a day or two before deciding it would be better to just live UNDER the fleece.

Is their anything i can do at all to nip this problem in the butt or am i just going to have to buy new fleece a lot more often than i had hoped?

Thanks in advance and please don't answer if you have something immature to say about rats. Thanks!

Hey everyone,

So my rats have been sneezing for a while, the vet prescribed steroids and then when i went back because that didn't work she prescribed some antibiotics, but they have run out and made no difference for my ratties! :(

I know a lot of rat owners say Baytril is really helpful and so if i ask my vet, do you think they'll prescribe my rats Baytril? And how much do you think it would roughly cost?

I know you can buy it online but that seems a little risky to me.

I was also considering buying some Dr S Fight back, it's apparently very good at speeding up the healing process for poorly rats. Do any of you have any experience with it?

Please help, i'm sick of the vets i see not giving me anything usefull after spending £100's on medication!

Thanks guys

Okay so in my 5/6 years of owning rats, i've introduced new rats to my pack three times. Those were all girls and apart from one rat that decided she hated all six of her new cagemates, they've all gone really well. Now i was aware that introducing males may be harder and i've been giving them short meetings for three days now. Bobby (one of the elder two rats) seems to be a bit of a bully and was pushing them around, holding them down and grooming them to assert his dominance which i just kept a close eye on but let continue hoping it would ease up a little.

Well i was just supervising their fourth meeting and everything seemed to be going well untill Bobby turned around and bit Merlin (one my the babies). But he didn't let go and i had to physically pull him off. I was very alarmed and immediately went to put him in the pet carrier (his cage was far away) but he was biting at the lid and trying to claw his way out.

In the five months i've had Bobby he's been a fairly sweet natured rat who plays a little rough with his cagemate but it never gets out of hand. I'm so shocked i'm not sure what to do. He didn;t bite me and i'm sure he wasn't trying to but Merlin was already shy and now he's very scared and shaken up.

He's a hairless and so i could inspect his body easily and i can see where bobby bit him, there's no blood just a little whiteish bite mark. I think it was more of a nip, but he held on for ages and dragged him along the floor a little bit.

What i'd like to know is where to go from here, shall i hold off on the intros for a while (which is a real shame because Albie was getting on great with the babies. ) Or shall i keep letting them play with just Albie. I don;t feel right putting Bobby back with the babies, i'm always there to separate them but little Merlin must be stressed enough allready.

Sorry the question is so long and please only answer if you know what you're talking about and have owned rats before. Thanks :)

Hi,

So I've been playing acoustic guitar for just under a year, i taught myself with a little help from my dad and brother. I can play all the basic notes like E, Em, A, Am, D, Dm and so on but i want to play chords like F, Gm and Bb. I know that practice makes perfect but how do i practice when my fingers wont even reach?!?!

Are there stretching exercises for my fingers or is that stupid? I really want to be able to play back to black by Amy Winehouse in March for a talent show but it includes; F, Gm, Bb and Bb7. I'll do whatever it takes but i was wondering if anyone with experience could offer a good way for me to teach myself?

Thanks in advance guys!

Hi, so i'm 16 and am looking extremely hard for a full time job. I was wondering if i can have a credit card at 16 in the UK because debit cards are so annoying as you have to get the money out at a cash point before hand, or is there some sort of debit card that can be used in store? I wouldn't even spend more than is on there anyway but i'd like an account like paypal or something so i can buy Christmas presents online with my card details and also buy things in store by paying straight from the card. Thanks in advance!

I took one of my rats to the vet because of a respiratory infection, the vet said i caught it at the really early stages and gave me some antibiotics to give him.

The only problem is, it's impossible to get them in him! I let him bite the medical syringe and then tried to squirt it in his mouth...he got away and i wasted a whole dose of his medicine! :(

So then i thought i'd mix it in with yogurt and he still won't eat it! He know what the syringe is for and wont go near it and i think he can smell the medicine in the yogurt and wont eat it!

Right now i have him in a separate cage with the little dish of yogurt and antibiotics but he is still refusing to eat it! I can't afford to waist anymore, how am i suppose to get him to eat it?!?!

I'm very upset because i allowed my brother to keep a rat in my room (Bobby) instead of picking two for myself and just got Albie. They were both really shy when we got them but i worked with albie till he was comfortable with people and thought my brother was doing the same...he wasn't. And as time went on he started complaining about getting them out everyday and about the size of their cage and feeding them until he lost interest in his rat altogether. We got in a disagreement and he said he was going to take bobby out of my room where he lives with his brother and keep him in a hamster cage alone in his room!

So at that point my dad took bobby away from him and said he was in my care now. But the only trouble is that i'm highly allergic to rats that i haven't handled that much, i'm use to handle bobby for a few minutes every day but he was so skittish and now i am trying to get him use to human contact and he will climb on me but when he does he gets scared and digs his nails right in and i get an allergic reaction.

By now the reaction has usually faded where i'd be use to the rat but i thin it's because hes digging his nails in, there not over grown and don't need a trim so i'm at a loss of what to do. If anyone's been in the same situation what did you do. I'm obviously not going to give up on little bobby and i'll handle him every day even if it does mean i have allergic reactions but if there is a way to make it go away then i would loveeee to know.

Thanks in advance

Okay so i put my male rat in his cage and he wandered over near to where his cage mate was sitting and then put both his back legs up onto the bars of the cage (so he was literally doing a handstand!) and then peed!

I'm not really worried, more amused if anything but is it common for male rats to pee like this, or have i, once again, picked the weirdest rat in the litter! :) ???

I was wondering if it is safe or not to put another similar cage on top of this cage:

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?hl=en&biw=1366&bih=...

(the cage is A LOT bigger than it looks in the picture.)

The entire lid opens but i never use that opening as i hang hammocks, ropes and other toys from it so it doesn't matter. I would like to home rats separately from the ones in the first cage, but have it placed on top of the first cage. Safe or not safe? I wouldn't want it to collapse on my ratties but the cage was quite expensive and is sturdy and well made. What do you think.

(Rat owners only please or at least people who know what they are talking about.)

HI guys, please only answer this if you know what you are talking about and aren't some idiot that spends their time scrolling through rat questions so they can leave answers like 'eww rats, kill em'.

Anyway, so my elderly rat ebony lost her cage mate i'd say about a month ago now. She was obviously sad for a while but she knows what happened as i found her cuddling her sisters body one morning. I don't want to introduce her to new rats as i think this will cause her stress and she is already three. She'll eat as you'll see in the video, and drink too although she doesn't eat much but this is probably because she doesn't move so much anymore.

hen i don't have her out she just lies in her house most of the time, although she does come out sometimes and even climbed on the bars yesterday to see me.

But sometimes she lies out of her house and it looks like she's going to fall onto her side, some mornings she has A LOT of porphyrin around her nose but not always. She's on my lap right now and i can see she had large patches of hair missing, and her skin is dry and flaky although i feed her what she needs an not too much protein so i don't know why this is?

Oh and the other day i found her buried under some blankets in her house, led our on her side, in the kind of position i have found other elderly rat to have died in. I'm so worried, her breathing has also gone down hill and she sneezes a lot.

I'm so worried i don't know whether or not to keep her alive and see what happens (she still even wonders around my floor and explores) or to have her humanely euthanized.

She like me to handle her so i don't know if she is in pain but i do know that rats mask their pain well...i think i've got so worried that i'm not looking at it logically anymore and so i need another rat owners point of view. She has no tumors at all (well any external ones, i don't think there are any internal ones.)

Sorry this question was so long, but i would reallyyyyy appreciate anyone to help me out here. Thanks so much

this is her: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_41kKhcHvN4&feature...

I was wondering if it's a good idea to insure a pet rat or not, because I've paid huge vet bills before for tumors, eye infections, respiratory problems and i was thinking it might be cheaper if i insured them? What do you think and if you live in the UK do you know any good small pet insurers?

Thanks for your time