Our Human

We, Rimsky and Korsakoff, would like to share with you a bit about our story and our human, Jen.

It was a normal day in the pet store, that January day in 2001.  We were napping in our small plastic enclosure, trying to ignore the smell of the pine shavings that were gradually damaging our lungs.  As always, the cage beside us with 5-week old babies was getting all of the attention from people passing by the small animal section.  At 3 months, we were already pretty big and all the people seemed to find the babies much more interesting.  Nobody ever asked about us... until that day.

Our soon-to-be mom came into the store that day with her fiancé after a long search for rat breeders in Ontario which had turned up nothing.  She had not planned to buy animals from a pet store - only wanted to check out cage options.  However, she made the "mistake" (much to our delight!) of sneaking a quick peek at the rats on her way by.  She saw the cage with the babies, but she also saw us and wondered why we were still there.  She realized that as long as the babies were there, it was very likely that no one would consider taking us home.  The staff told her that we were "nervous".  Well, our mom decided to find out for herself.  Suddenly, we were rudely awakened from our nap as our enclosure was pulled off the shelf.  As the door at the top was opened, Rimsky immediately climbed out and looked around curiously.  When mom offered her arm, Rimsky immediately began to explore and climbed around confidently.  Nervous?  Definitely not!  However, Korsakoff was a different story.  Korsakoff was definitely nervous.  After much coaxing he allowed a staff member to pick him up briefly before jumping back into the cage.  Korsakoff did not yet see that our mom meant him no harm.  Rimsky of course, being the more clever of us two, realized that this could be our last chance and did all he could to show off.  So, in the end, our mom decided to take us on a strange journey in a noisy moving box to a new home. 

Our new home had bedding (aspen) that didn't stink like the pine.  We didn't realize that such bedding existed!  We would like to go back to the store and tell the people there how much better we can breathe now.  We had a wire cage now too which meant we got lots of nice fresh air.  It is 24x18x18 inches (60x45x45 cm), the perfect size for two adult rats.

We are on a proper diet of lab blocks now too and we get lots of nice, fresh, veggies which we didn't know existed either.   This is what we get for our food and bedding now:

We are very happy ratties now.  It didn't take long for Korsakoff to overcome his nervousness and he is very friendly.  Both of us have decided that we like humans very much and we always run towards humans when we are out playing.  We have been told by mom that we must be careful when we do this while we are on the couch because when we run towards the humans they are usually trying to sit down!

We are almost two years old now.  Our mom had to travel a few times after she got us but she always left us with nice people.  She recently graduated with her B. Sc. in Wildlife Biology and had to go to Australia for a month to work (to photograph and videotape wildlife on the Great Barrier Reef).  We missed her but we got to play with mom's roommate Angie who is a vet student and took very good care of us while mom was gone.  Then, last August, mom had to leave again for her wedding in northwestern Ontario and reception in Australia.  We were sad that we couldn't go - we would have liked to have been the ring-bearers in our mom's wedding ceremony (which would have been totally fair since the family dog got to be the flower girl)!

After mom returned from the wedding, we had to travel in one of those noisy moving boxes to Toronto and move into a new apartment.  We are extra happy because we now also live with dad!  He loves us almost as much as mom (even though he won't admit it) and made us a very nice playpen for our first birthday.  Our mom worked for a while on an educational CD for the University of Guelph about the wildlife of the Great Barrier Reef.  She wrote all of the text and that meant she was able to work from home and so we got lots of playtime out of our cage while she was working.  Mom and Dad have since moved to Winnipeg Manitoba where they enjoy living on the prairies with lots of space and snow.