This tale is a long, exciting, funny and yet sad one to tell but I will try my hardest to explain it so everyone can understand and learn from it.
These 4 girls were surrendered to PRRR with their 6 brothers on the 11th of June 2008 when they were only 8 days old. Unfortunately for them, their mum had been killed earlier that day by the surrendering familys cat and without someone who was dedicated to them they would have died a slow and painful death. This is where I (Aimee, founder of PRRR) stepped up to the plate and offered to take in these 10 babies (4 girls and 6 boys) and try to hand raise them myself. I had never hand raised rat babies before (but I had experience with other animals) butI knew their chances of survival were slim, the chances of all of them surviving was almost zero.
I set about organising formula and bits before these babies arrived to me, did some searching for information and set about sorting out bedding and warm heat packs.
These little ones came to us so tiny, the first ever hand feed took just over 3 hours to complete. They all needed to be stimulated to toilet and had to have their tummies rubbed to help them digest their food. On top of this they required feeding every 3-4 hours so no sooner had I finished a feed than the next feed would take place. When Quentin helped me it took around 1.5 – 2 hours to complete a feed but during the days and early hours of the morning I had to do it myself as he was either at work or needed to have enough sleep to work the next day as he drives trucks for a living.
It was tough and every morning after just over 1 hours sleep I would jump out of bed and check to make sure everyone was alive and doing well. We had our hiccups and some of the babies had runny stools every now and again so we would adjust the formula mix accordingly. Some babies refused to swallow properly, some squirmed the whole time, some just lay there and worked as little as possible and others were ferocious about the food. One particular bub was a screamer, it didn’t matter what you did she would scream about it all…. We believe that was Pixie.
After 9 days of getting very little sleep the bubs had learnt to lap up milk and were experimenting with food. This was a HUGE milestone and yet, in another way, so very sad for me. They were becoming independent and although this was so wonderful, because I could get a little more sleep and because it meant that they had a really good chance of making it, it was also hard to know that within a few short weeks they would no longer require me to be their “mum”.
The babies started loosing all of their fur and we were not sure if it was a nutritional deficiency or whether it had something to do with their breed but even without their fur they were still growing well and doing all the normal things. Their fur did eventually grow back so we guessed it was something to do with the diet that they were being raised on and we assumed that it was lacking something.
At 4 weeks old the baby girls were starting to spend more time playing with our 3 fully grown females (Suz, Lady & Cutie ) who they had always had contact with. During the early days we were hoping that one of the older girls would adopt the babies to at least keep them warm during the cooler nights but none of the 3 girls payed much attention so we stopped hoping for this and allowed them to interact every night knowing that it would make integrations easier should we decide to keep any.
By 5 weeks old the girls and boys were separated as we didn’t want any oops pregnancies. The baby girls went straight into the cage with the older girls as they got along so well previously. 2 days after doing this I heard a meeping coming from the cage, I checked and saw that Lady was being quite rough with the bubs and so I sat and watched what she was doing so that I could be confident that she was not intentionally hurting the bubs. What I saw next made me laugh because Lady was not being mean, she was trying to be Mum. Lady kept putting the babies to bed and they wanted to play so the bubs were getting sick of being put back into bed so decided to complain. After a little while Lady basically hand gestured “I give up”.
From that day one all the girls got along beautifully. The babies got away with everything and were never reprimanded by the older girls for anything they did or didn’t do.
Unfortunately not long after intergrating the girls I noticed that Fairy (one of the babies) had, what appeared to be crooked teeth. We took her to the vet and had her teeth clipped hoping that it would only need to be done once every couple of months as she did not like having it done and it caused a lot of stress to do it. Within 2 weeks Fairy’s teeth were getting too long again so my mum and I clipped them, I can not explain how heartbreaking it was to hear Fairy screaming (there is no other word) when it was being done. Within 2 weeks it needed to be done again and the teeth looked like they were getting worse not better. We took her to the vet to get his opinion and he agreed that they were getting worse and growing very quickly. We tried to clip them but she refused, she screamed and she was terrified by all of this. At that point I made the decision that I was hoping I would not have to make for her. Although this was an extraordinarily hard decision to make because I had hand raised Fairy almost from birth, I knew that if we had not made the decision and let her continue on the way she was, she would have lived a very stressful and uncomfortable life. Having her teeth constantly growing at an excessive rate and not growing straight meant that for the rest of her life she would find it difficult to eat and that coupled with the extra stress of having to have her teeth clipped every few weeks was no way for an animal to exist.
At 9 weeks old Fairy was humanely put to sleep. It was terribly difficult to make this decision however I made it because I felt that to put her through this amount of stress ever other week was not fair to her.
Pixie, Tinks, Bloom, Cutie, Lady and Suz all got to say goodbye to Fairy as I bought her home so that we could bury her in the garden. All the girls were obviously distressed and in mourning for a couple of days, their life would never be the same and my heart broke for them and myself.
Today Pixie, Tinks and Bloom are fairly well adjusted little girls.
Pixie is a “Brat”, she likes everything her way and she does nip other people.
Tinks loves the boys, if she smells boys she screams with delight and I am not kidding.
Bloom is our snuggler, she has always been the more mellow of the girls. She also loves holding her tail in a curl all the way to touching the top of her head.
We decided to adopt these girls ourselves as they had become a huge part of my life and the other girls world.
