Bye bye girls

Northern Lights has had to say goodbye to two of the girlies. Nutmeg was PTS on Friday as she was just not improving and looked so sad and confused.

And I found Saffron dead yesterday. She’d been losing a bit of weight but was still very lively, the first one at the bars and climbing up on my lap at free range time. She came out to say hello to our visitors on Monday night, then she didn’t appear last night when I fed them. I found her curled up in her bed. She never visited the vet in her life and to be honest I wish they could all go like she did, at home in bed with her friends.

So now we only have 4 girlies. Sugar has outlived all of her daughters. I am going to have a cage change around today so I can pack up the Tommy and without wanting to sound really depressing I’m going to have to think about getting a couple more girls so Jemima won’t be left on her own if the worse should happen between now and the new year, which is the earliest it looks like i’ll get my ratties for breeding.

I will dig out photos and do proper obits for my girls later.

Saffron and the Yoghurt drops

Up until recently I had my ratty treats in a carrier bag under the table the boy’s cage is sat on. Then the rats found them and started to help themselves so they got moved! The yoghurt drops are now on my desk.

Saffron seems to have taken on the trouble-maker role after the loss of Pepper, Treacle & Mustard and has discovered they are on the desk. So her favourite thing is to climb up my legs, up onto the desk and help herself to the yoghurt drops. After she’s had a couple I put her back down, but because rats are so persistant she keeps returning. Again and again, she runs up, I put her down, she runs back and climbs up, the whole time the girls are out.

The other day I decided to thwart her and put my feet under my stool so she couldn’t climb up, but she jumped onto the bar along the bottom of the stool instead and climbed up between my legs. So I closed my legs…. and she chewed a hole in my jeans!! I have decided she is unstoppable and she’s so cute. Mischief rats are my favourite 😀

Success!

Sugar has gone down to 452g. Hooray. They have had nearly all their fresh food cut out completely, apart from a bit of veg a couple of times a week. None of them are looking worse for it, I think it’s because the weather’s warmer, they don’t need to use up energy keeping warm, so are maintaining their body weight fine.

Saffron gave us a scare last week. I went out on Monday to let them out and she came out absoloutely covered in (hopefully) poryphrin. All browny / purple round her head and nose and the inside of her feet where she’d been cleaning herself. She was also really skinny across her back and had seemed to have forgotten how to use the water bottle! I put a water bowl in for them and she splashed about in that quite happy and was a lot better on Tuesday, all clean again and just a wee bit skinny across her back and then by Wednesday was totally back to normal and has been fine ever since. I’m not sure what caused it. I’m wondering if it was actually blood and she’d had a nose bleed or smething. I noticed on Tuesday that Fudge had a cm long gash on her side so I wonder if the two of them had been fighting and Saffron had fallen off something. Fingers crossed she remains fine.