By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
This is what I thought about rats until my grandson decided to adopt two pet rats.
Rats have the worst reputation of any known mammal. The reasons are many. Rats are often found in filthy places such as garbage dumps or sewers, where they come to search for food.
They also attempt to chew their way into canvas bags of food and, in doing so, contaminate the area with droppings.
Worse, rats serve as disease vectors, causing the plague; more accurately, the fleas on them cause disease.
The Black Death killed as many as 50 million people in Europe in the 1600s, wiping out as much as 60 percent of the existing population. People especially have a visceral reaction to a rat’s hairless tail and feet.
My grandson bought his rats from a pet store to ensure a good pedigree. He also bought a large cage about four feet high and toys to entertain them. I remember coming into his room and standing beside the rats’ cage.
The rat in the cage would get excited like a dog and come over close to where I was standing. When I opened up the cage, he would jump into my hand, expecting a walk, some affection, and entertainment. I did not disappoint him. Cages are boring places.
The rats sold at pet stores are domesticated, and “Make excellent and friendly pets” especially for small children. Rats are small and require minimal care and space.
They are also very affectionate, love to play, and interact with their humans. Rats are by nature clean animals, spending several hours a day cleaning themselves and others in their rat community to achieve social bonding. They can keep clean in the clean cage environment.
They are also fast-moving, agile creatures that are excellent climbers. Rats are also rapid learners and quick to solve problems. A common example is that they can be taught to run through a maze to reach food.
Their talent in this area makes them excellent animals to use for many kinds of scientific experiments. A 2021 Nature Magazine study determined that over 100 million mice and rats were used in U.S. research laboratories annually, making them by far the dominant lab mammal.
When I was doing biomedical research at a medical school, we used only white rats for all of our research. For this reason, biologists know a great deal about them, including their genetics.
Rats as Pets
Rats have co-existed alongside humans since very early in recorded history. As far back as the Edo period in Japan, from 1603 to 1868, people have kept rats as pets.
In America, they have been kept as pets back to the 1800s, where they made affectionate, intelligent pets for the upper classes. A white rat named Sammy belonged to Beatrix Potter, the author of the Peter Rabbit stories. Sammy was often featured in her novels.
Most large cities have rat clubs and even rat shows where owners and potential owners can become acquainted with other owners. This allows owners to witness the enormous variety of rats. Their colors alone, besides white, include black, cinnamon, chocolate, gray-blue, and silver.
Because rats are naturally gregarious, they do much better in the company of other rats. Many owners buy rats in pairs of the same sex to ensure they have a cage mate.
Opposed sex mates often end up producing a litter of pups. This may not be a problem if one is part of a rat club and can sell the pups to other members.
One advantage of owning rats is that they can eat almost anything edible, including table scraps. The other side is that rats are opportunistic eaters and can become obese if not fed properly.
Conversely, if given a choice, rats are very particular about what they consume. Unlike mice and guinea pigs, rats have stomach anatomy that lacks a mechanism for regurgitating food (vomiting) that doesn’t agree with them.
For this reason, they rely on non-food items, such as clay, to settle their stomachs. Rats and humans both soon learn to avoid foods that give them an upset stomach.
Their Intelligent Design
The rat is a super well-designed creature. This includes even their ugly tail. The tail has three functions besides helping them balance as they traverse across a tree branch.
These include thermoregulation to maintain their body heat within a certain narrow temperature range. They do this by dilating or constricting their tail blood vessels.
When the rat’s body temperature rises by a few degrees, the tail vessels (especially the veins) swell, causing vasodilation, allowing warm blood to flow through the tail to facilitate cooling. This system works very well to regulate their temperature.
Rats have poor vision, but their other senses are highly developed. Especially the sense of smell, touch, and hearing are highly developed.
Their complex nervous system and brain gift them sophisticated cognitive skills, including empathy, abstract rule learning, and advanced problem-solving.
Rats also effectively communicate with each other by using body language like humans. Rat brains are structurally so similar to human brains that, for centuries, researchers have studied rat brains to understand the details of the workings of human brains.
Next week, Part 2, which covers why rats are miracle workers.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. Has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools. Jerry can be reached at JerryBergman30@yahoo.com
1 Comment
So much wrong with this article.
—“the fleas on them cause disease” – please make it clear that domesticated pet rats do not carry fleas, only the wild rats. Pet rats can get mites which cause no harm to humans and are easily treatable with medication.
—“My grandson bought his rats from a pet store to ensure a good pedigree” – Absolutely WRONG. pet store bought rats are from mass breeders who do not breed for health or temperament and who keep the rats in awful factory-esque conditions with no enrichment or stimulation. Often they are skittish and not socialised as they are never handled by the breeders. Pet stores are the LAST place you should buy rats from. Always buy from a registered, reputable breeder that you can find via official rat clubs and groups, or from a rescue centre, never from a pet store.
—“Rats are small and require minimal care and space” – No, no, no, no! Rats do not require minimal care – they are intelligent, social animals who need daily interaction and stimulation from their owners. Female rats are prone to rumours, which can be expensive to remove. You can reduce the risk of tumours by having them spayed, which is also expensive. Male rats can develop aggression towards cagemates or their owners, requiring neutering which is expensive. As for space, rats need LOTS of space. They need to be able to climb, and need platforms, ropes, hammocks, different levels, and a stimulating cage environment. Sticking them on a single level small cage is NOT good enough. What cage is big enough for any animal, I ask you? Rats are not the same as hamsters, you can’t stick them in a rubbish plastic bubble cage.
—“they can eat almost anything edible, including table scraps” – yes they can, but that doesn’t mean you should feed them everything from your plate, junk food, or human food. They need a balanced diet of specialist rat food, they need hard food that will keep their teeth trim, and they need green vegetables, salad, boiled eggs, chickpeas, anything healthy, natural and nutritious but their main staple diet must be specialist rat food. You can’t feed them chips, pizza and takeaway. I hope part 2 of this blog is better than part 1.