An Adventure With Nervous Sniffles!

Every day is a learning experience with our little guys. As before mentioned it is all new and exciting as well as scary at times.

When we first brought them home we noticed that they were sneezing a lot. One thing that I did know about rats was the constant threat of respiratory problems. If their living conditions and surroundings are not kept sanitary rats can develop congestion which can weaken the lungs and be potentially fatal to their delicate system. I know that this seems a little absurd because a person often associates rats with filthy situations, sickness, and disease. However, it is the same for rats in sewers and garbage heaps. A rats life in these situations is rather limited. It is their ability to reproduce in such a short amount of time that keeps their population up. Just an interesting fact: A rat's gestation period is about 21-24 days and can birth up to 20 rats in a litter. You do the math!

But back to my cute little guys--the non-sewer dwelling, disease-free type.

So Monkey and Steve had the sniffles and for the first week or so Steve seemed to be getting worse. I was moments away from actually calling the vet, when I did some searching on the Internet. As I said, Tim and I keep it close.

We found that most rats suffer from Nervous Sneezing and Sniffles, when subjected to a new environment. It is brought on by the stress of relocation, separation anxiety, insecurity. We learned to leave them alone for a few days and to see if the sneezing subsided. It did! I think what helped was the fact that we did decide to get two rats instead of one. Imagine being pulled away from your pals and placed in a cage all alone. It almost makes me feel like a monster.
Monkey and Steve are the best of buds, and definitely helped one another adjust to a new environment.

We do experience the nervous sneezing and sniffles every now and then when handling the rats. Money and Steve were never handled by humans on a regular basis while they were young, and in every experience of human handling they have been traumatized in one manner or another--seperation from their mother, brothers and sisters, moved from cage to cage, and finally cage to box, a bumpy car ride, and then thrust into a new situation entirely (the Sams home). They are still uncomfortable with being held and usually sneeze their heads off and leave a trail of "Fear Poop" (gross I know but an actual reference). This is something that we will need to work on and is getting better every day.

They do love when we open the door to the cage and are perfectly fine with the human/rat interaction that happens when they are still within the confines of the cage. They are rather sweet in this type of exchange and hopefully soon will move beyond the bars!


They wrestle, which is always a fun thing to watch--especially when they both have one another's tail in their mouths and running around in circles...Hilarious!