All I Want For Christmas
Dec. 25th, 2006 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstorm...is a clean, rearranged house with pottery wheel and rat cages where they should be. I'm getting that plus some turkey, though I have to give most of it to myself.
Let me see if I can get back into the swing of typing livejournal trivia.
I'm up to three rat cages now; a friend of mine originally had three of Helen's siblings, and now almost two years later two of them have passed on. The one remaining, a hairless black birkshire named Sprite, was originally the runt and now is the sickeningly healthy one. She's intensely submissive, probably from being the runt (rats tend to form dominance hierarchies in terms of size and then keep them through the life of a colony, which means younger rats are less dominant, and my Helen rules the cage of slightly bigger rats). I put Silver in with her, because Silver is a sweet nonagressive girl and she's a hairless and should have someone to keep her warm, and Silver rolls over onto her back and tries to shimmy under Sprite-- and Sprite freaks out and runs away. Silver tries again, and Sprite hides in her house. Silver tries to wriggle into the house upside-down to accept being belly-groomed... and Sprite hisses and cowers. After a little bit of that I took Silver out. For the interested, I've been mixing up their food, giving Sprite both lab blocks and the subee's mix she came with, and giving the girls in the big cage some suebee's to suppliment their lab blocks. In the wild a rat colony identifies it's members by smell, which is in part caused by diet, and I'm hoping this will help. It seems to've, because the mixing of Sprite and Angel today worked pretty well-- they're together now. The big cage gets set up in about an hour and that'll be fun.
Let me see if I can get back into the swing of typing livejournal trivia.
I'm up to three rat cages now; a friend of mine originally had three of Helen's siblings, and now almost two years later two of them have passed on. The one remaining, a hairless black birkshire named Sprite, was originally the runt and now is the sickeningly healthy one. She's intensely submissive, probably from being the runt (rats tend to form dominance hierarchies in terms of size and then keep them through the life of a colony, which means younger rats are less dominant, and my Helen rules the cage of slightly bigger rats). I put Silver in with her, because Silver is a sweet nonagressive girl and she's a hairless and should have someone to keep her warm, and Silver rolls over onto her back and tries to shimmy under Sprite-- and Sprite freaks out and runs away. Silver tries again, and Sprite hides in her house. Silver tries to wriggle into the house upside-down to accept being belly-groomed... and Sprite hisses and cowers. After a little bit of that I took Silver out. For the interested, I've been mixing up their food, giving Sprite both lab blocks and the subee's mix she came with, and giving the girls in the big cage some suebee's to suppliment their lab blocks. In the wild a rat colony identifies it's members by smell, which is in part caused by diet, and I'm hoping this will help. It seems to've, because the mixing of Sprite and Angel today worked pretty well-- they're together now. The big cage gets set up in about an hour and that'll be fun.
