Ratventures!

You may or may not be aware of the fact that there are rat babies in our lives. Technically speaking they're not babies at all, except in the same sense that Nathan's parents' thirteen-year-old dog is still "the puppy". Anyway rat babies make pretty sweet pets, but they have certain quirks of anatomy that the cats don't share. One such quirk is the ever-growing-teeth quirk.

Normally this is not a problem for rats- the little suckers will gnaw on anything and everything (which is why we give them sticks and cardboard tubes and such) which naturally keeps the teeth in shape. They also have a habit of bruxing (ie grinding their teeth together in an equivalent of a cat's purr), which helps keep things under control, too. Notice that I said normally.

Of our two rat babies, Zelda is the bold and dashing one, and Camilla is the shyer, more home-body rat. Zelda's teeth are absolutely fine, but a while ago I noticed that Camilla's lower teeth were causing her to somewhat strongly resemble a nosfeRATu. Pretty freakin' creepy, even for those of us who think rat babies are, as a general rule, default adorable.

At any rate, if a rat's teeth start to look a bit tusk-ish, the solution is to take them to the vet and have the teeth ground down, so I made an appointment for this morning, and round about 1020 Nathan and I loaded up the Ratkins (that's their surname) and headed out.

You might be wondering why we brought both rat babies, if only one of them needed medical attention. Well, the fact of the matter is that rats are incredibly social animals, and we thought it would be way less stressful for Camilla if Zelda came along for the ride. Turned out to be a good decision on our part, since we ended up sitting in a waiting room for like half an hour while they worked on her (they had to give her knock out gas), and having Zelda to play with did a lot to relieve the tedium.

The other bonus was that Nathan managed to get quite a few good pictures of her swarming all over me, being cute, and moreover he was able to use one of her eating a carrot as his "action" shot for today.

(Feeding Time)

They eventually brought a very groggy Camilla back to us (her chompers a respectable length once more) and we discovered what had taken so long. The vet had accidenly nicked her gum while he was trimming her teeth, and the poor man was so distraught it bordered on comical. I reassured him that it was okay- "After all," I said, "I can't tell you how many times my dentist has made my gums bleed, and he's not trying to work with tools the size of my head!" This made the assistant crack up, so I figure they realized we weren't going to sue, or anything.

The vet was able to give us a theory as to why Camilla's teeth had gotten so out of control- turns out her upper teeth are abnormally small, and at an unusual angle, making it difficult for her to brux properly. He says she was probably born that way, and just to keep an eye on how long the lower teeth get. Which tells me we're probably going to have to repeat this rigmarole once every six months.

::sigh::

Ah, "free" pet ownership...