Pyramus left us on Tuesday evening. He was still steadily losing weight and looked very tired, but I didn't expect him to leave us. I'd moved him and Sophie into a hospital cage at the weekend so they could have some peace, but have now moved Sophie back into the big cage as I feel she's better off with company even if she's bullied on occasion. She's still climbing round the cage quite agilely, despite having a head tilt and being a bag of bones. I can't keep her interested in food for more than 10 seconds or so, so the weight is dropping off her.
These are two Alpha Centauri babies who have arrived to bridge the gap between my original breeding bucks and a year later when their offspring will reach breeding age. I now have Barnaby, a gorgeous topaz rex, and Bramwell Brown who is absolute agouti perfection. Beautiful big eyes. Perfect ears. Lovely sleek body. One of those rats you just have to keep gazing adoringly at.
My run of easy intros seems to be continuing. The babies met their prospective cagemates today - Darwin, Maxwell and Morse. First on neutral territory, where everything was so completely uneventful that I tried them all in the playpen this evening. No problems at all.
Here are all five of them crammed into a Wobust Wodent Wheel on their first meeting.
Got seven rats entered, taking two going to a new home, picking up four girls from two breeders, feel dreadful. Got to get an early night.
Well I survived the show, and so did the four new girls. I bunged them in the same carrier at the show and they seem to be young enough to have accepted each other right away.
Angelina got a rosette for pink eyed white, albeit in a class of one. Diggory got 3rd stud buck in a class of 20. Quite pleased with that. Chester came fourth in adult owned pet buck, in a class of 13.
The little ones seem to be settling in OK. The boys are getting along well with the three older lads who they will be living with eventually. The girls are not quite so good - Rosie and Megan have serious issues with other wimmin being around, even if they're only babies. I've stuck the cages next to one another so they can get used to the scents, but I haven't tried putting them together as the one time I tried they were very territorial. I need to find somewhere to put them that's neutral, but the settee is not escape proof and they're all too agile.
I'm tentatively claiming success at getting the two little boys in with Max, Morse and Darwin. Darwin is the one who's being huffy about it all, which amuses me as he is the only one who isn't an intact male.
The eight girls are also in together, but in a small neutral cage with nothing but a pea-fishing bowl and a food bowl (plus litter and water bottles of course). It's been relatively good so far. A bit of screeching and flipping but no raticide. I put Rosie and Meg in with the little girls to begin with, then added Thisbe and Sophie when it was a little calmer. All I've got to do now is make the big cage neutral.
I am late writing. The girls have settled down in new cage. New to me as well as to them - I picked up a second hand Explorer cage for them as they wouldn't settle in the old girls' cage. It's really posh. Sophie is stressed by it all though, I wish I'd waited until she'd gone, but it's too late now.
The little boys are also settled in, but only with Morse and Darwin, as Max died last week. Morse's health isn't good either, so it's probably as well that Darwin will have the little ones when Morse leaves.
Last modified: Friday, 02-May-2008 08:37:22 BST
