New Babies

I will be taking Lab Animal Technology this quarter and, apparently, the 5 rats and oodles of mice we already have were not sufficient. Therefore, we welcomed a bunch of new mice (I honestly didn't count but it's something like 8 or 10) from SJSU and 4 four-month-old black-hooded rats from Simonsen Labs into our menagerie. In all honesty, I don't really mind more rodents; yes, there's more to clean but I like the little meeces and the boy rats are nice so I'm find handling them. (The lady rats are very nippy! They suck.) I just wish we could get rid of the rabbits! They are horrible, horrible creatures. Yes, I understand that they were lab rabbits and so have no reason whatsoever to like humans but man do they not like humans! They are extremely unpleasant and I do not enjoy looking after them at ALL. Ahem. Moving on...

Since I had never seen a baby rat in person, I spent a little extra time after Animal Care last Wednesday helping Alisa get the little guys a bit more socialized. Which seemed like a perfect opportunity to snap some photos of our rodent room! And here it is:

I took one good picture and then promptly forgot to actually take any photos of the mice or our original rats. Whoops! Well, we were focusing on the newbies so I focused on the newbies. Here's one of them now:

And here's another little guy in my pocket. He was so sweet! But he promptly peed on my top before running into my pocket so that's why it looks wet.

The rats are definitely people-shy; they wouldn't even nibble oatmeal or applesauce from our fingers. But people seem taken with the little ones so hopefully people with play with them more and they'll get more comfortable with us. I just feel bad for the albino bunch - people think they're so creepy looking that they won't love on them. :o(  I love on the boys - they're so cute when they get their Cheerios - but the girls not so much. I just hate for anyone to feel left out. Mew.