We maybe have a ghost in our house that has popped up since we’ve had work done on the walls, and random stuff keeps happening but something keeps opening my hamsters cage and leaving it open so I’ve just had to explain to thin air what a hamster is because as my sister pointed out, my house is old af and my ghost probably doesn’t know what a hamster is, I’m also leaving it a note in the hopes it can read.
just to illustrate, I don’t think my ghost means my hamster harm, it’s just confused
Confused ghost just wants to pet the soft.
My hamster figured out how to open his cage door. His cage was on top of a considerably tall chest of drawers next to my bunk bed. In the middle of the night he’d open the cage door, jump down and go to my parents room across the landing. When he got there he dug a hole into the bottom drawer on their wardrobe and spent countless nights building a second nest there. Before morning he would return to my room and some how climb his way up to his cage and back to bed. The only thing is he never knew how to close the door so we were left with some clues. That and the fact that multiple times he tried to climb back up he fell on my brother’s face while he was sleeping.
What I found absolutely impressive and stunning about this comic is the way the artist explained the identification and elimination of the confounding factors in the Rat Park study. This is one of the hardest parts of experiments to explain to the public, and I think it was just brilliantly done.
This is so important! And a good comic!
But one thing that worries me – I really hope the Rat Park rats weren’t kept on cedar shavings because that can be very toxic to rats and harm their breathing. 😦 I almost lost 2 rats that way before I knew better. So please do not keep rats on any sort of conifer or softwood shavings (cedar, pine, etc.)! Get paper bedding or look into alternatives like cloth, corncob, etc!
Other small animals too, including hamsters and guinea pigs. The researchers may not have known better, especially decades ago. But, cedar shavings in particular really are not recommended now. Keeping inhaling the aromatic compounds wouldn’t be particularly good for humans, either. (Besides it probably being really unpleasant just to live in an overwhelming cedar smell all the time…)
There are also paper-based beddings available. Kiln-dried pine may be much safer since the heat treatment process drives off most of the phenol, etc. Hardwoods like aspen are probably the safest choice if you want to use a wood shaving bedding, though.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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