Rats are so easy to please. I shoved some sweet potato into cardboard toilet paper tubes, packed in with shredded paper towels. At first they were just excited about the paper towel shreds and started making a nest, then they found the sweet potato and lost their minds. Like they couldn’t believe what a good and gracious world they lived in that there could be sweet potato and paper towel at the same time.
French photographer Diane Özdamar shoots wonderfully kawaii photos of pet rats in effort to help counter the negative associations many people have with them. So great is Özdamar’s love and appreciation for rats that she also rescues and fosters abandoned rats and hopes that her photos will help them find forever homes.
“Here are some of these photographs, both of my rats and of my friends’ rats and, as you may see, they are far from being dirty nasty little monsters! They are actually highly intelligent social beings that love interacting with each other and their favorite humans. They are very friendly, smart, playful, they love cuddles and are very clean: many rat owners agree to compare them to tiny dogs.
I made all the little accessories (except for the little black hat) so these wouldn’t constrain the rats: they could remove them very easily, although they didn’t bother most of the time as they were quite cool and relaxed. No animals were harmed during the making of these pictures, the ladybug was also alive and well and flew away soon after the photo shooting.”
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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