All of these guys are genetically tame. We'll probably give some to breeders, so let me know if you are interested!
Transcript
All right, look at these guys. That one is just chilling out, he's been there a long time. He's always there. The other ones are kind of exploring. I thought that one might be a boy, but I couldn't really tell. Turns out that's a girl, a very tame girl. They're pretty good babies. See, she's thinking about jumping. If she starts kind of shaking her butt a little bit, that means she's thinking about it. That's why she's just sitting there, asking herself, "How do I get down from this thing?" And there she goes. Look at that. Go play with your friends.
There are seven rats here, two girls and five boys. Most of them are black, and we have a few with white tail tips, and I think one or two are like this one. I saw one for sure. And this is the mama. Mama is up there. I can feel them messing around in my hair. At some point these guys will be ready to play with and stuff like that. Right now they're pretty young and they're not really used to people. This is the first time they've been on me. They've never seen me before in their whole lives, these little guys. That's because we don't tend to handle them too much when they're very small.
It's better for them, and it also helps us know which ones are truly tame. If you handle them a lot when they're small, they might get tame anyway just because you're handling them, but then you won't know if they're genetically tame. So our goal is to breed the most genetically tame ones to make it easier for future breeders, who can just breed them and always get nice tame babies. Like what you get with Norway rats. With Norway rats, when you breed two rats, you really expect that all the babies are good. That's our goal here. See, she's doing her little licky thing.
Yeah, you're doing your little licky thing on me. Thank you very much. That's one thing we can do with these guys, because if you put Norway rat babies on you, they'd probably fall. These aren't going to fall accidentally, but they may leave on purpose if they don't want to be on you anymore. Usually that means they'll jump down, because they don't like to climb down. That's the funny thing. They like being up high because that's where they feel safest, so they're not likely to just run down, but they might jump down, because they do like jumping. It's a natural behavior.
Usually they want to try to jump to something else that's also high up. So if I got next to that wall, that screen wall there, they would probably jump to it right away. But as you can see, they're not likely to climb down, and that's great. I can actually hear some of them boxing on me, so some of them are quite friendly. They're literally boxing and stuff, and that's a very, very good sign. I bet you they're going to be good pets someday. Okay, little guys. Maybe this is long enough.
Watch it on YouTube. If it helped, the channel has a new roof-rat video most weeks, and there is a written guide with photos on the videos page.