My apartment comes with two wooden platforms, partly hidden behind a wall, so I just modified that to be a rat cage. I do have a cage, but I felt so bad when I noticed just how little space they have. For some reason I did not expect rats to be large, I would sometimes visit the pet store just to look at the animals, but I didn’t realize that they only show young rats there. When I visited the rat breeder I was almost scared of their size, I figured I had seen dogs smaller than that.

I don’t think all animals go well with each other. I think that in the case of rats, you can’t keep them with other animals too well because they are natural bullies and will make your guinea pig or rabbit feel miserable. And if the animals are too small, like mice, their hunting instinct flares up and there is a certain risk factor. Guinea pigs and rabbits are often placed together, maybe out of some notion of efficiency, but I imagine they are still best served with same-sex, same species animals to spend time with.

I’ve had two female guinea pigs together, for a while these two plus a bunny, and then for several years we had two bunnies at a time, always a female and a neutered male. I don’t think it’s ideal either to keep guinea pigs and bunnies together, they communicate much better with their own kind. Guinea pigs “talk” a lot, while rabbits spend a lot of time licking each other.

They’re not necessarily that short-lived… our guinea pigs both lived till they were eight. Of our bunnies, two of them unfortunately died fairly young due to illnesses, one became medium-aged, and one became ten years old, which is old for a bunny. Sure, still a short life-span compared to a cat or a healthy toy dog, but not that short.

The last bunny we got from an old lady I cared for when I worked as a practical nurse. She had rapidly deteriorating Alzeimers and had to go to a nursing home, and couldn’t bring her little bunny, so I took her (the bunny that is, not the lady). The bunny was incredibly short-tempered and got pissed off at everything and everyone. At that time, we had a lone male bunny since his female companion had passed away, so we thought that this would be great, now they’d both get some company. But the old lady’s bunny and our male bunny just fought all the time. They had to be kept in separate cages when we weren’t at home, and when we were at home and could keep an eye on them we had to watch them all the time to make sure they didn’t get into fights.
Bunnies are supposed to take care of each others fur on top of the head where they can’t clean themselves, but since these two wouldn’t lick each other, our oldest dog took it upon himself to fix their furs. Unfortunately he wasn’t very good at it; he managed to make dreadlocks on them both, even on the one with absolutely short hair on his head he somehow managed to make short little locks. Eventually though, our dog just tired of cleaning rabbit heads every day (or something). Whenever the rabbits would show even the slightest indication of getting into an argument, he would bark his head off at them. Pretty soon they didn’t dare fight with each other any longer, since any such attempt resulted in the dog running at them shouting his head off. And then they actually became friends and started cleaning each others heads like a proper bunny couple. They remained friends after that.

Daintydougal, I used to get so angry at my parents for refusing to take my budgie to the vet. My budgie was attacked by my blue crowned conure, she had some toes ripped off and her lower jaw was completely snapped out of place. I cried and stayed with her, and kept putting anti bacterial stuff on the perches when I could. My parents wouldn’t take her to the vet even though she was bleeding a lot.
The next day she couldn’t eat, since her jaw was obviously in pain. I wanted to bring her to the vet to get liquid food or something but they still wouldn’t go. I just fed her some apple sauce and crushed food pellets(from the conure) mixed with water. Birds starve to death in like 24 hours btw.

Thankfully she lived, but her toes and beak are still messed up. Her lower beak grows but doesn’t have anything to grind it down, so it gets really long. It sticks out the side of her mouth. It’s not painful for her, it just looks funny.
She can still bite and eat too.
She’s 8 years old now.

Daintydougal, at least she’s alive and happy now.
There is some karma with it, since she absolutely loves me yet doesn’t like my parents much. She follows me around the house and imitates the kissy noises I make at her. My parents always call her cute and try to play, but she just puffs up and bites them whenever they try.

I probably haven’t been giving the best impression on keeping fish lately huh? Besides FUCKING ICH some species can live a really long time — plec was at least 14 and the oldest of his kind (with a confirmed age) is in its sixties! Clown loaches can live over a decade too.

And even the little 2-3 year life span guys…most of mine that I didn’t lose to ich hit 4 — had a couple live a surprisingly long time with obvious tumors that didn’t seem to bother them any.

So yeah, if you set up a loach tank, just loaches, you’ll have a better show then anything on TV (they are hilarious, clown loaches are aptly named). Be careful about ich and dear gods make sure you have a solid filtration system, and they can live longer than some dogs.

That filter note is because Every. Last. One. of the 10+ year old loaches I know of died when their filter kicked it. I used to use mine as an excuse why I couldn’t visit my parents for more than 72 hours (worked too)

Yeah, ich makes for an emotional rollercoaster, and I definitely have my why do I bother moments. But then I get a well stocked tank again and wonder how I could’ve ever thought of packing up the tanks.

Oh and if you get a plec when it’s tiny, you can train them to eat from your hand. To the point my previous one would eat from anyone’s had as long as they had a tubifex cube. (Freeze dried worms all shoved together in a cube, feels kinda like tofu to your hand, the plec rasping your fingers feels way weirder!)

And even ich…I mostly get it from fucking heat waves fucking with my babies’ immune systems. Never had much trouble when I had AC.

Lol, hurricane Sandy cut power to most of the region. And not here. My mother joked that they knew what I’d do to them if I lost fish because of that storm.

Loaches though…yeah, you want a backup system. And for the cost of a well stocked loach tank, a generator is cheap (yes small ones at under ten bucks, but then you get a school of 20+…)

Daintydougal, yeah, I love my budgie even more now since she practically treats me like I’m a budgie and a best friend.
Sometimes animals can be too grudgey. My conure holds a grudge against all things that I like. Hence why he hates the budgie. He’s just really attached to me. If my dad talks to me he puffs up and mumbles. When I even look at the parakeet he puffs up. Also when I use the iPad around him he will try to block my eyes or attack it.
If I play with the budgie and get him riled up, and then play with him, you can tell he’s happy but has his feelings hurt. He forces his head under my hand to pet him and mumbles, like “I feel hurt because you play with the bird, and you might love her more than me, but I’m angry at you because you too, since you don’t see how I’m totally superior to her in every way.”

Daintydougal — when Nemo hit I was more on edge than Sandy — Sandy worst comes to worst I could borrow a customer generator from the shop (seriously questionable ethics of course, but I’d totally put the lives of critters great and small above borrowing property without permission [at least, property that literally cannot be used without being borrowed without permission]). And there’s ALWAYS a handful there that are just there for a clean bill of health, so to speak, before being resold, because the customer returned it, is it okay to resell?

Nemo we were trapped. Like, I literally couldn’t get past the front steps until my brother shoved to the sidewalk. I’m 5’4″, we had 40″ of snow. It came to nearly my neck in other words.

You know…I need a new light fixture for the 55g, mine is finally dying (not the light, or ballast, the casing itself, it’s old and survived a half dozen moves, so not surprisingly really)…after that, maybe I can talk my father into going 50/50 with me for a generator, I know he wants one…

RE: amandajane5

I interpreted it as sarcasm AGAINST people who claim that sort of thing. And I don’t see what her race has to do with anything.

I interpreted it as sarcasm AGAINST people who claim that sort of thing. And I don’t see what her race has to do with anything.

Because of the double dose of racism and misogyny one gets for being a black woman in the US? That’s how I read it.

LBT — I have an idea. You’ll still have to do some of it by hand, but I think acrobat will let you print even/odd only and has a “reverse order” button. Not quite sure the order you need, but would printing it in even and odd chunks make sorting it easier?

What order do you need? I can maybe figure it out, spent a week whipping excel into shape, acrobat is far more sensible!

Okay, this should prolly be in the cat thread but this one’s more active. I just had a look at the Engineer’s channel and saw this. I can’t hear it and it’s still hysterical …

Sorry, AJ, will do - I knew the background (had a whole book called The Wandering Uterurs once) but thought the word had lost that tone in talking about things being funny.

katz, poor dog!

Greeks really sucked at biology. Not really, since they were ancient so it’s understandable. Nevermind, they did better than most people would.

Idfk, the whole thing about babies coming from menstual blood and semen I can almost get, since the former stops when pregnant and, even now, that’s often the first sign of pregnancy. So that makes a certain amount of sense. Wandering organs just doesn’t.

Unsurprisingly, the Victorian view I’ve seen on this is that pregnancy keeps it in place. So get pregnant as often as possible! (But not if you aren’t socially acceptable! Early eugenics and all!)

I know that if I move away suddenly from them I can’t do much to help them not feel that I’m abandoning them out of spite.

Aaliyah, I can only repeat what was said on Feministe about this: you can’t control their feelings, you cannot shield them, and you know you have to get away.

Also, and please remember this: even in the best circumstances, even if you had the greatest family in the world, little kids will take it personally when you leave. It’s part of being a little kid, it is NOT something for you to feel guilty about.

Ally,
I’m sorry about your parents being that way… That’s awful.
Sorry this sounds cheesy, but you could give the sisters stuffed animals as a present. Kids already like them because they make them feel safe and secure. If you gave one to each sister they’d have something for comfort and also something to remember you by. Plus it would probably help them understand that you don’t want to leave them, but it doesn’t look suspicious to your parents.