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Eynstyn · Jun 12, 2005, 09:06 PM

On Animal Planet there's a Jane Goodall special showing these big old hairy rats being used to detect land mines in Mozambique.

The rats look big and kinda hunky like a small, short-haired dog. The trainers are really like the rats' PARTNER and they pet them and feed them by hand and the rats aren't forced to hide and scurry so their personality or rationality shines through.

Mithras · Jun 12, 2005, 09:19 PM

Rats are great pets; I had a number of rats when growing up. Smart, friendly, and fun.

Eynstyn · Jun 12, 2005, 09:29 PM

Originally Posted by Mithras

Rats are great pets; I had a number of rats when growing up. Smart, friendly, and fun.

They also train dogs to detect the landmines but the rats learn the job ten times faster than the dogs.

Randman · Jun 13, 2005, 12:31 AM

I had a pet rat in college as we couldn't have dogs or cats in the apartment complex. It was smart (she would run out and climb up top my shoulder when called). She was clean, cleaner than any dog. If her house (a shoebox with newspaper inside a homemade wire cage) wasn't cleaned weekly (on Fridays), she'd turn the house over, push everything into one corner and sit in the other corner until it was changed. She was also constantly grooming. A very good pet.

Eynstyn · Jun 13, 2005, 12:41 AM

Originally Posted by Randman

I had a pet rat in college as we couldn't have dogs or cats in the apartment complex. It was smart (she would run out and climb up top my shoulder when called). She was clean, cleaner than any dog. If her house (a shoebox with newspaper inside a homemade wire cage) wasn't cleaned weekly (on Fridays), she'd turn the house over, push everything into one corner and sit in the other corner until it was changed. She was also constantly grooming. A very good pet.

She sounds delightful. Was she white or brown or grey or multi-cultural?

Randman · Jun 13, 2005, 09:13 AM

Brown. Long-tailed. Had her for a couple of years. It was pretty neat. A little whistle and some finger snapping and she'd pop up from somewhere and come right to me.

MacNStein · Jun 13, 2005, 09:37 AM

They're great pets, I've had a couple. They just don't live long enough.

d.fine · Jun 13, 2005, 10:10 AM

I've had a couple as well. They learn really fast, and they're smart as hell. Of course I didn't have the kind of rat that are shown in the tv show.
The rats died of old age, and after 4 years we decided to take a break. Maybe we got some again, in the near future.

Mithras · Jun 13, 2005, 10:14 AM

My dad's a surgeon, and after my first rat died (I think I was six) he did an autopsy for me; poor rat died of cancer. It was all very sad but incredibly interesting for me.
Put me in the camp that believes it's good for kids to begin understanding death at an early age.

It had a certain harmony with the fact that we'd saved the rat from an even earlier death at the hands of a snake owner...

Eynstyn · Jun 13, 2005, 11:14 AM

Originally Posted by Mithras

My dad's a surgeon, and after my first rat died (I think I was six) he did an autopsy for me; poor rat died of cancer. It was all very sad but incredibly interesting for me.
Put me in the camp that believes it's good for kids to begin understanding death at an early age.

It had a certain harmony with the fact that we'd saved the rat from an even earlier death at the hands of a snake owner...

And when Grandpa Mithras passed away was the wide-eyed little grandposter Mithras ready to have Tata peeled open and dissected on the kitchen table, too?

Mithras · Jun 13, 2005, 11:32 AM

well, I did watch a gallbladder surgery that my dad did on the kitchen table for a friend that had no health insurance... grandpa (lifelong navy man) thought that my dad being a doctor (my dad dropped out of the Naval Academy) was almost as bad as being a homosexual or a communist, so no, he didn't get the treatment