# Fizzgig is biting his own tail



## Stephanie (Mar 25, 2007)

Ok so i have heard of rats chasing their tails but I noticed today that fizzgig is actually biting his own tail. It is all marked up I am going to try and get some pictures of it but he may not let me. 

Has anyone heard of this?

Has anyone had experience with how to make him stop?

If it is not one thing with this rat it is another LoL


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## Fuzzie (Apr 25, 2007)

perhaps some ferret spray stuff or Tabasco would help, but he is probably already feeling pain from his tail, and I'm not sure either of those are safe to put on rat skin. that is weird.


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## ladylady (Apr 5, 2007)

Apparently rats dont like mint-could try some herbal tea on it or mouthwash allthough im unsure of the safeness. Maybe some savlon might do-expect it tastes funny but wouldent do to much harm or some vegtable soap. What a pickle


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## Stephanie (Mar 25, 2007)

Well i treated the bite wounds with neosporin and bactine as a saftey measure but he freaked out even more. I just wish I knew why he is biting CHUNKS out of his tail. I got some pictures though they are not the best quality i hope they come out alright for you guys. I am taking him tot he vet on monday morning and I have a horrible feeling that he is going to tell me that my rat is suffering from dimensia. ugh i swear this rat is beautiful but a problem all around.


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## twitch (Jan 4, 2007)

maybe its related to stress. people and other animals can act very strangely and self-destuctive when stressed out so i couldn't see why a rat couldn't do the same thing. try to figure out what is new for him and remove it or if its about attention give him more.


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## Stephanie (Mar 25, 2007)

I just switched his cage thinking it may be from stress. He is now in his own cage away from the other boys. Nothing has changed at all but i am trying this before anything drastic is done. I am hopefull that this change will help. The gashes are really really bad and i am afraid he may be suffering from dimensia but i have no idea. I hate how much this rat worries me LoL i gave him lots more toys and lots more things to do i hope this helps him. I would give him a cage mate but he is soooo nasty to all my other boys. Perhaps once steve is out of surgery on the 12th i can put them together but i am not going to get my hopes up. I'll keep everyone updated on him and let you know what the vet says tomorrow.


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## twitch (Jan 4, 2007)

maybe its the changes that are bothering him. maybe there's too many for him to cope with at once. just before he started the tail biting what was going on in the house? anyone sick? more attention from other members of the family or less? change of food? new toys? new cage? new rat smell in the area? did you change the location of the cage? before offering more changes i would rule out the chance that it was change that made him go weird. 

as odd as it for a rat to be self-mutilating a rat that doesn't cope with change well happens. in fact i had one. Snicketts, spider's sister, hated any change. if the room was just a few degrees off she'd get cranky. cage changing day was **** on her. she would sulk at the bottom of the cage and scream at me if i so much as touched her. she even tried to bite me a few times. she'd push the other rats and be general terror in the cage for a day or two afterwards but then she'd get over it. but i was the changing of hte smells, changing routine, giving her different foods or giving her too many new toys at once that get her upset. if i kept to a strict routine and made changes in small doses she was fine. it was a lot of work and it didn't surprise me any that the only rat that mourned her death was her sister. i can't imagine it was easy on the others to live with her either. a few of Snicketts' children turned out the same way though never to quite the same degree. there's no research that i know of to back it up but i think Snicketts was autistic of some sort. i don't know if its possbile for a rat to be but for her to be so upset over such small changes gets me wondering. her way of coping was to pick on others, to lash out. perhaps Fizzgig's way of coping, not having any other rats to pick on, is to self-mutilate. but that's just my theroy on it. i could be way off. he could also be sick and can't get away from the pain or whatever other symptom he has and bites himself to distract or because he's confused. you had another rat that recently went through a great temperment change after treatment from an illness you didn't know he had, maybe its the same thing but backwards? there's so many possible causes that i wouldn't just focus on dimentia. its a possiblity and certainly a worry but just as your other rat could of had diabetes but was a simple bladder infection fizzgig could be the same. 

whatever happens keep us posted on his progress. i hope he comes round soon.


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## Stephanie (Mar 25, 2007)

that's just it there were NO changes at all. the tail biting started for no apparent reason whatsoever. But since i have moved him into a seperate area and closer to me he seems to be doing better. I haven't seen any of the tail chasing yet but i am going to keep a VERY close eye on him for the rest of the night. And i have discontinued the intros that have been going on for the past two weeks. I hope he comes around too. I am also going to treat him for mites just in case he has been a little itchier than normal but that may be the stress too. He is still going to the vet tomorrow as a precautionary measure. I am not really sure what they can say with out extensive testing but I am sooo willing to do whatever it takes for him.


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## Stephanie (Mar 25, 2007)

p.s. thanks for all of your suggestions twitch I keep meaning to put that in there LoL i am such a ditz sometimes


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## Stephanie (Mar 25, 2007)

alrighty I just got back from the vets and it looks liek fizzgig has mites (i don't see how but hey i am no vet). He seems to be doing alot better now and I will have to take him back in two weeks for a follow up. I never would have guessed that it was mites.


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## JennieLove (Jan 2, 2007)

Well, good to hear that hes going better. Im glad it wasnt anything bad enough that you would have had to put him down.


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## ladylady (Apr 5, 2007)

Yay, glad hes getting better 
I was worrying he had rat autism but didnt want to worry you


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## twitch (Jan 4, 2007)

ladylady said:


> Yay, glad hes getting better
> I was worrying he had rat autism but didnt want to worry you


so it is possible for a rat to have autism? i don't suppose you have any sources i can read? like i posted eariler i had one strange rat that i suspected had autism too but i didn't think rats could get it. i never found any info on it when i looked it up either. normally you have such great sources to read, i don't suppose you have anything on this as well?


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## Stephanie (Mar 25, 2007)

yeah i would like to read up on this as well becuase like i said there have been no signs of mites in any of my mischeif of rats. Thanks everyone for your help with this I was so worried LoL. he seems to be ok now but i haven't been home much tonight. so i am just going to have to keep a close eye on him all night tonight and tomorrow


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## ladylady (Apr 5, 2007)

*Beware its laboritory based testing*


"But perhaps we're just recognizing their rat behaviors better. Perhaps the rats are just quirky. Perhaps they suddenly showed characteristics of autism because of their rat genes. Everyone knows there are 1 in 150 autistic rats scurrying about. Perhaps all rats bite their tails, and one another, obsessively. Perhaps their mothers were just emotionless and cold. How else could this be explained? After all, it couldn't have possibly been the neurotoxin that made them act neurotoxic."

http://autismdiva.blogspot.com/2006/10/nonscience-in-research-ghetto.html


The results were clear. The rats in the moderate-lead exposure group showed great improvement from the chelation therapy with their test results being virtually indistinguishable from the non-exposed control test results. Rats exposed to higher lead levels showed benefits in the emotional symptoms, behaving similarly to the control group in this area after treatment. The chelation therapy with succimer only slightly improved their learning abilities however.

http://www.ei-resource.org/news/2006/chelation.asp

In light of these ambiguities, hope is held that an animal model of autism may help elucidate matters. In this article, we overview most of the currently available animal models for autism, and propose the rat with mild and transient neonatal hypothyroidism as a novel model for autism.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/cga/2006/00000046/00000001/art00002

thats it-bit thin


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## 2manyrats (Apr 10, 2007)

Yeah, I did a quick overview of the scientific lit on autism in rats, and most of the studies I found introduced toxins to emulate autism. It'd be really hard for them to do a study on autism in rats without inducing the condition somehow... it'd be difficult to selectively breed for autism.


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## ladylady (Apr 5, 2007)

The first one seems to say that it exists naturaly in rats. I suppose its not allways called autism in rats because the symptoms differ bacause there behaivour naturaly differs from humans if you know what i mean?!


Gibson, Evelyn; Reed, Phil. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders, Dec2005, Vol. 35 Issue 6, p851-859, 9p, 2 charts, 4 graphs; DOI: 10.1007/s10803-005-0030-9; (AN 20528554)
The present study explored whether a similar phenomenon to stimulus over-selectivity occurred in rats, in the hope of establishing a non-human model for the autism. Rats were serially presented with two-15 seconds, two-element compound stimuli prior to the delivery of food, in an appetitive classical conditioning procedure. Each compound stimulus consisted of two lights. Once the rats had acquired a conditioned response (CR) to the stimuli, they were presented with each of the component elements separately in extinction. The rats demonstrated greater conditioning to components of the compound presented just prior to reinforcement than to the components of the temporally distant compound. However, there was a smaller difference between CRs to the components of the compound presented just prior to reinforcement (i.e. less overshadowing) than between the components of the temporally distant compound. It is suggested that rats demonstrated a form of stimulus over-selectivity, resulting in greater overshadowing of one cue by another. Such results may form the basis of a viable non-human model of this symptom of autistic spectrum disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]


Rodier, Patricia M.. Mental Retardation & Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 1996, Vol. 2 Issue 4, p249-256, 8p; (AN 12389092)

Animal models of human brain damage syndromes range form ones that are purely theoretical to ones that attempt to duplicate a human syndrome at every level. The similarity between animal and human cases in experimental manipulation, CNS alteration, and tests of parallelism is sometimes restricted by the extent to which experimental species match humans in their basic biology. However, the information available from the human condition is often the most important limiting factor in the degree to which similarities can be achieved. The recent discovery of a high rate of autism in patients exposed to thalidomide around the time of neural tube closure suggest an appropriate experimental manipulation for an animal model of the disease. Rats exposed to valproic acid at the same stage of development mimic the thalidomide cases apparent injuries to the brain stem. Whether the behavior of these brain-damaged animals is similar to that observed in autism is difficult to determine, because the diagnostic behavioral features of the disease are not easily translated into animal tasks. However, anatomical observations in human cases provide tests of parallelism that can be applied to animals, and these appear to be positive in the animal model. The development of behavioral tests that discriminate autistic from that of other brain damage syndromes may require further research in both humans and animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cant link to the full text cus it needs my uni login


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## Stephanie (Mar 25, 2007)

Ok so again I got back from the vets this morning and fizzgig has a new spray for me touse on his tail it is bitter so he won't bite at it anymore and it has an antibiotic and itch relief in it. right now he has a cone untill tomorrow when i am supposed to try and get it off LOL likei am going to be able to do that anyway I thought we could all use a laugh and I decided to post pictures of it so here it goes he is sooo unhappy but sooo cute at the same time!


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## JennieLove (Jan 2, 2007)

LMAO you posted them! Poor baby...xD


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## 2manyrats (Apr 10, 2007)

Oh, poor guy! Can you take a closeup pic so that we can all see how it's attached? I'm curious as to how tight they had to make it so he couldn't wiggle out!


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## Poppyseed (Feb 1, 2007)

Oh MY GOD! That is the saddest and cutest thing EVER! I always think dogs with cones are a little sad but laughable, but RATS with cone LMAO XDDDDD


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## twitch (Jan 4, 2007)

i agree poppy! that was hilarious! i should feel sorry for fizz that he has to wear that but i have to stop laughing first! *chuckles*


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## Stephanie (Mar 25, 2007)

it came off this morning and i didn't get any close up picks as he was grumpy and nasty when it was on understably of course. I can explain it though. They had it right by his ears and under his jaw bone it was tight enough that it wouldn't slip off but not so tight it was choking him. they just taped the crap out of it to keep it there LoL. Poor guy was soooo mad at me though he is doing a bit better but he is still biting his tail. I have a spray to put on it whenever I see the tail nipping but I have no idea how long this is going to go on for  I hope he will get over it soon. I am awaiting some revolution to treat everyone with which hopefully will knock out these mites for good!!


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