# Forced socialization or another way?



## moonkissed (Dec 26, 2011)

This will likely be a controversial topic. But I hope to encourage discussion 

One of the biggest topics people ask about is how to get their rat to like them and trust training. I often see forced socialization pushed. But the question is, is that really the best way to gain trust?
In many rat circles I have seen a change to more patient, slow training. I fully admit I now prefer this method myself.

*Forced Socialization* = spouted as a quick fix by forcing the rat to socialize with you. I have seen several different ways to go about it but the general idea is putting the rat with you and giving them no choice but to deal with you. 

I am going to call the other method *Trust Training*, as it is a method that slowly builds trust over time. This uses positive reinforcement.

*What is Positive Reinforcement?*
-the offering of desirable effects or consequences for a behavior with the intention of increasing the chance of that behavior being repeated in the future- dictionary

-Positive reinforcement is a very powerful and effective tool to help shape and change behavior. Positive reinforcement works by presenting a motivating item to the person after the desired behavior is exhibited, making the behavior more likely to happen in the future. -with children

I am going to take a moment here to discuss dogs. I know rats are not dogs. All animals are different, but this helps to show the idea. All over the training world positive reinforcement is hailed as king and used on all sorts of animals- dogs, cats, horses, even zoo animals! Positive reinforcement builds a foundation so that the animal then constantly makes the choice to do the thing you want them to do. IMO it builds a better animal, a happier animal and a deeper bond between you and them.

In the dog world the alpha theory was invented in the 1930-1940s by a man named Rudolph Schenkel. His research at the time was very flawed & he himself has since even said so! Since then it has been proven false. The alpha theory is junk and outdated. -good read if interested. Anyways.. besides a few really lazy/bad trainers and "celebrities" alpha training is not used. Positive reinforcement is the preferred training method now used and supported.

Ok so dogs do not do the whole alpha thing but does that mean rats don't? The term alpha is used when discussing wild rats. But IMO it is not so black and white. There are going to be more confident rats and less confident rats. Rats that are more bossier and those that back down. I think it is far more complicated a relationship then just alpha vs submissive. On top of that what happens in a wild rats social circle is in no way relatable to our pet rats. In the wild a male would have many females and defend his territory to the death. If another male came in they would fight, not accept them. But we can add males to our mischief. Domestic pet rats are in no way wild animals, they do not have the same social behaviors because it is not needed in their lovely pet home situations. 

Even more so, we are not rats. I am not the alpha of my dogs, of my cats or of my rats. And would you really want to be?? Yes I am in charge, I make the rules and am the giver of food and the releaser of the cage. But would I rather have a companion or a submissive? IMO trying to be an alpha of any pet is absurd and often involves downright silly methods, cruelty, & in no way works like you want it to. 


Ok on to the point... lol

*Forced Socialization* works by using fear & control. You are restricting their choice. Negative methods like this often have adverse long term issues and in no way touches upon the reason for the fear. 
Some rats can merely be alittle shy and not quite sure about you. But for many rats who have true fear, have never been handled or no good experiences with being handled this is likely to make things worse. You are taking the absolute scary situation that you are putting them in and having that scary experience be 100% connected to you! 

Sadly these negative methods in training often give an illusion of a fix. It is more like a band=aid rather then solving the underlying problem. Your goal is to build trust but how can any trust be built in this method? 

Let me be clear here... 
You bring home a new rat that is alittle shy but showing curiosity, comes out to see you, takes food from you, shows confidence but perhaps is not ok with being picked up just yet or coming out of the cage. 
Holding this rat, carrying it around on your shoulder, hanging out with it in a room or on your bed. This is not forced socialization. This is hanging out with your new pet.
But...
Taking a rat that is obviously showing signs of aggression, fear- hiding, running from you, not coming out of its bed, squeaking, freezing in place (this is often what scared rats will do, do not take it as a sign of things being ok), hiding in a corner, etc... in this situation forcefully chasing the rat to grab it, forcing it in a small area with you, holding it, putting it in a position where it is forced to be with you = forced socialization. 

*Trust Training* is a slow method of building up trust, consistency and making it the rats choice. It can take loads of patience and time with some rats. It involves building trust and making them relate to you as positive.

Now I do not know about you, but if I were the rat I know which one I would prefer happen to me lol. 

There is not a one way fits all rats way. I do think you should spend time with the rat, learn the signs of a rat being afraid, uncomfortable, or unhappy.

Sitting near the cage talking calmly often.
Read to your rats!
Leaving the cage door open. Not trying to remove the rat, not trying to go near the cage but just have the door open.
Working with food..leaving a trail of food near the cage door.
Using yummy foods on a spoon and slowly work them closer to you.
Always be aware of how they feel and move at their pace. If things start to go wrong taking a step backwards.

This is a god awfully horrible designed website lol but the info is pretty good on trust training rats
http://www.joinrats.com/ definitely worth a read.

I love my pets. They are a part of my family. I want them to choose to love me. And I want ideally to give them all positive happy experiences. i want to build their confidence.


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## Nieve5552 (May 20, 2014)

Cool post moonkissed  
I definitely do agree that positive reinforcement is THE most effective way to train all animals, much better than negative reinforcement and still better than the method of both negative and positive reinforcements combined. 

I do feel like comparing rats to other animals in this case is different though. When we say trust training, its more like getting them used to us, not actually 'training' them like the way we train dogs or horses. It would make sense to compare training dogs to training rats to do a trick, but maybe not to trust training since most of the time when you 'train' dogs it is assumed that they are used to your presence and arent fearful of you.

What is your stance on immersion? From what you've said, it would be that immersion with curious, unfearful rat will be 'hanging out and bonding' while immersion with a fearful unsocialised rat would be categorized as forced socialisation.

My personal thought is that immersion is kind of like concentrated (in terms of time and energy spent) method of trust training, but they do fundamentally differ. Immersion might create a higher level of fear and uncomfortableness in the rat, but for a much shorter period since immersion takes a few hours instead of weeks. Trust training usually takes weeks, and even though they might not experience the high level of fear and uncomfortableness like in the initial stages of immersion, they will experience more uncertainty for a much longer period. 
I also think that immersion is more like us trying to 'speak rat' while trust training is a process of trying to communicate through the reward of food
So I prefer immersion, as even though it might cause a little more fear in them once immersion is successful, their uncertainty of who we are and what we want from them is eliminated fairly quickly, allowing to settle in their new homes with more curiosity than fear

This is just my 2 cents, Im definitely not as experienced you are in rat keeping haha 4 rats total in my life so far!
I would love to hear your opinions on this though


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## Rat Daddy (Sep 25, 2011)

PRO aka "positive reinforcement only" conditioning is the illegitimate stepchild or behavior modification BM and/or operand conditioning OC something I'm very familiar with as a psychology major from the 1970's and 1980's where it was pretty much all we were taught...

Firstly.. it produced some truly amazing results, both in it's positive and negative aspects through rewards and punishment and withholding both or either reward or punishment.... It truly made for good science, but in fact things started going sideways or pear-shaped right from the start. Yes, people would quit smoking but they started gambling or overeating. Sure you got your wife to take out the trash by zapping her with a cattle prod... but your likelihood of divorce also disproportionately increased... And you could get your kids to do homework by letting them watch more TV, but in the end they didn't actually learn anything more but became TV junkies instead... And the hits kept on coming... a friend actually worked on a project to "fix" homosexuals... and aside from little issues like suicide it was working pretty well until their project got buried when homosexuality was considered not to be a mental illness anymore.... Who's going to fund a project to fix something that isn't broken?

PRO, has the same drawbacks as OC or BM except with only half the tool box... And if you are seriously into PRO, really you shouldn't discount OC or BM and all of the rest of the tools they offer.... Lastly OC never takes into account that you are dealing with sentient emotional beings... in fact it assumes that rats and people are basically stimulus - response organisms. Plug in the right stimulus and get the right response... with a little bit of tweaking you should be able to brainwash anyone into doing exactly what you want... Bring a girl the right flowers and candy and she will fall in love with you... Simple as that? Of course not!!!!

Rats and humans are sentient and emotional beings, we're not just stimulus - response organisms.... Sure you can get me to take the trash out with a gun and a cattle prod, but you aren't likely to ever see me again. And even if lots of people might marry for enough money, it really can't buy long term love. Oddly the term resentment doesn't fit into the OC dictionary... There are nifty terms like stimulus desensitization and negative effect... which sound cool, but really mean that there's something wrong with treating intelligent beings like computer programs... change a line of code and the program runs right.... 

I wrote immersion based on rats being intelligent and emotional beings that can feel and think.. And sure rats love treats, so do I, but I do things because I understand something, not just because I want a reward or to avoid pain... Sometimes I do something that I know will hurt because it has to be done because it's the right thing.. And sometimes I don't do things for the same reason.. If I knew I could kill my boss to get his job and get away with it, why shouldn't I? BM says I should... for the reward... But I wouldn't even think of it because I know I couldn't live in a world like that.

Yes.. in immersion we use rewards and sometimes even small punishments to communicate with our rats but it's all part of building understanding... I currently have two home safe rats, that don't chew wires and even stopped killing my plants because I communicated the rules of the household to them and they understand... They don't chew wires or kill my plants when I'm away even when they know they can get away with it... they just understand the rules and follow them. As a parent, I can testify that rewards work better than punishment, but both work if the child understands and neither work if the child doesn't. 

Trust training and even forced socialization can work if the person doing it guides their methods with the goal of communication and understanding and accounts for the emotional costs and benefits, but by definition PRO assumes that you are only concerned with quantifiable stimulus - response and that's very wrong... You wouldn't try and raise your kids without love or communication or understanding.... rather only with treats and zaps... or even less so with only treats and hugs. Get real... giving your kids candy for setting fire to your curtains or when they don't won't stop them from eventually burning down your house if they don't understand the drawbacks of homelessness.

So to be clear... I know BM and OC and there are useful techniques I borrow from time to time, I clearly prefer rewards to punishment on a 50 to 1 basis, but my methods are guided by the principle of communication with another sentient and emotional being and that's why immersion has such wonderful results.....

Immersion builds competent rats, we get true shoulder rats, and house safe rats and build life long relationships with our rats... it's not just a matter of building trust or stopping or encouraging a certain behavior... it's building a family unit or a mini society with mixed human and rat members... and it works.

I'm not a stimulus - response organism and neither are any of our rats... I won't be boiled down to a soulless, mindless, condition-able and programmable automaton... I think, I reason, I understand, I communicate and so do our rats... There's a lot to be learned from BM and OC... but without a guiding conscience and consciousness it's like sending a heard of elephants into a dark light-bulb factory and expecting them to turn on the lights. 

I'm not so much opposed to the methods of PRO as it's lack of philosophy and morality... If there are any psychology students out there, BM and OC is important to lean... but never drink their cool-aide! And never forget PRO is only the kinder gentler version of OC... it didn't grow a soul, when it stopped zapping rats to make them jump.... it just got more politically correct.


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## Rat Daddy (Sep 25, 2011)

I just wanted to address the concept of social order in rats... Rats and humans tend to build natural social hierarchies... it's the basis of social psychology now usually called group dynamics. For the most part immersion doesn't need to fix social order issues... Humans are bigger and hopefully smarter and rats tend to pick up cues from their "human parents" without any effort at all... It's a perfectly natural process that doesn't require any special technique on the part of the human... In fact during most immersions the human is more likely to have to show their rat that they aren't the big bad bear in the room... 99% of immersions are a love fest and not a gore fest....

But sometimes something goes terribly wrong... it's rare but it happens. Some humans are very passive and some rats are very aggressive... sometimes some humans are just very neglectful and leave their rats to work out social order on their own.... some rats are mistreated and/or learn to get their way through aggression...

Again to be clear... these are unusual cases, and a very small minority of the socialization issues we see....

But immersion is based on rats being intelligent and social beings... so sometimes we have to use communication to create an understanding of correct social order in our homes.... 

But how can this be explained? It's not easy... For most people, I like to say you would fix a rat social problem like you would address a child's social problem... what would you do if your kids started hitting, kicking and biting you? How would you restore social order to your family? So, perhaps... I might say you have to be the parent and set limits.... and then enforce them.

Some folks don't get the parent child analogy... so I might say that rats have a social order where an "alpha" rat takes the leadership role... so sometimes you have to be the alpha... I certainly don't mean dictator, or dominatrix or punisher... I mean you have to set and enforce the rules... A rat alpha isn't like a wolf alpha and not like a human alpha personality... there are differences and I don't mean to imply that one is equal to another... But as long as there is social structure, there is social hierarchy and that means there are leaders or loosely termed alpha's.. and in mixed rat and human families rats can't be the alpha.

I don't like extreme immersion... and I wrote the guide and I decided to include it, because it works and often it works when nothing else will. When faced with a social pathology, you need a social remediation.... And for the most part when rats become aggressive and start biting their humans, the situation is critical if not dire. There's a need for a fast and effective solution, even if it ruffles some PC feathers... The human has to communicate that he isn't a chew toy and socially he is in charge... sometimes this can go very quickly and sometimes this can get ugly, but the problem has to be fixed, biting rats don't make housepets.

If you watch how normal rats deal with social hierarchy, they do fight, one wins, the other submits, the first grooms the loser's belly and they go off to be the best of friends... no hard feelings.  It's a form of communication between rats. And if we observe our rats interact sometimes we do notice one is more dominant than the others and we call this rat the alpha... He or she might be a bit protective and tend to lead the other rats, like a parent, but certainly not like an alpha wolf or a human politician... 

Extreme immersion techniques at face value are the exact opposite of normal immersion, but they're based on communication and the rat being a social animal that can understand... 

Extreme immersion is not like punishment in terms of simply modifying behavior, it's part of a communication strategy that promotes understanding and family building... How's a baseball bat different from a war club? It's in how it's used and the philosophy behind it's purpose.


Immersion has nothing to do with dog training models of the last century that were based on behavior modification through fear of punishment or Alpha by pain infliction... Getting an animal to fear you is no trick, nor is a way to make any animal more competent or to gain love or trust....


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## moonkissed (Dec 26, 2011)

> I do feel like comparing rats to other animals in this case is different though. When we say trust training, its more like getting them used to us, not actually 'training' them like the way we train dogs or horses. It would make sense to compare training dogs to training rats to do a trick, but maybe not to trust training since most of the time when you 'train' dogs it is assumed that they are used to your presence and arent fearful of you.


Well when I used training it wasn't meant solely as like "sit" and "stay" lol but training towards any behavior issues. The same feelings of fear are there and that is the issue that needs to be dealt with. With dogs it isn't just the one cowering in the corner who has been abused, but actually many behavior issues result from things like fear. I do think we need to treat every animal uniquely as their species and as individuals but the same emotional issues are related and can be worked through in fairly the same way. I very much believe patience and positive reinforcement is key.




> What is your stance on immersion? From what you've said, it would be that immersion with curious, unfearful rat will be 'hanging out and bonding' while immersion with a fearful unsocialised rat would be categorized as forced socialisation.


In many of the circumstances immersion is forced socialization. Just a nicer name lol I am not a fan of it overall personally.

I also do not mean to be rude to anyone but anecdotal advice is lovely in thought but I question the experience it is coming from. Is it coming from someone who has had a lifetime of experience working with animals and rats? Have they had hands on experience working with fearful, timid, abused, neglected rats? Rescues? Has it come from scientific research or opinion? i can feed my rat a banana everyday & then have my rat live to be 5. Then go on to claim that bananas are magic and will make your rat immortal. lol My point is that I am not a fan of the whole anecdotal advice that is often given as fact...even more so when it has hefty claims. I want to know the whys and hows behind the claims.

I am NOT an expert myself. I am not a rat behaviorist  I do not have a lifetime of work with rats either. Rats are my passion, I am a breeder. I make it my goal to study and keep in contact with experts and learn from them. I do have a lifetime of experience with animals and training. All different species. I train dogs. I have alot of experience with cats and working with feral cats and taming kittens who have never been near a human before. i have worked with animals that had trauma, abuse, and needed to be handled gently. I have experience working with rescue rats and ones that have some severe issues. I am studying alot of scientific research done on rat behavior, mostly though how it relates to babies and growth. I try very hard to focus on my baby rats giving them all the most beneficial mental development I can. 

I want to make it clear I am not an expert or claiming to be  This is just my experience and opinions. I think no one should blindly follow advice, question stuff look into it yourself! Mostly my goal is to give people another perspective to consider.

That being said... I am finding MANY rescues who are hands on working with rats and many experts turning more to the trust training and positive reinforcement. That link I posted above is more likely to be shared in most rat groups I am in these days when people ask about bonding or working with fearful shy rats. 


I think definitely we should hang out with our new rats. I think in some cases immersion may take it too far. Rats are hands on interactive pets. I think often people treat them too much like a hamster. I would say if you brought a new kitten or puppy home how would you treat it that first day? Your rat should spend time with you for sure! But a new home, new smells, new everything is alot to take in. I wouldn't rush it or overwhelm it with everything at once. I don't think if you give a rat a day to adjust to the new home and smells and check its cage out that it will be detrimental to its bonding with you. 

I apologize if my post is not super clear. My head is kindof meh right now. I am dealing with one of my older boys being very sick and it is quite stressful and sad for me. So I hope I made sense!


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## Rat Daddy (Sep 25, 2011)

Most importantly Moonkissed, I hope your older boy is feeling better.


Otherwise, we actually agree on almost everything except PRO... Trust training techniques, forced socialization techniques and even BM techniques work with certain rats that have certain issues. Perhaps using the right technique with the right rat is what it all boils down to... But how we use these techniques and how we set our goals needs to be part of a unified philosophy.

For example if I were working with a very shy or fearful rat, I'd be patient and take it slow, I'd still do long sessions, but I wouldn't force myself on the rat beyond him or her knowing I was there and interested in being his friend and a safe someone to interact with... Yes, I'd be engaging, but not overwhelming.... It might sound a bit like trust training, but the technique is being used within the philosophy of immersion's engagement to promote communication and understanding. If I were teaching a rat to spin for a treat, I would use OC and reward the rat for close enough behaviors until they got it and reward the final spinning behavior... but then again I see this as bargaining, if you spin for me, I'll give you a treat and mostly I would make sure the rat knew how proud and happy I was that we were working together... it might be an OC technique, but it fits perfectly under the umbrella of immersion when done in context of the human - rat relationship.

The problem with OC and BM is that it's based entirely on a foundation of "empirical science" If you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist. You can't quantify love, you can't quantify emotions, you can't quantify personality... so in OC and/or BM these concepts are simply discarded... Technically you can't quantify fear either.... so the strictest behavioral scientists consider fear as a learned behavior.... perhaps in part true and perhaps it's part of a larger emotional gestalt.

Behavioral science pretty much considers, love fear and other emotions as learned behaviors. They assume we are nothing more than an organism that reacts to stimulus. Fix the input and you fix the output. As I mentioned, a personal friend of mine worked on a project to "fix" homosexuals through OC... and she's still a professor today and likely still teaching OC and BM methods and strategies. The fact is that behaviorism didn't work... yes, it can modify certain behaviors, but it has it's limits.... 

Now, PRO is a just kinder and gentler form of OC... they don't use electric shocks any more but their philosophy didn't grow a heart... They are still trying to fix the same problems with only half their bag of tricks. And this doesn't make their approach more successful, just more PC....

Immersion has a huge tool box... all of the tools from trust training, BM and OC, and even some of the better parts of forced socialization... And we certainly all agree that rewards are better than punishment... but immersion has a philosophy based on rats and humans being thinking animals that can understand and feel... We don't think of ourselves or our rats as stimulus-response organisms. We are sentient beings working with other sentient beings. So it's more than just a technique it's a construct system.

I honestly don't think I wasted 4 years in college studying BM and OC. There was a lot to learn and much of the science was good... but I also learned behaviorism has limits and PRO has even more limits without it's non PC counterparts.

No one has to throw away the science or any of the studies or reject their personal experiences to do immersion. They just have to accept that they are working with thinking, feeling and social animals. And that there is a philosophy behind applying the appropriate techniques to the appropriate situations. People who do immersion build relationships through communication and understanding and they foster competence in their rats through techniques of family building. 

Immersion doesn't reject the science, it simply builds on it... However it does reject the behaviorist philosophy. We can toss out the bathwater and still keep the baby.

If someone can't see their rats as communicating, thinking and understanding animals with feelings and the need to be a part of a family structure they can't understand immersion, they get stuck with OC or it's stepchild PRO... But once they embrace who they are and who their rats are, immersion becomes second nature.

I think "rat whisperers" or animal whisperers have always known that their animals were thinking and feeling beings, I think they always applied a philosophy of communication and understanding with their animal friends... As a concept, I don't think immersion is entirely new... but as a strategy based on an underlying philosophy on how to apply techniques I think it's a giant leap forward from BM or OC.


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## Isamurat (Jul 27, 2012)

I’m very much a fan of pushing rats beyond there comfort zone, I don’t count this as the extreme description of forced socialisation you describe, but it’s probably a lot stronger than you would recommend. However I do believe that each rat varies a lot and what will work for them is different. I tend to be very hands on with my new rats and take a dominant role in our relationship from early on, however I don’t believe in pushing a rat into a point where it is so defensive it feels forced to bite or where it freezes (sometimes called flooding) that achieves nothing but teaching it bad behaviours or avoidance. 

To me there are 2 main approaches to rats, in the first you initiate the contact, taking the lead role and guiding the rat to the right behaviour. This doesn’t mean using negative reinforcement, it means pushing them slightly outside there comfort zone and then giving them time to adapt and realise it’s not bad and actually kind of good. IN the second you allow the rat to intiate to contact, so it goes at the rats pace, you taking a more passive role in the arrangement. Neither are wrong and some suit different owners, but I would say for most rats initiating the contact is faster, especially where your dealing with poorly bred rats with little or no socialisation. 

I think its easy to see these things are black and white, Forced socialisation is a poor description for the first approach (I sometimes call it pushing boundaries, or human led socialisation), trust training sounds much nicer but is also misleading as I think there’s a lot of trust training done in any method, you just go about it a slightly different way.

I can think of many rats who’ve had serious behavioural problems that have meant they’ve not easily been able to snap out of the fearful and defensive state of mind on their own, and others that have reacted badly to being “cornered” and given no choice. I think rather than focusing on the methods being inherently wrong we can come up with a list of definite “No’s”

For me they are;

•	A rat who is frozen isn’t learning anything, there’s no point pushing your rat into this state, even given time to relax they generally won’t be taking things in
•	A rat who is defensive to the point of avoidance (kind of a step before frozen) needs a safety zone to avoid the frozen behaviour, this could be a carrier, a safe hammock in the cage, a jumper to burrow into etc.
•	Don’t ever resort to hurting the rat, especially if it has bitten you out of fear, this will make things a lot worse. Holding them firmly if they’ve acted out of aggression is different, however hitting them or flipping them is counterproductive and can make things worse.
•	If a rat is getting worse after trying a method of a good while assume it’s not the right method for the rat and try something new . There is no 100% right way for any rat

To emphasise this a couple of very different rats socialisation stories;

Podge – this was the rat that go me started on rat behaviour, I think I was 15 at the time and whilst I’d had rats for a good 10 years at that point I was only really beginning to think about why they behaved in certain ways. Podge was an adult rescue from friends on the family who had got them for kids pets without wanting the rats for themselves too. Podge and her sister were soon forgotten by the kids and very much unsocialised, Podge’s sister Peggy then died and she became very withdrawn. She came to me as they were moving house and I was looking for new rats. When she came she was in a tank with the floor entirely covered in food, clearly poured into the top with no interaction. I introduced her to a proper cage with 3 little babies as friends. She adored them but was very warey of me, obviously having been handled roughly in the past by the kids. She quickly became very protective of the kittens and would outright attack me when I put my hand in the cage, a first for me as I’ve always had a knack with animals and getting them to trust me. It got so bad my mum threatened to have her put to sleep (I had several very nasty bites). I had to think quickly and didn’t have any reading to use as back up, back then rats were not popular pets and the internet didn’t exist. At first I tried being very slow, letting her come up to me etc. The trouble was she’d been along for so long she didn’t see the point in humans and was actively trying to keep the curious babies away from me, she didn’t see why she should change so she wasn’t going to initiate contact (unless it was with her teeth). So I tried a different approach, I put some gloves on (my mum had informed me if I got bitten again she was out) and started to push things. I would spend a few minutes making ti clear I was there, moving around in her cage, saying hello to the kittens, moving things around etc. At some point she would charge and go to bite, so I would pick her up firmly and say no, then put her back and pick up where I’d left off. After a couple of weeks of a good 30-60 mins a day of this she stopped attacking me and just ignored me. I then moved to approaching her, not going to stroke, at first it was just a brush past, later it evolved into me resting my hand in the nest, again she went to bite and she was firmly told no. Eventually she started to accept my presence in her cage and around her, so I switched to picking her up. To me this is very important, rats need time out of the cage and to do this safely it involves picking them up safely, so I pushed it with this. She didn’t like it at first, but soon learnt that it was only for a short time, then it built up, then it got ended with a quick scritch. Soon she was seeking me out, I’d removed the gloves some time before and not had any issues. By the end of her life she was besotted with me, she would try and carry my hand around by its scruff (that bit of skin between your thumb and hand) and spend ages grooming me. Once she’d been pushed past her belief humans were only there to hurt or scare her she was one of the most affectionate rats I’ve had.

The next rat is Skally, she is still with me and a rat I took on from a more traditional breeder over here. She was a retired breeding rat, having had a couple of litters then settling in a home with fewer rats for a bit of extra attention. She’d been kept predominantly in hutches so wasn’t used to the openness of cages, nor the kind of regular handling that mine expect (or demand). She got on immediately with my rats but very much distrusted me. I started out as usual, my guys love scritches in there hammocks or pile out to the front, everyone gets held and checked over first thing. This freaked her out, a human hand approaching her in the scary new cage really wasn’t welcome. She bit me a few times, though very much warning fear bites rather than ones intended to do damage. I persevered with my normal pick up and tell off when she did this but she was getting more tense and defensive and I saw signs that she was starting to get flooded. So I had a rethink. I designated a hammock in her cage as a safe hammock, if she retreated to this I left her alone, if she wasn’t in this she was fare game. The rules were simple and she learnt them quickly. I then combined it with food (she is very food motivated), she only got a treat if out of the hammock, but she would get stroked if she came out. It took a couple of weeks but at that point she was infinitely better if still a bit tense. I then removed her safety hammock. 5 months on she’s very close to me, she pines when I’m away and whilst shes not in your face like my home bred lot she is very much bonded with me, no less than my 2 who’ve had litters with me and like to fling themselves in my face. She took a different approach but it worked.


I’m interested on where you stand on things like not having hiding places in cages for youngsters (something mine don’t get until there a good 4-5 months.


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