Your rat will eat everything you eat. If you give your food to your rattie, you will end up with a very fat rattie in record time. Ratties tend to get fat very easily and therefore, strict discipline is necessary if you want to have a healthy, fit rattie.

Clivia used to give me "Rattenhauptfutter" (rattie main food) by Vitakraft as a basic diet. It contains wheat, corn, peas, beans, soy, some dried poultry meat (4%), vitamins and mineral salts. However, she all of a sudden switched to a more healthy diet, Debbie Ducommun's molasses mix! Basically it's a mix of sunflower seeds, oatmeal, barley flakes, cooked brown rice, wheat germ, yeast flakes, calcium, chromium picolinate and molasses. The recipe for this is available under: (to be completed soon...)

Anyway, I know Clivia cares about my health and does not put me on a diet to punish me for eating her phone cable numerous times.

Btw, ratties also like to eat rice (cooked and raw), pasta (cooked and raw) and potatoes (cooked). It's a welcome variation to the grains.

Next to the basic diet I get raw vegetables (peas, beans, corn, carrots, broccoli etc.) and fruit (banana are my favorite, but I also eat kiwi, apple, strawberries and pears). Be careful with green salad. It usually tastes like there's some heavy chemicals inside (nitrates!), no good for ratties!

Food for shortening the ever-growing teeth: hard bread, cold hard toast, nuts in the shell, raw pasta.

Now we come to my favorite topic: treats!

My alltime favorite treats are Vitakraft Yoghurt Drops. Never known a rattie who does not kill for them. Other treats are cheese, sunflower seeds, some milk, nuts. Sometimes I snatch something that Clivia is eating, like pizza, croissants or my favorite people food, Kelloggs Smacks! This is rare tho, because Clivia has become wary of my attacks and practically never eats when I'm out of the cage.

In Switzerland you cannot buy a rattie cage. Clivia has bought me a rabbit cage, it's measurements are:

length: 97 cm / width: 47 cm / depth: 50 cm

Oooh, come to think of it, I have had a picture taken of my cage. Wanna see it? Click on the little house above!

I have a few toys in my cage, ladders, paper rolls, a huge chunk of wood. And I have a little balcony where I enjoy to sit and relax. I even have a little plastic sleep-house, where I can build my little nest with tissues and hay. (I had a wooden house first, but unfortunately it became very smelly after a while.) My house is small and crammed, I love it that way. I've heard of rats who live in Kleenex boxes. In my cage, I also find a ceramic bowl for my food and a glass water-dripper for my fresh water.

Bedding: Clivia has bought me some hamster bedding first. It smelled aromatically of wood and made me sneeze like a mad-rat. Clivia learnt in the rattie group that the cedar wood chips are very bad for ratties and since then she buys Vitakraft "Farmers", a bedding made of granulated straw, fun to play with and dust free. She also gives me some cat litter for my toilet corner, I love to dig in the litter. So I would no longer need to dig up her plants. Not that I stopped.

I sleep on cannabis straw, a very soft and almost dustfree nesting material. I used to sleep on hay, but Clivia got concerned about mites...I cover my nest with soft household paper or toilet paper, so it makes a warm nest.

Clivia cleans the cage every day, taking out the newspaper under my house and in the toilet corner and removing the soiled bedding. She takes out all the bedding and washes the lower part of the cage and my plastic house every week with hot water. So I always have a neat, clean home *smile*. It is very important that ratties have a clean home, they are less apt to fall ill and catch evil respiratory diseases like mycoplasma.

Rats love to play and I am no exception! I am a fierce chaser of hands and fingers, love to climb the bookcase, the computer table, the wardrobe and screaming humans. Also, I am a great explorer and can sniff every single thread of the carpet if the mood gets me. My ancesters must have been hunters and gatherers, I gather whatever I can and carry it to my secret hiding place on the bookshelves. The other day I gathered socks, many paper table napkins and some jewelery from Clivia's always open jewelery box.

Do you know the kleenex tissue boxes? Gimme one of those and I am busy for hours. I will tear out every single kleenex and carry it to my secret hiding place. Then I will chew the kleenex and make a nice nest for me. Unfortunately, Clivia cleans behind the bookshelves twice a week, so I often have to build new nests and store new treasures.

I have discovered another great game. Clivia bought some almonds in the shell, and she could not open the darn things! So she gave them to me. I carry them from a bowl to my secret hiding place on the third and second level of the bookcase. It's great fun! I do this up to 50 times! The next day, Clivia brings me a bowl of new almonds. Altho I gotta say, they smell suspiciously the same as the almonds from the day before. Could it be... are they the same? Who knows, I have no time for pondering, need to carry some more almonds...

I also love to play with the bedsheets. They need redecoration ever so often and I gnaw little interesting patterns into them. Alas - nobody really appreciates my efforts. True artists are doomed to suffer ignorance. Same thing happens when I sculpt wood (bookcases), strip off the wallpaper to reveal a lovely shade of gray wall, and help the plants get more air by removing the earth out of their pots.

Many people seem to dislike my intense liking of rubber. Whenever I get my paws on shoes, the rubber soles will get eaten. Has nobody discovered that this stuff is delicious? Same goes for bandaids and rubber gloves. And I just love cables. Unfortunately Clivia has proceeded to put all the available cables into black, strong garden tubing. Now I cannot gnaw without being heard and - lo, she comes running and takes me away from the cable. Earlier, Clivia has always bought new cables for me. I especially liked the modem and the phone cable.

Well, well, my stories will continue another day... me seems, I am a little tired *yawn* (to be continued)