I was at my friend's house today. Her place is the sort of house where every time you're there you end up in a situation so ludicrous you never imagined it happening. Today's strange event was definitely exciting, but mostly sad.
It had reached the point in the day when my friend began to
feed her animals. Though she lives in the suburbs, she has many, many more
animals than the average person. Primarily, she has rats. She loves rats more
than any other living thing, and she makes a bit of money breeding them. She
has more than thirty rats, and they are scattered in cages all over the house.
Most are in one of two cages, the boy cage or the girl cage (color themed,
because it’s stylish), but others are housed elsewhere because they are new,
they are moms with babies, they are sick, or they are too vulnerable, like her
completely hairless rat, Ruguru.
We had just started the feed the rats, and my
friend was checking up on the newest mother and her three week old babies, when
she found that the mother was gone. After a few seconds of searching, we found
the mother in a dirty laundry basket along with a baby. This made us a bit nervous,
as neither of us had considered that any of the babies would be out, and after doing a headcount we found that we
were missing two of the eleven babies. Me, my friend, and my friend’s mother
searched the entire room. The cats had been in the room overnight, and we
thought that one of them would definitely eat baby rats if given the chance.
The only thing we couldn’t understand was the complete lack of blood or hair.
After roughly half an hour, my friend’s mom saw something red in the bedding of
another rat cage. I opened the cage and pulled it out and found that I was
holding a leg. I gingerly put it down amidst horrified cries, and searched
through the rest of the bedding. I found the rest of the poor little guy a few
seconds later. He had been practically skeletonized, only some fur and a little
bit of flesh remained.
My friend took his remains away, and I checked out the
two rats who were inside the cage. They were the picture of innocence, running
about and pressing against the bars, all excited to see me. I had trouble
believing that they would have done something so horrible, but I don’t think
rats think of things like eating babies in the same way that humans do. I
looked closely at the two happy rats, and I found blood on their paws and
whiskers. Case closed I suppose.
There was still one more baby rat missing, and
we looked around for another twenty minutes. No sign. My friend started
cleaning other cages while we searched, and I looked around for any other place
we hadn’t checked yet. My friend went outside to clean something and I walked
to one corner of the room to see what she was doing. I looked down at a roll of
chicken wire that was standing up in front of me.
Lo and behold, the other baby
rat was squeezed into it, her eyes were HUGE, and she was absolutely frozen. I
reached into the chicken wire on either side of her, put my hands together
under her so she couldn’t run further down, and drew her up. She didn’t
struggle at all, and I could cup her furry cotton ball sized body in one hand.
I lifted her up over my head and made excited squeaking sounds at my friend.
She looked up and came running inside, where she took the baby from me and kissed
and snuggled her.
We delivered her carefully back to her mom, and moved them all
to a smaller cage so they couldn’t get out again. For the rest of the day I
told everyone about finding the living baby rat, I felt like a hero. Well, I
still do actually, and now I’m writing this on the Internet so MORE people can read
about it. So I suppose I feel the same, it makes me happy when I can save an
animal, I wish we could have found them both before the Cannibal Twins had
gotten the other one, but at least one survived. She’s back with her family
now, hopefully not too traumatized, and she should go on to live a good and
happy life.
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