Books/Animal Neighbours - Rat

Author: Stephen Savage
ISBN: 978-0-7502-5083-2

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2009-07-05 17:20:25   This book is a real missed opportunity, with some glaring errors too unless pet rats have changed very dramatically since domestication. It has them opening their eyes at one week, rather than the two weeks we're used to with pet rats, and states that the babies are completely weaned at three weeks old, whereas I'm used to babies still feeding occasionally at five weeks. Another mis-statement is that a doe will only mate with the dominant male in the pack - does will mate with any male that can catch them, and usually mate with several bucks! It gives an age of 11 weeks for the onset of breeding age, which could cause pet owners to leave their litters together for too long, as domesticated rats have been known to become pregnant at less than six weeks. Some of the photos of black rats are not labelled as such, which makes me wonder if some of these statistics also apply to black rats rather than Norway rats?

Having said that, I did enjoy reading the book. There are a lot of lovely photos of supposedly wild rats - it made an amusing game to try and work out which were taken in a studio, and which might be genuinely wild rats. —AnnetteRand