The rats got a bit of remodeling recently.
Georgie and Lucy have been living for the past month in Blaze’s 30 gallon aquarium. The tank was plenty of room for goldfish training. However, it’s a bit cramped quarter for two young rats who seem to enjoy quite a bit of rough housing and racing about.
I found these neat aquarium cage toppers online and decided it would be perfect for them. The cage toppers come in a variety of sizes and fit directly over an aquarium. So far they seem very pleased with their new quarters! There was quite a bit of scurrying around and noise the first few nights. That’s one downside to having rats–the goldfish never kept me up at night with his antics!
Rat potty training has been great so far. I have a wooden pan in the bottom of the cage that I put paper bedding in. It took them a little while to figure it out. However, now they do their business in the litter box about 95% of the time. Makes cleaning the cage A LOT easier and we don’t go through bedding quite as fast.
I haven’t done that much training with them yet. Well, there have been a few attempts, but not much success yet! Lucy was pretty terrified of people at first. She’s starting to be much more comfortable with being picked up and handled, but we haven’t really tried any clicker training yet.
Georgie is a little bit too gregarious and out going–she does not stop moving! I was having trouble at first with training because I didn’t have an effective enough reward and I didn’t have a way to contain her. She kept leaving training sessions because something across the room would catch her interest!
I’ve found a few treats that they really like, so hopefully in the next week or so we’ll start getting serious about rat training. Be on the look out for some rat training videos!
makes me relive my childhood with my guinea pigs! Oh man did I make them some elaborate habitats. I even had my dad build them an outdoor cage so I could take them “grazing” in the summer.
I guess I was destined to be a “trick trainer” too because I used to try to coax my “pigs” over my breyer horse jumps with the promise of carrots. I even made them mazes in the back yard out of old bricks for the sides. I would time how long it took them to find the treat.
the litter pan idea is awesome! I wonder if that would have worked on guinea pigs too? My mom would of been thrilled – especially had we used it when playing our favorite game of hide & seek with the pigs in the living room….after we ultimately always found them since they inevitably left a trail of droppings behind. 🙂
LOL. we use to build mazes for the gerbils and for my friend’s rats growing up.
I know zilch about guinea pigs, but I assume they could probably be litter box trained?
The rats were fairly easy–I just stuck a pan of bedding in the area they were using the most. Then for the next week or so I would daily removed any poop that didn’t make it in the box. Apparently rats like to be neat, because they figured it out within about a week or two.
Mary
Cool I like that extension. I did not know they made those. Very nice.
I feel for you on the treats. That was the most frustrating thing with Chrome when I got him because he did not like anything (now he eats everything lol). I hope the new treats work out. 🙂
They like most foods, the problem has been finding something that is easy for me to give them in small pieces and that isn’t messy and doesn’t take long for them to eat.
Right now I’m using 1/2 of a chocolate rice krispy. These seem to be working GREAT!
Mary