Thinking about adopting two rats!

I have been wanting rats for quite awhile. I was tempted to take a pair home from Rodent Fest but honestly we weren't going to have any room in the car!

I saw a listing on Craigslist yesterday and decided to inquire:
http://westernmass.craigslist.org/pet/3076563654.html

I'll be getting two rats on Saturday! There are two girls and the rest are boys- I initially told the person I wanted the two girls because they don't smell as bad as the boys do, but I much prefer the cuddly personality of boys. Do boys really smell that much worse than girls? (Do they smell anything like male mice, a scent with which I have zero issue?).

Either way, I'm hoping to get a hooded blue baby! I'm quite excited

....This would bring my animal count close to 50 though. I'm not used to that number!

Congrats, very cute! I actually find that male mice tend to smell more than my male rats. I've got 11 rats (3 males) in one room in my house and the smell is not offensive. The boys don't smell a whole lot worse than the females (in my opinion), but they do scent mark more. My boys are way more laid back than my busy bee girls!

I always kept males, but other members of my household kept females. The males smell different, not really worse. That said, I grew up in a house that bred ferrets, so rodent smell is really not "bad" to me. Buck rats smell somewhere between really salty faux-buttery popcorn and slightly overcooked muffins, to me. They were always snuggle-butts, and lived rather a bit longer than their tumor-prone sisters and girlfriends.

If you have no trouble with the buck mice, you CERTAINLY won't have problems with male ratties. My bucks now have a much stronger smell than my buck rats ever did.

Laigaie wrote:Buck rats smell somewhere between really salty faux-buttery popcorn and slightly overcooked muffins, to me.

I just want to say that this description is hilarious to me.

I had three very large male rats as pets once, and as long as the bedding is changed somewhat regularly, I didn't have trouble with the smell at all. I think male mice smell worse! Enjoy your new babies.

Laigaie wrote:
If you have no trouble with the buck mice, you CERTAINLY won't have problems with male ratties. My bucks now have a much stronger smell than my buck rats ever did.

That's quite a relief!

I'm much more a fan of the laid back cuddly type than the busy bee type as well. I'm sure this will go well! Thank you everyone for your input!

Congrats and good luck!!!!

Let me put it this way - rats are the ONLY rodent my father's nose will tolerate, haha. I really did not notice much of a difference at all with male vs female smell. I also find it hard to generalize what to expect from each gender as I had lazy, sleepy females and males who were trapeze artists. Two of my females marked, few of my males did. With rats I really feel the individual personalities are more obvious than with mice. This is also why I tend to adopt when they're fully grown. I've never had an aggressive rat (that wasn't sick and died as a teenager!), but I do notice a variability with how they interact with me. Either wanting to play and explore or sleeping on my lap.

Enjoy your rats! I really miss them.

The rats are here! I'll upload photos a little later.

It was an eventful meet-up. I met the person with the litter of rats at a park and ride. Being a complete idiot, as I'm looking at the rats to pick mine out, I set the only black hooded one in the group down on top of the crate so I could check out another one. It took two seconds for him to jump off onto the concrete and disappear. After about an hour of searching, we gave up and figured he had gone into the field of grass that was a few feet from the car even though we hadn't seen him enter that area (he disappeared somewhere under the car).

I was about to take three with me and even drove away when I get a call that they had caught the missing rat- he was under a car across the parking lot.

I returned and (since I only wanted to rats to start with) gave them two of the ones I had back and left with the first boy I had picked up (blue hooded) and the black hooded escapee. The blue boy is now Jester and the black boy is Mayhem

Wow eventful indeed. Glad they were able to find Mayhem and all is well.

Onoes! I do hope he's doing alright after his scamper.