Rats were domesticated and tamed back in the Middle Ages. Decorative individuals first appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, these pets have enjoyed great popularity. Rats are very smart and quick-witted. They are cunning, they have an excellent memory.
Sometimes their behavior attracts the attention of even skeptical people. Just look at the pictures of decorative rats, aren't they cute?
Array
What diseases do these animals carry?
Perhaps most of all, gray rats are dangerous because they are carriers of various infectious diseases in humans.
The most terrible plague epidemics in Europe in the Middle Ages, which claimed millions of human lives (according to historians, a sixth of the population of Europe died out from them), arose precisely because of rats.
Fleas parasitizing on rodents are carriers of the plague bacillus, and when rats settle in houses, these insects actively attack a person and bite him, infecting him with a disease. Moreover, this danger persists today: in many settlements of gophers and gerbils - natural reservoirs of plague - there are also pasiuk, capable of carrying the causative agent of the disease into settlements.
It is interesting
Black rats are more likely to carry the plague, but it was the pasuk that played a major role in the spread of epidemics due to their greater numbers.
In addition to the plague, Pasyuk also carry several deadly diseases:
- Cryptosporidiosis;
- Q fever;
- Typhus;
- Leptospirosis;
- Pseudotuberculosis;
- Sodoku;
- Brucellosis;
- Trichinosis.
Also, most gray rats are infected with helminths, and if food is spoiled with their excrement, there is a high risk of transmitting parasites to humans. In particular, two types of tapeworms, parasitizing on the pike, are dangerous to humans.
Content rules
Keeping decorative rats does not require any special wisdom. The main thing to do is to get a spacious cage.
Animals love to move, so they need space. The cage must be equipped with:
- filler - dry wood would be ideal (it absorbs odors and liquids well);
- a house - a rat sometimes needs solitude;
- tunnels and ladders - pets will definitely want to play and run;
- drinker with fresh and clean water;
- a feeder well fixed to the rods;
- mineral stone so that animals can chew on it.
For decorative rats, it is strictly forbidden to use coniferous filler. It can cause serious illness and even death.
You can complement the design of the cage with various toys and treats for rodents.
Rodent appearance
The general appearance of the animal is known to everyone: the gray rat is a medium-sized rodent, while of all rats in Russia it is the largest. Only ground squirrels, marmots, beavers, nutria and other rodents that are not rats are larger than it.
In length, the animal reaches about 19-24 cm, the length of the tail is 12-19 cm. It is noteworthy that the tail of the gray rat is never longer than the body, which is one of the differences between it and the black rat.
Photo of a large gray rat:
The color of the pike's coat is usually not completely gray, but brownish, although young rat pups are exactly gray, and as they grow older, they develop a reddish color.The abdomen of the animal is light, almost white. Very rarely - in about one animal in 1500-2000 - pure black individuals are found. However, despite their coloration, in terms of species, they continue to be typical gray rats.
On a note
In the fur of the pike, there are a large number of guard hairs, which are longer than all the others. Therefore, gray rats often look somewhat disheveled and "untidy" (like dirty).
In the picture - a gray rat at a meal:
The rat's tail is an object of disgust for many aesthetes. It is naked, covered with sparse, short, transparent hairs and a rough epidermis that resembles scales.
Gray rats quite easily differ from their relatives, with whom they live together in different parts of the range. For example:
- A reliable species identification of gray and black rats is carried out by measuring the mass and size of the body, as well as the length of the tail: the pasuk is larger, heavier, its tail is always shorter than the body. The appearance of the animal is also evaluated - the black rat has larger eyes and ears, the muzzle is elongated, and the tail is more “fluffy”. Experts also know how to distinguish between these types of skeletal features. For example, in the Pasyuk, the parietal crests of the skull are fairly straight, while in the black rat they are strongly curved. It is noteworthy that there are light populations of black rats, whose representatives are very similar in color to their gray counterparts;
- The Pasyuk differs from the Turkestan rat in coarser fur and large size.
The photo below shows a gray rat:
And here - black:
And the very appearance of the gray rat is heterogeneous. At least two of its subspecies are distinguished - Rattus norvegicus caraco, indigenous, smaller, distributed in Transbaikalia, the Far East, Mongolia, Korea and Eastern China. And the main one is Rattus norvegicus norvegicus, found in all other parts of the range.
Interestingly, the Latin name for the gray rat is the result of a scientific error. This species was described by the British zoologist John Berkenhout, who noticed that most of the Pasyukov were in port cities. He decided that the animals sailed to England on ships from Norway, and suggested that it was in Norway that their natural habitat was located.
As a result, he gave the animals the specific epithet "norvegicus". The irony is that, in reality, at that time, gray rats had not yet penetrated into Norway, and most likely they came to England from Denmark.
Nevertheless, the subspecies that have spread throughout the world is named with the same epithet, because it was he who was described for the first time, for science it is nominative, and traditionally its subspecies name duplicates the species name. Such a forced double mistake ...
On a note
Today, taxonomy scientists believe that domestic and laboratory rats have developed enough specific features to distinguish them into a separate subspecies.
On agricultural lands in Russia, the gray rat can be confused with some other animals. Most often, the water vole is mistaken for it - a rodent of the hamster family, which really looks like a hamster in color and body size. But the water vole has shorter legs, and the head is even more massive and less elongated.
Photo of a water vole:
And for comparison - a gray rat:
In northern regions, rats (especially young ones) are sometimes confused with voles or lemmings. On closer inspection, such errors are quickly discovered: rats are usually larger, have a slender body and a longer tail.
The errors themselves are due to the fact that the animals are noticed out of the corner of the eye when they make their way in the grass or quickly hide in holes. In addition, the further north you go, the less often representatives of this species are found outside human habitation, which means that an animal caught somewhere in the taiga is most likely not a rat.
Feeding
Would you like to know what to feed a decorative rat? Everything is quite simple, especially since pets are unpretentious in food.
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The rat menu should consist of:
Cereals. Experienced owners prepare and select the ingredients for feeding themselves. A ready-made cereal mixture can be purchased at almost any pet store.
Protein food. A little meat, cottage cheese or cheese. These foods are not for your daily diet.
A list of foods that should not be given to rodents: sweets, legumes, cabbage, sausage, soda, and chips. Make sure that the pet does not eat houseplants, this can be dangerous to his life.
Reproduction and life expectancy
Many rats reproduce throughout the year. The peak of animal reproduction is in the spring and summer. The most prolific are the Gray Pike.
Female rats mate with 5-6 males. The offspring hatch from 22 to 34 days. A rat brood usually numbers up to 10 individuals, but sometimes their number increases to 20. It has been noticed that basement rats are the most fertile.
Newborn rats do not have fur, with the exception of black-tailed (“rabbit”) rats, which are born fluffy. Males do not look after offspring.
Attention! Rats are cannibals: the mother can eat sick or dead cubs, and the father is able to destroy the babies simply by getting hungry.
The female carefully looks after healthy rat pups, feeds them with nutritious milk. Monthly cubs are already completely independent. They reach sexual maturity in 90 days. A rare rat lives up to 2 years, most of them (about 90%) die in the first few weeks of life.
Photos of decorative rats
In vivo
In the wild, gray rodents choose places near water bodies. They like areas with soft soil, in which you can easily dig a hole up to 5 m long.If liquid from a reservoir floods a rat hole, the animal moves to the nearest hollow or builds a temporary nest in a tree. Under natural conditions, an adult individual attacks any creature that is smaller in size.
Usually rodents live in large colonies, attacking anyone who invades their territory. The division into "friends" and "aliens" is due to the smell, since all members of the rat colony maintain close contact with each other.
Fighting rats is hard enough. All traps, mouse traps and other tricks invented by a person are not always effective. If one of the individuals dies in a trap, then she informs the whole group of animals about the danger and the next time no one will fall for this trick. The same thing happens with the poison: the rats remember the bait from which one of the relatives died, and will bypass it. Rats do harm not only by eating and spoiling other people's food supplies. These animals also gnaw on various building materials, electrical cables, etc.
The teeth of these mammals grow throughout their life, and in order to avoid pressing the bone processes into the jaw, these animals gnaw everything in their path. Rats are able to destroy even materials with low hardness, such as copper, lead, tin and their alloys. According to preliminary estimates, there are almost 2 times more rats living on the planet than people.
Lifestyle
Common rats are crepuscular. Active from 7 pm to 8 am, the maximum peak occurs at 20-22 hours.
They can crawl out of their shelters in the daytime, if necessary. Live in groups or colonies, aggressively guarding their territory from outsiders.
Recognizes the members of the flock by smell. In nature for them serve as shelters: burrows, tree stumps, snags, ruined nests. In the city, they often live in garbage dumps, dumps, basements, sewers.
They eat plant foods, fish and meat, grain, any food waste.
Many animals will envy the stamina and vitality of the pike. They have high adaptive capabilities, flexibility of mind, excellent diving and swimming, jumping up to 80 cm, when moving around the territory they reach a speed of 10-12 km / h.
