Commentary: Rehome, Adopt, Rescue, Purchase

I recently took part in a discussion on an avicultural forum that relates to the way we acquire animals. There are a number of terms being used in this discussion and they are terms that are often used incorrectly. These terms are rehome, adopt, rescue, and purchase. The following are my interpretations of what these terms mean, when they are appropriate, and why they should be used in this way.

Rehome
You rehome an animal when you are no longer able to or no longer want to care for it, but you don't want to surrender it to a shelter. You instead want to find the new home yourself. Your goal is solely to find a new home for the animal to live out its life. Money is not the focus of the exchange. Idealistically, no money changes hands as the sole purpose is to find a good home for the animal. Realistically, a "rehoming" fee is often charged - not to recoup expenses or to make a profit from the exchange, but just to make sure the new owners are serious about caring for the pet and, in the case of rats, are not intending to use them as free snake food. This fee is advertised, but is often not collected if the prospective owner can establish that they are a qualified pet owner and can assure the original owner of the intentions of caring for the animal properly.

Rehome is starting to be used improperly, likely due to the requirements of websites such as Craigslist. Craigslist does not allow for the sale of animals outright. Craigslist does allow advertisements for rehoming of animals and they allow for a rehoming fee. Because of this, breeders are starting to advertise their animals as having a "rehoming fee" instead of a price. Technically, they are selling their animals against the rules of Craigslist and taking liberties with terminology to slide under the radar.

It is important that this terminology shift not gain ground. Breeders of animals should claim to sell their animals for a price, and not claim to rehome them for a rehoming fee. When you breed an animal with the intent to sell, you are not rehoming a pet you can no longer care for. You are selling offspring you bred for that specific purpose.

Adopt

You adopt animals from a rescue or shelter. You do not adopt from an owner rehoming an animal or from a breeder selling animals. Adoptions occur when a third party organization steps in between an original owner and the new owners, taking the animal in, providing medical care, and going to great lengths to find the right home for the new animal. 

Adoptions usually include an adoption fee. This fee helps keep the shelter in business, paying for some of the costs and vet bills associated with the animal. It also ensures that the owners are committed to caring for the new pet and will look at it as something with value, and not something that is disposable. The adoption fee is often mislabeled as a rehoming fee.

When you adopt an animal, you are usually not free to then sell that animal or rehome it. The animal must be turned back over to the adopting agency. This rule exists for many reasons. First, adoption agencies want to make sure that any animal in their care ends up in a good home for life. Second, sometimes rare, expensive animals find their way into rescues. Rescues charge an adoption fee that tries to cover some of their expenses, but it is not based on the rarity or value of the specific animal on the free market. Thus, sometimes, animals can be adopted cheaply from a rescue, and then turned around and sold for a profit, with no regard to the qualifications of the new owner. This is obviously not in the best interest of the animal and thus, rescues want to prevent this from happening.

Therefore, it is important to use the term adoption properly, as the term implies not only taking in an animal that needed a home, but also a loss of some of your rights as a pet owner. When you adopt an animal, you lose the ownership right to sell that animal or even rehome it.

Nonetheless, people often use this term incorrectly. People do not want to think of acquiring their animals as a business transaction and thus are starting to trend toward the term "adopt" rather than "purchase" or "buy." So, it is not uncommon to hear someone say that they have adopted their animal from a breeder or from a pet store. They did not. They purchased their pet. Unless, of course, the pet store adopted out the animal through an animal rescue program that did not require a fee going to the pet store itself (Petco sometimes has animal adoptions available - our Casper was adopted through the Illinois Doberman Rescue and Petco).

Breeders have picked up on this and have followed in the footsteps of rescues, calling their sales "adoptions." They have made up "adoption" applications for people interested in purchasing their animals. While the application process is a good idea, this is not an adoption. This is the sale of an animal and and such documents would be more correctly called a "sales contract" or "purchase application."

Rescue
Most of the time, the pet owner himself did not rescue the animal. Usually, a rescue or shelter rescued the animal and the pet owner adopted him. Sometimes, individuals do rescue an animal, when they find the animal in a bad situation and convince the owner to surrender the animal to them without a fee. Note that if a fee is involved, it is usually not a true rescue. If money exchanges hands, it amounts to a purchase, with the original owner making a profit and going on to commit the same sins again to make another profit down the road. You are replacing one animal in a bad situation with another animal coming into that exact same situation.

Thus, if you see an animal in deplorable conditions at a pet store and you purchase that animal, it is not technically a rescue. It is a purchase, with the pet store making a profit on that animal and replacing it with another that will exist in the same deplorable conditions. A rescue that just swaps one unfortunate animal with another gets nowhere.

On the other hand, if you see an animal at a pet store needing medical care and you offer to take the animal off their hands and get it treatment, and the pet store surrenders the animal without payment, that could be considered a rescue - as the animal receives care it would not have gotten and the store loses its investment in that animal. Another will come to take its place, but likely not with the same problems.

Purchase
This is the most significant of the terms and no one wants to use it correctly, but everyone should. When you buy an animal from a pet store or a breeder, you are not adopting, you are not rehoming, and you are not rescuing, you are purchasing. Purchasing something gives you rights of ownership. These rights are important to us as pet owners. If we are to ensure that we always have control over the decision making regarding our animals, assuming we are keeping them lawfully in good conditions, then we want to be owners of our pets. Not guardians or keepers or any other such animal-friendly terms, but owners. We don't want anyone to be able to come into our homes and take our animals away because they have other ideas about how they should live. We want to own our pets. The more our language moves away from terms that imply ownership and towards terms that make us feel good but that actually imply a loss of some of the rights of ownership, the easier it can be for animal rights groups to pick away at those rights over time.

There is nothing wrong about owning an animal. Owning an animal doesn't mean we love them less or treat them like objects. It only means that we get to decide how that animal should live and be cared for, as long as we are keeping them in lawful conditions and not subjecting them to neglect or abuse.

Summary
All of these terms have important roles in animal acquisition, but it is important that we use these terms correctly. More and more, the lines have begun to blur, and the more that happens, the more we lose important distinctions between the terms and situations.

Twice in One Week: Bela Diagnosed with a Lung Tumor

On Friday, Bela went in for her second recheck for a respiratory infection. I had caught it early and brought her in three weeks ago at the first sign. We treated her aggressively with Baytril and Doxycycline. At her one week recheck, she was much improved. The second week of treatment, she was fine. The third week, her symptoms returned - this time, worse and persistent, despite still taking the antibiotics.

After listening to her lungs, the vet decided an x-ray was necessary. When she returned with Bela, she had bad news for me. For the second time in one week, I had brought in a rat for a respiratory infection, only to find out we were dealing with a lung tumor.

You can imagine how surprised and heartbroken I was to get this very same diagnosis, not once, but twice in just a three day period. Bela's tumor is less advanced than Casper's and she likely has more time, since it was caught earlier. We are treating with a steroid (Prednisolone), plus doxycycline to prevent secondary infections, since the steroid weakens the immune system. We also decided to try the same for Casper, although his tumor is more advanced and the steroid is something of a Hail Mary pass.

How Common Are Lung Tumors? Should We Do More X-Rays?

The shock of having two lung tumors diagnosed in one week got me thinking. I had always thought this was not a very common problem. I knew it could happen, but it is not the first thing I would suspect when a rat comes down with respiratory symptoms. I have now had three rats diagnosed with this problem - each time it was caught on an x-ray. It makes me wonder how often this is missed because no x-ray was performed. It made me wonder about Mystery, who passed from chronic respiratory problems. After a while the meds didn't help. Had we done an x-ray, would we have found a tumor there, as well?

My experience is making me wonder if we shouldn't do x-rays more often. Not for those initial mild symptoms that are treated effectively without much fuss. But maybe for those rats who have frequent recurring respiratory symptoms. Maybe for those who stop responding to the antibiotics. Maybe, before we go to all the stops with various meds and trying this and that, we should do an x-ray.

Bela's initial diagnosis of respiratory infection was, in fact, correct. However, the respiratory infection had occurred secondary to the tumor. When given meds, the respiratory infection cleared up rather quickly, but because it was just a secondary problem, the root cause being the tumor, the symptoms returned and the meds were powerless to help.

X-rays always make me cringe because I know they come with a cost. But with Bela, I am thankful that we did it early. Catching a tumor at this stage has saved me several recheck visits, along with more antibiotics and higher dosages of those meds. Doing the x-ray early actually saved me quite a bit of money, and early diagnosis means there is a chance that the steroids will stall the tumor growth and we will get more time. I also am prepared for what will inevitably be coming.

Don't Skip the Vet

This diagnosis is a reminder of why it is in our rats' best interest to NOT throw antibiotics willy nilly at every wheezy rat, but instead, to see a vet when they become ill. I know there is a whole community of rat lovers who will treat respiratory infections at home without the guidance of a vet. I know there are ways to get prescription medications illegally online or to use medications meant for a different species in an off-label way, or to just save leftover medications to try to treat yourself. I choose not to go this route. Everyone must make up their own mind, but these are some of my reasons, and if they influence others, that is great, and if not, at least you go into it aware of what is at stake.

Risks to You and Your Rat
 
Home treatment without the guidance of a vet carries risks. You are at risk of using meds that have expired, that are unsafe, or even not what is advertised. You are at risk of making an error in the dosage calculations. Some medications are safe for some rats but not for others. For example, Baytril is unsafe for rats under 4 months old because it can cause cartilage problems. Vets are better educated in these special cases. Most of all, you are at risk of treating for the wrong thing or with the wrong medication. While you are doing that, your rat is getting sicker; his prognosis, worse. When you finally do see a vet, it will cost you more money and will be harder to treat. We always assume that respiratory symptoms are caused by respiratory infections. But as I have seen, that is not always the case, and even when it is, respiratory infections are opportunistic infections that often crop up secondary to another health problem. For example, Pirate developed a respiratory infection secondary to salmonella poisoning. Treating the secondary problem doesn't do much good if you don't treat the source. Treating yourself and getting something wrong is a waste of money that will only lead to spending more money down the road, risking the health of your rat as the actual problem goes untreated for longer.

Antibiotic Resistance

The other thing to keep in mind is that rampant consumer use of antibiotics without the guidance of a vet leads to antibiotic resistance down the road. I have seen this already happen in the bird world, where many antibiotics are legally available for consumer use. Many of the broad-spectrum antibiotics carried by pet bird suppliers now have absolutely no effect on anything. They have been overused and misused by too many people over too long a period, and everything out there is resistant to them.

To replace these now useless antibiotics, pet bird supply vendors are starting to carry more potent antibiotics, and one of those is Baytril (intended for use in chickens, but sold by pigeon supply stores, and now pet bird suppliers, and marketed to pet birds). This concerns me. When consumers use antibiotics, there is inevitably a large portion of the public who use them incorrectly. They will use them for the wrong thing. They will use the wrong dosage. They will use it for the wrong period of time - stopping after symptoms resolve or stopping when it doesn't seem to be working. They will use it too often, when not even needed. It is not uncommon for a rat to be a little sneezy just because of environment (allergies, new home sneezes, dusty bedding). The more available antibiotics are to consumers, the more consumers will throw an antibiotic at every little dry sneeze. They will use it preventively or as a quarantine measure. You may not be that person, but you can bet than there are many out there who are, and they spoil it for everyone. The bird community has proven it to be true. It would be nice if everyone was as knowledgeable as a vet with regard to diagnosis, dosages, and proper use. Unfortunately, even when we have mastered the latter two, the first will always be trumped by an experienced vet, and many, many people will get all three wrong.

The Emergency Vet Fund

I know it happens sometimes where people end up in tight situations where they just cannot afford a vet, and then they feel they have to resort to home treatment. I never have any advice for this situation. The truth is, if you are truly in that spot (no money to be had anywhere, no credit, nothing to sell, no way to earn money, no one to borrow from), it is too late. It does no good at that point to say, "Well, you should have done XYZ" because we can't go back in time and fix it now. Instead, I offer advice for everyone not in that situation today, with the hope that there will be fewer people in that position tomorrow: Start an emergency vet fund now, even if you don't have rats yet - in fact, that is when you should start the fund - before you have rats. Fund it generously. Never borrow from that fund . . . ever! Remember it is an EMERGENCY vet fund - don't use it if you don't have to - pay your vet bills from your regular budget if that is an option. Replenish that fund in a timely manner before it is needed again. Apply for Care Credit if there is a chance you ever might need it, so that you can finance a vet appointment now and pay it off gradually should the need arise. The only good solution for this problem is to take steps now to make sure you never have that problem. It is like the movie War Games: The only way to win is not to play. Unfortunately, if you don't take those steps before they are needed, it is too late once you end up there.

Rescues, Animal Welfare, and Animal Rights

It is the start of a New Year and you might be thinking about what you can do to help animals in need this year. Sometimes, we put aside money to donate to good causes, and causes that help animals are close to my heart.

During the holidays, we see advertisements on television that tug at our heartstrings. We are bombarded with pictures of abused and neglected animals that need medical attention and quality care and a loving home. This is a sad reality. And then we are hit with appeals to send our money to organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Unfortunately, HSUS, and many other large national organizations do very little to help the animals in the situations they depict.

By now, most informed people know what PeTA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is about. Their leaders have publically declared that they don't believe that any animals should be kept as pets and that they believe in a world where humans and animals have no interaction whatsoever. They euthanize the vast majority of the animals that they do take in, and they do so willingly, believing that animals are better off dead than as pets.

What people often do not know is that over time, people with these types of beliefs have infiltrated other organizations - organizations that used to be legitimate animal welfare organizations. They have gotten their people on the Board of Directors of these organizations and eventually into leadership positions, turning these organizations from animal welfare organizations to animal rights organizations. This is what has happened to HSUS. Most of their funds are spent on lobbyists and lawyers, and very little money actually goes to any shelters. Ask your local shelter if they receive any money or assistance from HSUS. They will probably laugh.

You might think that having more laws "protecting" animals is a good thing, but the truth is that, in most cases, there are already laws protecting the animals - there is just not enough manpower to enforce them. Making laws that are stricter and harder to comply with doesn't help most of the animals, it just makes it harder for good honest people to keep their animals legally. Animal cruelty continues because people choose to break the law and don't fear getting caught. Adding more laws won't stop them. And this is the intention of the animal rights groups - to make it harder and harder to own/breed/rescue animals legally.

Sometimes the laws sound good on paper, but in practice, become overwhelming. For example, it might sound good to require a license for anyone to sell, trade, or give away an animal that was born in their home. However, what do you do if you purchased a pregnant rat and it gives birth and you need to rehome the babies, but you don't have a license? And situations often change once the law is created. The law can't change without going through the proper process, but the requirements for getting a license can often change without changing the law. So a license that might have once just required registration, may be changed later without any process, to require inspections and standards that one's personal home could never live up to. Often, laws don't specify the animals they apply to, and what is a good law for a dog might be a terrible law for a rat. For example, in Illinois, there is a law that a foster home can only keep a max of 4 animals at once. I am not sure if the law specifies a species, but if it does not, that makes it difficult to foster flock animals like a group of finches, and can make it hard to foster a litter of rats. There are a lot of ways a law can look good on the surface but ultimately have the effect of deterring pet ownership.

I am not writing this to get on a soap box and try to change your views. Those who support animal rights don't bother me. They believe in a cause and they fight for it and I believe in their right to do so. If you share those beliefs, I have no problem with you continuing to fight for them. I don't want to try to change your views any more than I want you to try to change mine. And you should continue to support organization like PeTA and HSUS who stand for your causes.

What I would like to do is make people aware of the agenda of organizations like HSUS. So many people donate in response to the ads they see on TV and think they are supporting one thing when in reality, they are often supporting an organization that is quietly fighting against their rights as animal owners. If what you want is to help the animals in need, donate directly to your local shelters and rescues who actually work hands on, every day, with those animals. You will do way more good for an animal in need if you go directly to the source.

Another thing to keep aware of is the use of "political correctness" when it comes to changing peoples perceptions on what is right and wrong. Animal rights groups try to introduce language into our vocabulary that ultimately intends to steer people toward their cause. For example, they try to get people to use the term guardian rather than owner. It sounds nice. I am the guardian of my rats and my dogs and my birds. I guard them. I protect them. They have their own rights and I am just looking after them. But I believe in animal ownership. There are good owners and there are bad owners, but ownership in general is not a bad thing. An owner also guards and protects, but an owner has something that a guardian doesn't have - ownership rights. That is not the right to hurt, abuse, or neglect an animal you own - these things are already illegal. Ownership grants me the legal right to continue to guard and protect my animals as long as I am not breaking any laws and am capable of continuing to do so. No one can take those animals away from me as long as I am keeping them legally in appropriate conditions. That right is important for the wellbeing of our animals. There are many cases where animals have been confiscated wrongly from their owners and euthanized before the owner could take action to get them back and defend themselves in court. Those rights are essential for protecting our ability to continue to keep pets in the future.

So, if you want to help animals that are homeless or ill and in need of medical attention and you don't want to jeopardize your right to own animals in the future, be sure to donate to your local shelters and rescues. I like to support rescues with 501-C3 status, as they must meet stringent guidelines to qualify. However, many private individuals do a lot of good work rescuing unwanted animals as well - but I would make sure I knew the people running the operation and was familiar with the work they do before I donate.

So You Want to Breed Rats . . . .

So you want to breed rats . . . . This article may give you pause. Or maybe, it may encourage you to actually make a difference in the genetic make-up of the pet rat population.

If you’ve owned rats for a long time, you are familiar with the plethora of serious health problems that plague the domesticated rat population. If you are not so familiar, a quick browse of GooseMoose's the Rat Care Corner will expose you to many of them.

Given the rate and ease at which rats reproduce, there would seem to be no need for more breeders, but that is actually not true. There are lots of accidental litters and tons of backyard breeders, and a few ratteries that try to do things right, but there are very, very few breeders who actually do get it right.

Rats are just too easy to breed – anyone can do it, and often, anyone does. Anyone who thinks they have a sweet, nice-looking rat thinks they are doing everyone a favor by making more. Unfortunately, they don’t take the time, money, and effort to put anything into establishing health in that line – they only care about making more sweet little cuddlies and what problems come later are not their concern. They think that as long as they can find homes for all the babies they produce, everything is good. But finding homes is not the only issue. If your rats are filling homes, the rats in rescues are losing potential homes. And if your rats are carrying health issues in their genetics, they may go on to perpetuation those health issues in their new homes, continuing the trend of producing unhealthy rats in the pet population.

I’ve never bred rats because the hurdles to doing it right just seem insurmountable to me. I’ve gotten all my rats through the adoption section of GooseMoose or from rescue operations. I have bred difficult, exotic finches and have ran the Finch and Softbill Save conservation program organized by the National Finch and Softbill Society for many years, but am stepping down at the end of this year. I worked with birds that are very difficult to breed and keep properly in captivity and despite all the challenges inherent in that – I think it is much easier than working with rats. Those birds can be expensive and difficult to keep in proper conditions, but the few people who work with them successfully are dedicated to breeding for the proper things and keeping bad genetics out of the lines – as these kinds of mistakes can completely ruin a life’s work and make a huge impact on the future of that species in captivity.

Despite being strongly pro-rescue when it comes to rats, anyone interested in taking on the challenge of breeding for health and hardiness in domesticated rats and doing it the right way has my support. As I don’t breed rats, I am not the expert. But I can easily apply some of the things I have learned from running a conservation program to what you would need to do to get started with rats and do it right.

First of all, because of the inherent health problems that plague the pet rat population, one would need to start off by acquiring stock from experienced ratteries that have already begun the process of working out some of these health problems. You wouldn’t want to have to reinvent the wheel and start with complete unknowns unless that is all that is available in the captive gene pool (it is not!). The amount of time it would take to get to the point that others have already gotten to would mean that it would be unlikely you would ever make any contribution to the gene pool short of dedicating your life to it for the long haul. These ratteries should know exactly what problems their lines carry and which problems have been weeded out. They should have pedigrees going back generations with records detailing health problems and causes of death for the animals in their lines.

They should have established lines and not just a hodgepodge of breeding this rat they acquired from here with that rat they acquired from there and mixing in their own young as needed.

A breeder breeding for health and longevity shouldn't give up any of their breeding rats, even after they have reached retirement age. How long the parents ultimately live and what health problems they experience later in life provide critical information about what traits may have been passed on to their young and what traits had been passed on to them from their parents.

Any rattery that has put any kind of investment into their lines is not likely to give up their stock for breeding to just anyone. If you take stock from their lines and breed it to just any rat, you will undo much of the work they have done. If you then sell/give away this offspring with documentation that it came from those established lines, you will ruin their reputation.

This is where mentoring comes in. You are best off finding a mentor among one of those breeders who has established that their lines have been selected for health and improved vitality. It will take a lot of research to find one and it will take a lot of time, research, and commitment to prove that you know what you are doing and that you are worth their time investment. You will probably have to travel distances to find one and meet up and obtain stock.

Once you have a mentor, your mentor can help you with finding other quality breeders for stock and can help convince them that under their guidance, you won’t do damage to their reputations if they let you work with their lines.

Once you have a mentor and have acquired stock with known health histories (note that this does not mean your stock is free of health problems – it just means that you know what problems are likely to pop up in each of the lines and that some problems have likely been weeded out and won’t occur very frequently), you are ready to start working on your lines, you will need to learn a lot about selection – which rats are worth keeping in your program and which should be culled (by culled, I mean sold as pets – preferably neutered/spayed or to homes that keep same sexes and don’t intend to breed). You don’t want to risk your reputation by selling off your lesser stock for breeding by inexperienced breeders who will pair your rats to mill rats.

You will need to do all the things that I mentioned your mentor should be doing. You should keep detailed pedigrees and health records. You will need to not only treat your rats for the health problems that occur, but also have tests done to find out what the exact cause of those health problems are. You can’t just throw an antibiotic at something and if it goes away, be done with it. You want to know what illnesses your rats are especially susceptible to and what genetic problems they may have. These are things you will want to work out of your lines, but you can’t work them out if you don’t know specific causes. This means doing cultures and x-rays and scans, and having necropsies performed when your rats die. Ideally, it also means keeping in touch with people who obtain rats from you and convincing them to keep you up-to-date on their medical histories. If they don’t keep in contact with you, it means contacting them periodically, and collecting this information.

You will want to hold back rats for yourself. Obviously, some for continuing the line and hopefully improving it. But others just to monitor the health problems and longevity. This means keeping lots of rats that will need your time and care and food and large clean cages.

You will have to learn about and understand the risks and benefits of line breeding. While inbreeding is generally considered bad, once the serious issues are worked out of a line, breeding back to that line will keep your line from becoming contaminated with problem genetics. Test breeding from the same line will help you identify the recessive problems that still exist in that line. But too much or improper inbreeding can lead to weakened strains.

You need to do more than just collect this information. You need to learn how to interpret this information and what to do with it. Sometimes, you will have to discontinue lines, because problems crop up in those lines that are too serious to keep working with and keep producing rats with that problem. Megacolon would be an example of a problem so serious that you would want to discontinue any line that started throwing it.

Do all breeders do these things? Sadly, most breeders don’t. And that is why we continue to have so many bad problems popping up in the pet population. You would be hard pressed to find breeders who actually do these things. But this is the kind of breeder that we really need. We need as many of these breeders as we can get and we need everyone else to stop breeding and adopt from the accidental litters and the rats whose owners can no longer take care of them. Those who just want the joys of raising random rattie litters would be better served by volunteering as a foster for a rescue and helping to raise those oops litters that will continue to happen as long as pet stores can’t accurately sex rats and as long as people continue to keep rats of mixed sexes without spaying/neutering.

Rats With Wings - This Should Be a Compliment

I ran across the following article in my news alerts today:

Pigeon Owners Participate in Show at Fayette Fairgrounds.

The opening line of the article begins:

Steve Stanish of Lemont Furnace says he hates when people call pigeons “rats with wings” because they are really beautiful birds with unique colors, markings and features.

Now, as a one-time aviculturist, I know that pigeons are wonderful and beautiful creatures and that they are wrongly maligned with a reputation as being a pest species. However, here is an example of a lover of a misunderstood species going on to perpetuate that same misunderstanding of another species, perpetuating the same ignorant attitude that offended him in the first place.

Rats are also beautiful animals, with unique colors, markings and features. Like carrier pigeons who have performed working tasks alongside humans, rats have also trained to be productive in society, promoting human health and safety, in their case by being trained to sniff out landmines and detect tuberculosis cheaply and accurately in third world countries.

And as there are pigeon shows (I am no stranger to bird shows, having been an award-recognized exhibitor of exotic finches), there are also rat shows, where rats are also judged for their shape, fur, and color with the same critical attention to detail as other animal exhibitions, although rat shows will probably never have the same popularity because of the prevalence of air-borne rat viruses in the United States that make exhibitions a more risky proposition.

Stanish says of his pigeons:

They are very beautiful and interesting birds. They don't deserve the bad reputation they have received over the years.

I agree, but the same is true of our rat friends. They also do not deserve the bad reputation they have received. So don't be offended when someone calls a pigeon a "rat with wings" (or a rat a "pigeon with four legs"?). It truly is a compliment. Mr Stanish should not be getting angry, he should be complimented, and he should explain why the next time he hears it said. In fact, both species DO have a lot in common. Both creatures are beautiful, intelligent, worthy animals. While the phrase may have been coined in ignorance and intending insult, it nevertheless has a lot of truth to it, in a very positive complimentary way.

Why Animals Cannot be Properly Bred for Profit

Our last post dealt with an extreme case of animal cruelty at a mill facility that produced rats and reptiles en masse for pet stores. Even though that was most certainly an extreme example of what can go wrong at a mill, that doesn't mean that other mills are doing things right.

The simple fact is that there is no way to breed animals for profit if you are doing things correctly. And it is almost impossible to do things correctly if you are producing animals in large numbers, which is a requirement if you hope to supply animals to big chain pet stores.

So let's go over some of the things a breeding operation would need to do in order to do things right. First, let's look at the animals' needs:

1. Animals need to be fed a nutritious diet made up of healthy ingredients - especially pregnant/nursing mothers and growing young. A good diet costs money and often takes time to prepare. An establishment that is trying to make a profit will often cut costs by providing less healthy or incomplete alternatives. A bulk operation is much more likely to substitute a cheap processed food (eg, low-quality dog food made up of dried corn and meat byproducts and artificial preservatives) in place of a more expensive high quality commercial diet or a more labor-intensive fresh food diet.
2. Animals need a clean and spacious place to live, with room for exercise. They need a stimulating environment with appropriate air-flow, temperature, and humidity. This means large cages/enclosures without overpopulation in a climate controlled building, with staff available to keep enclosures clean and safe.
3. Mothers need time between litters to recover and regain their health. During this time, they still need to be fed and stimulated and cared for. Thus, they continue to cost money without producing any returns. Large mill-based operations are likely to overbreed their animals so that they continue to earn their keep.
4. Animals need attention from their handlers. Many species need to be socialized so that they learn to trust people. Adult animals need care, attention, and stimulation from their people. All animals need someone to watch over their well-being and ensure they are not injured, ill, stressed, or otherwise compromised.
5. Animals need veterinary care. Animals in an overcrowded facility are more likely to get sick or injured. A profit-based operation is likely to see vet care as being more expensive than that animal is worth. Sick and injured animals need medications, which means they also need qualified personnel to measure and administer the medications. Animals that are dying and cannot be treated need humane euthanasia options, but how many profit-based operations will pay for something that is going to happen on its own for free?
6. New animals and sick animals need to be quarantined to stop the spread of disease. This requires a separate airspace and separate housing arrangement, along with vet care to properly handle illness and pathogens. A mill operation is not likely to devote the money or resources to proper quarantine, thus illness and disease are spread and carried by the animals in their warehouses. It is often less expensive to lose some animals to disease than to properly contain, control, and treat it safely for all animals.

But this is not all. To do things right, breeders cannot just look at the current generation of animals - they need to look at the future. They need to think about how their efforts are going to contribute and hopefully improve the genetics of the general animal population. Think about all of the devastating health problems that rats are susceptible to - many of these problems continue to torment the pet rat population because the majority of rats bred are bred by mills, by accident, or by backyard breeders who do not make any effort to eliminate them. Such breeding efforts/accidents just contribute to the widespread animal overpopulation problem and perpetuate the same problems that torment us today.

Sometimes breeding efforts are focused on working with specific colors/markings/physical features. But those are just superficial concerns that appeal to people but have little bearing on the well-being of the animals themselves. These goals should be secondary to those goals that promote the health and well-being of the animals.

Improving the health and temperament of a species/breed is a very difficult thing to accomplish and takes much time, money, and effort to make any inroads. Mills will always ignore these goals - they have one simple goal - that enough of the animals produced live long enough in good enough condition to be sold or to produce more of themselves. That is it. But the following are some of the things that a good breeder will do so that their efforts actually improve the quality of their lines and to ensure the animals they place find a good home:

1. Detailed records from all lines must be kept, including pedigrees with information about genetics, longevity, temperament, and health conditions. Not all conditions are genetic, but susceptibility to contagious illness such as myco can be. The overall picture must be understood so that careful selection can be used to reduce such problems in future generations.
2. Applications should be created by breeders and filled out by customers to ensure the animals are going to a home that is prepared to care for them properly. Care sheets should be prepared and distributed to all customers to make sure they have access to the important information they will need.
3.  Necropsies should be performed in order to identify problems in the lines - both problems that cause death and those that had not yet progressed to the point of showing external symptoms.
4. Some animals must be held back and kept by the breeder for the sole purpose of continuing to monitor what conditions pop up in the line. Breeders should stay in touch with customers so that health problems and longevity can continue to be tracked among the animals that are rehomed. It is impossible to know what problems exist in a line if one loses track of all animals once they reach independence and find new homes.
5. Decisions must be made as to when to stop breeding from a given line because of serious medical problems in that line and when to continue working with the line to work out those problems. Some problems are so bad (eg, megacolon in rats) that they may warrant abandoning a line that has many other positives going for it. Trying to breed such conditions out of a line will continue to produce more rats with the condition and may continue to pass the gene along even if it is not expressed.
6. Animals that should not be bred because they are known to carry a gene for a serious condition should be spayed or neutered before being sold so that there is no risk of that gene being passed on to future generations (whether on purpose or by accident).

It is easy to think that the only thing you need to breed an animal is a male and a female of that species and any offspring that you get are pure profit, but as you can see, the reality is quite different. It is actually quite costly and time-intensive to breed animals in a humane way - and even more costly and time-intensive to do it in a way that improves the species rather than just contributing to the pet overpopulation problem. When you do it as a business rather than as a hobby for the love of it, you have to add labor costs on top of everything else. Now consider that PetSmart currently sells a "Fancy Rat" (really just your plain old average pet rat) for $10.99. They bought those rats in bulk from a mill at a much lower cost - probably only a few dollars each. Given the high costs of care, even for a very productive species that is easy to breed, where does the profit come from? If there is no profit, there is no business.

The only way to make it work is to cut back on expenses - which means small inappropriate cages, poor diet, no handling or interaction with the animals, limited vet care, dirty environments, and overbred females. Even the pet store, just turning around the animals and reselling at a much higher cost, cannot make a profit on live animals. Their care and upkeep is usually more than they will ever sell for. The longer a given animal stays at the store, the more it costs the store. So why do they sell them if they can't make a profit? They sell live animals as a loss leader so they can then sell more profitable supplies: cages, food, toys, and accessories.

Unfortunately, pet store animals are readily available and easy. Locating an animal through a rescue or researching a good breeder takes work and time and effort - and sometimes a long drive to another location to pick the animal up and bring it home. Too many people settle for easy and never think about what the costs of that convenience are.

It would be nice if pet stores started to move in the direction many of them have gone with dogs and cats - to make it easier for people to find small/exotic animals from rescues.

Anyway, I apologize for the graphic nature of the video I linked to yesterday. I know it is hard to stomach. And it is not my intent to use this blog as a platform to preach pet politics as I try to keep an open and non-judgmental mindset. But it is just too easy to turn a blind eye to the reality of pet store animals because the truth of the situation is conveniently hidden from our view. I think it is good to try to look behind the scenes every now and then and take that into account before making any pet-related decisions. Having once bred finches for a conservation effort, I know how expensive and labor intensive it is to keep animals, and even moreso to breed them properly and successfully. It is just not possible to do things right and make a profit. The mills supplying pet stores make a profit or they go out of business - so that really should tell you everything you need to know.

Rats and Children - A Family Commitment

Do rats make good pets for children?

Rats are great for children, but primarily as "family" pets. A family should adopt a rat with the same considerations they would adopt a dog. A child can assume some responsibility, but a responsible adult needs to oversee the care and be committed to ensuring the rats' needs will be met.

As a member of the very popular and informative Goosemoose Pet Forums, my heart breaks whenever a young person posts that their rat is sick and their parents won't take him to the vet and they don't have any money or transportation to do it themselves. They are desperate for a home remedy that doesn't exist and heartbroken that they are on the verge of losing a friend who could be saved, but powerless to do anything about it.

Sometimes these posters are told a harsh reality, that they never should have adopted a rat if they didn't have the means to care for it properly. Salt in the wound. True words, but they are young. They didn't know any better. It is a hard way to learn a lesson and both the child and the rats suffer for it.

This is not necessarily a failure of a child, who doesn't have the world experience to have made better choices. This is parenting fail.

Parents want their kids to be happy, and kids love animals. It seems so simple to buy them a pet store cage and an inexpensive critter, and let them feed it and clean up after it until it lives out its natural life. Many parents are of my generation, and when we were kids, there were few vets who saw small animals. Pocket pets were cheap and replaceable. They got sick. They died. There was nothing you could do about it - it was just life. They got replaced with another inexpensive animal or their owners moved on to something else. There was little veterinary research being done on proper care and treatment of these animals and their diseases, so veterinarians were of little help in treating them, and so no one brought them in to be treated. There was no money to be made in conducting the research or in training to treat them since there was no demand for veterinary care for these animals. Replacing them was cheaper than treating them - the value of the animal was no more than the price initially paid for it (a silly conclusion when you think about it, since food and housing will instantly eclipse the price of the animal and no one thinks twice about that). It was a vicious circle leading to nowhere, and many parents who grew up during that period do not realize that things have changed.

Today, there are many vets who see exotics and small animals. Some are more experienced than others, but often the less experienced can treat the simple common problems just fine and then refer you to the specialists for the more advanced problems. The value of a small animal is no longer limited to its price tag. It is a life. It is precious and irreplaceable. It loves us and we love it. "It" is no longer an "it," but instead, a "he" or a "she" and more so "family" and especially a "friend."

The parenting fail happens when parents don't do their homework. Once, information about small animals was confined to petstore books that were brief and often wrong. Now, there is an Internet full of information about any kind of animal you might ever want to bring into your home. There are whole communities that have sprung up around these animals, with active forums where we can all learn from each other. Before allowing any child to bring home a pet, an adult needs to spend a little time on the Internet, learning about the needs of the pet, and deciding whether or not he/she can take on those responsibilities. Because if our children do not have the financial means to meet those needs or the transportation to get to a veterinary practice or the maturity to live up to their responsibility, then the parent needs to be willing to provide these things - or they should not consent to bringing home the pet.

So how does this apply specifically to rats?

First, rats are prone to many health problems. They already have a short lifespan, usually 2-3 years, but that can be cut even shorter without proper veterinary care. In our home, our rats need more frequent veterinary care than our dogs or our birds. They are prone to respiratory infections that must be treated with antibiotics that can only be provided via prescription from a vet. With proper treatment, the rats can live long happy lives while managing chronic respiratory problems. Without proper treatment, they will suffer and die prematurely. They are also susceptible to tumors, some of which will require surgical removal. Children are not always aware of the signs of illness and they usually don't have the veterinary access required to treat such problems. An adult needs to oversee the health of the pets.

Second, pet stores and pet supply manufacturers are either very ignorant about the needs of rats or they make decisions based on what will sell and not what the rats need. Specifically, cages and diets marketed for rats are frequently inappropriate for them. Most commercial rat diets are not balanced for rats (with a few exceptions). Most cages labeled for rats are too small and they are often difficult to maintain. But a child, on his or her own, will likely rely on what the pet store employees erroneously tell them is good for a rat - like a small cage and a bag of seed and nut mix. An adult needs to actually research the needs of a rat and decide whether or not they can afford an appropriate cage/diet/environment before adopting a rat. Appropriately sized cages tend to be large - space in the home needs to be afforded to such a cage. A small cage located on a bedroom night table won't cut it.

Third, rats are very social animals. They need time out of their cage every day and social interaction with their humans. This is a great responsibility for children to take on, but children can be very active and might not always be able to commit some time to their pets - school, sports, musical instruments, hobbies, and friends all make demands on our children's time. And children often tire of their responsibilities - what once was novel and fun has over time become dull and boring. Thus, it is good for our pet rats to have an entire family to fall back on. When one person has a full schedule, someone else can step in and make sure our ratties get some love and out time. And if everyone in the family wants to love on the rats - so much the better - you can't give them too much attention.

Finally, since rats need out time, a rat-safe environment needs to be provided for them. Someplace where they can be confined and kept away from the dangers in the house. Someplace where they cannot chew on electrical cords or damage furniture or mark the carpet (unless you plan to clean the carpet often). A child is not the best judge of these things.

And if your child wants a pet that is solely his/hers rather than a family pet, well - if they are ready for that responsibility, give it a go, but be there in the background in case things don't go as planned. As long as you understand these animals are, at heart, your responsibility, there is no reason that your children have to know that.