2011 Mammal Report

Oh man hamsters.

We got us a dang zoo around here. Seriously. I believe I already mentioned the fish, and it was a long, long time ago, but I think I've only updated once since around mid 2003, so it's probably only a few "older posts" clicks back. There have been may changes in the fish situation, and even changes in the bird situation, but I'm a mammal, and with that bias inside of me, I'll hit those first, and tell you peoples some other day about everybody else, hopefully before the cockatiels all die of old age.

I would have said something about them turning gray, but well...

CATS:

Oh Jesus, the hind feet.

Diabetes didn't kill Dusty Rhodes, and an old priest and a young priest never showed up to kill Crackhouse, so they're still around. Since last we spoke, Dusty has pretty much kicked all his glucose issues in the ass, mainly through the power of Fancy Feast. So the positive is that we no longer have to jab him with needles several times a day, and the negative is that if we ever get raided by the cops, they're going to see a giant box of unused syringes and assume the worst. Dusty is pretty much the snuggliest and best cat ever, which serves as a stark contrast to Cracky, who remains a cat full of hate.

"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."

She's so cranky and insane and evil that somehow, it made a full loop around back into these being endearing qualities. This cat is so awful that it went beyond awful and did that thing really old video games did where you walk off one side of the screen and end up on the other. and her awfulness somehow became adorable. Also, she lost one of her fangs somehow, (my theory is that it's embedded somewhere in Dusty's flank) so she's all snaggle-toothed and drools in her brief moments of happiness. I love my cat.

Dorp.

Thirdly, there's the newer cat, Panda. One one hand, with her bizarre floppy body, foot pad hair-tufts, and creepily bent tail, she's basically the most physically adorable cat to ever exist. On the other hand, she is dumb - dumb as hell. She leaps into windows face-first, slides around on her big, stupid feet, treats laundry hampers like toilets, terrorizes small animals, and has this stupid, psychotic urge to chew the hell out of any tortillas she can find. Dusty likes her, though.

HAMSTERS:

A rare photo of some of our caged pets that isn't fully just a blurry picture of an animal behind perfectly-focused cage bars.

Also, we have these two Roborovski hamsters here. If you're not the world's last 56K user, you saw them in the video at the head of this post, and that's basically what life is like with two of these, except with slightly less Motorhead. On runs and runs, the other tries to get on the wheel, and eventually someone falls. I think hamsters are one of the rare cases of an animal that's commonly kept as a pet where even people who are overly enthusiastic and make websites about them and suchlike will tell you that they're all basically all a bunch of stupids. But they're like little cotton balls with eyes and Sam Elliot mustaches, so they can get away with it. They don't actually have names, because we gave up on trying to tell them apart maybe five minutes after we got them home.

RATS:

FUCK YEAH WATER

Finally, there are the rats. I had wanted rats for a long, long time, and was seriously getting them sometime around 2004, before I spent all my money paying Hell Roommate's bills and before her cat gave birth to Cracky in my closet. Finally, Sarah got a bigass cage as what I can only assume is a pretty nontraditional Valentine's Day gift, and shortly after came Poppy and Scrambles the Death-Dealer, followed eventually by impulse-rats Punky and Snickers. (I named at least one of these rats. Try and guess which one. Take your time.)

OH MY GOD I LOVE WATER

Poppy was pretty much damaged goods when we got her, missing the ends of a few of her fingers, and she has this weird little crimp in the end of her tail. The end is all loose and floppy, and we figured it would fall off eventually, but it's been over a year, and it's still there. She's normally shy, probably as a result of whatever led to her having mangled fingers and tail, but she's becoming crazy in her middle age, so she might randomly hop around for no reason or try to gnaw off your finger because she thinks it's made of yogurt. Good times.

Basement Rat lurks in the shadows.

Punky is what's known as a Dumbo rat, where someone found a genetic mutation and selectively bred the shit out of it until there were a whole bunch of rats with huge, low-set ears that all looked like Feivel from An American Tail. Being a Dumbo also means that she's bigger than the other rats, (or at least was until recently) and will alpha-rat out on them from time to time. What I'm saying here is that she will try to humble them the way they do in old country and hump them silly, even though she lacks the parts for proper humping. I never thought I'd ever make a post on here that included the phrase "proper humping." I better stop before this gets all lurid. But yeah, aside from the non-consensual lesbianism, she's all sweet and cuddly and loves to ride around in your pocket.

Please excuse the desk.

Snickers is the newest rat, and the only one without the hooded pattern that pretty much every pet store rat has ever had. She's what you apparently call a Berkshire rat, which is a monocle-wearing way of saying solid-colored with a white belly. Aside from that, she's goddamn huge, even bigger than Punky. Seems to be pretty timid so far though, and Punky is improperly humping her as I type this, so I don't think she's going to try and get all dominant any time soon.

Post-op Scrambles on the comeback trail.

Finally - and this is the "current events" part - there's Scrambles. All humping aside, she's more often than not been the alpha female of the group, and is the most outgoing and energetic of the original three. In most ways, she does live up to her name. Well, as in the scrambling part, and not the "giant killer hurricane from a cartoon about death metal" part. And she's the smallest of all of the rats, except that changed for a while in the last month or so. First, she started looking a little chubby, which was adorable, because hell, chubby rat, you know? But then, shit got real.

She kept getting bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And it became really apparent that something was messed-up inside her, because a fat rat gets fat everywhere, and this looked like she had swallowed a damn baseball. After a lot of freaking out, doing hella Google searches and getting worried that she either had cancer or a condition called megacolon that's not as funny as it sounds, (although it does sound pretty funny, for real) and is just as much as a "time to euthanize this here rat" condition as cancer, we finally lucked out and found a vet in town that handled things other than dogs and cats. And the vet knew her shit to the utmost and was able to tell use within a couple seconds of picking Scrambles up that she was going to need surgery, and that her uterus was full of something and had to come out. So on Monday, they cut my damn rat open.

The surgery didn't make her head all blurry; that was just my camera.

You might not think a rat can handle surgery, but they actually seem to kick ass at it. The wound you see up there, while still pretty gnarly, (And speaking of gnarly, she actually has stainless steel stitches, which I'm totally asking for, next time I butcher myself) is nothing compared to the puffy red thing she had going on about a day earlier. And man, speaking of puffy red things... The problem in her internal baby-making apparatus ended up being what the doctor referred to as "cysts on top of cysts," and was just fucking awful. I declined the offer to look at the actual mass they pulled out of her in person, but the vet's cellphone picture of a passed-out Scrambles next to that thing was fucking gross. It was pretty much as big as she was, and was like this big, gnarled-up, bloody ball of terror. It looked like they had pulled Hitler's soul out of her. Words alone cannot fully describe the picture I saw, but Google Image Search and some artful cutting and pasting I did should give you the general idea:

Basically this, spread out on a towel.

As of right now, she's doing fine, eating, drinking, sleeping, and crapping the same as always, and should be headed back into the big cage with the others sometime in the next day or so, bringing the rat squad back to full strength. As for me, I'm $135 poorer, but I still have my rat, so it's all good.

Awwwwwww.

Now, we just need to figure out a way to get some dogs and Guinea pigs in here somehow...