More on medicating a rat

I see that Daddy Rat has made a post about medicating a rat... yes - he's Watched Me Do It LOADS of times!!!! When we first started keeping rats and Grissom (my first baby boy) had something wrong with him - I can't remember what it was, since it's quite a few rats ago - we asked the vet the best way to give medication to a reluctant rodent. He went to a lot of trouble showing us - calling in his four nurses, two assistant vets and a partridge in a pear tree - to demonstrate how one person could hold the rat (while the other three assisted in holding said rat), two more could hold the rat's mouth open and the final one could use the pipette to drop the medicine into the enraged rodent's mouth. So we went home and tried it. We used up half the phial of medication, ruined two sets of human clothing and had an indignant (and non-medicated) rat. Conclusion: in the absence of a full medical team (and a partridge) and after seeking medical attention myself to have two of my fingers sewn back on, there had to be an easier way.

First of all, calling into play my forty years of cat ownership experience (or is that ownership by cat experience?) I decided I'd mix the medicine with some fish paste. Rats don't, it seems, like fish paste. Unless the fish paste is unmedicated, of course - in which case, rats LOVE fish paste. So we moved on to something else: let's put it on a rat sweetie. After months of frantic pleadings for rat sweeties to be issued at five minute intervals, all of a sudden Rats Don't Like Rat Sweeties. After I'd come out of my month-long stay at the asylum and the electric shock treatments had taken effect, I hit upon another idea: how about using something that rats LOVE but that rats don't get?? HA!!! Thus the idea of putting the medication onto a piece of digestive biscuit was born.... rats will walk over hot coals for a square of digestive biscuit, so they're not going to reject such a treat just because it tastes absolutely foul... especially if they think the OTHER rat is after it...! That was my life's ultimate Eureka moment. I've refined my technique now - you put the medication on the broken edge of the digestive biscuit (because it absorbs better there than on a 'cooked' surface) and you make sure that the rat needing the medication is the last to get his bit of biscuit. That way by the time he manages to wrestle it out of your reluctant fingers he feels he's earned it and will not under ANY circumstances leave any! As Daddy Rat said, some of the faces they pull while they're chewing can be comical, and sometimes I think they may doubt their own cravings once ownership of digestive has occurred, but hey! Rat + (Medication + Biscuit) = Medicated Rat (Happy Mummy Rat).

All this said, I couldn't consider life without being owned by a rat!!!