Oreo

DOB: 14th September 2006

Adopted: 28th October 2006, from AristocRATS Rattery

Sex: Male

Colour: Black

Coat pattern: Downunder Berkshire. There’s no denying it, Oreo is beautiful. He’s like a toy rat, perfectly shaped and velvety hair with a short muzzle and a a long, firm body. It sounds sexy, and in rat land he is. I wanted to adopt him from the very first time I saw him:

Coat type: smooth, short and dense. Like Wulfman’s without the gloss.

Oreo in 5 words: careful, quiet, introverted, unpredictable and unusual. But 5 words just doesn’t do it with Oreo. He has several personalities which he switches between. There’s the Oreo that stays hidden frantically grooming while the others freerange, the Oreo that sleeps in the heavily soiled litter, the Oreo that will not let you touch him and goes listless when you hold him and the Oreo that arches his back and closes his eyes with pleasure when you rub his neck. It can be frustrating and difficult to interact with Oreo. He seems so detatched and yet so interested in us at the same time. Whenever I go to sit, there’s Oreo. Whenever I go to offer food or treats, there’s Oreo. Yet he doesn’t bound or twitch with anticipation like the others. He just appears, quietly and surely. And then he snatches and leaves me baffled that he actually CAN move quickly. For a long time he was much smaller than his brother which was emblematic of their differences, but he’s always been able to overpower him so it’s odd that he seems so introverted as he is far from being the lowly rat. He does not run or protest when you pick him up and when you put him down he stays and watches the world go by for a time before going back to his quiet wanderings. Maybe he’ll adjust one day or maybe he just wasn’t meant to be a part of this family.

Favourite things: Burrowing, pushing litter out of the pan, sleeping, dominating his brother and Ravill, sifting through the litter pellets, and running through the PVC pipes. If it’s a dark place, Oreo will be in it. He’s my little goth rat. I’m not entirely sure what else he likes doing, but he does tend to enjoy running around while the others sleep. I think he likes to dig so I will have to find a large plastic tub to make a new fabric/paper digging box out of. The old one is cardboard which is banned from the cage (they love to pee on cardboard and sleep on it after they’ve torn the box up).

Naughtiest stunts:

• about once a week I have to put all the litter (poops included) back in the top corner pan because Oreo has sat up there shoving it all out. I’ve watched him do it. It’s the only time I’ve seen non-food related delight on his face. That and…
• when he digs under the shelf liners (placemats and clamped downwashers). I put plenty of loose washers in for him to burrow under but he insists in disrupting the neatness of the cage that the others love as they don’t often watch where they are running. Quite often Oroe will burrow closer and closer to the litter pan so that it and the tile it sits velcroed upon lift up and almost spill.
• Before I started clamping the ice cream container house to the bars Oreo would also pick it up and move it… usually sending it toppling onto Pseudo in his favourite hammock.
• During the brief time I let the rats freerange on the bedroom floor I had an almost full open bag of litter sitting by the cage. Oreo climbed in and was having a whale of a time so I left him in there. After a few minutes pellets started flying from the bag in handfuls. I managed to get Oreo out of there, but not before half the bag (a 13kg bag mind you) was on the floor.