Our Remy, Rescued

When it comes to adopting pets, it's most common to go to a shelter that houses dogs and cats looking for their new — permanent — forever home. Depending on the place will determine whether or not they house other animals, such as birds and reptiles.

Today, I'll be sharing my slightly unusual adoption story. How we took in our late rat, Remy.

One thing you should know before we start, my family and I have on and off been rat owners for the last twelve or thirteen years. We must have had a minimum of fourteen rats over that time and it has been brilliant.

On the 2nd of April 2018, my mum had a message from a Facebook friend asking for help. A friend of hers, and the friend's partner, had found a rat in the car park of a park, half a mile away from any home. This rat was discovered in the rain looking like a drowned rat.

And to quickly answer your thought — no, they didn't find and accidentally rescue a wild rat. This sweet baby was a pet one.

The friend reached out to others for help because all of the rat-related shelters were closed that day — if my memory is correct, it was a Sunday — and because my mum has posted many photos of rats on her feed over the years, it felt natural for the mutual friend to reach out.

So off we went to investigate this sweet little baby. The rescuers didn't know if he was male or female, or even if there was the possibility of pregnancy (he was just a big fluffy boy).

I have to admit, as soon as I laid eyes on him I knew I wasn't letting him go with anyone else. He was going to be ours, he was going to be a part of our family.

For those of you who may not know, it is very easy to tell whether a rat is male or female. Big balls obvious. So we were quick to confirm that he wasn't a pregnant lady (although, I would've been beyond excited at the thought of raising baby rats. Despite how chaotic that could have been!) and got him into a carry box to bring him to his new forever home.

The sad part of this story, however, is we have no idea how he was treated beforehand. We don't know what he went through or how he got to be left in a car park, but what we found out within a few days was quite vital to us.

Our little man was a biter.

Despite him being gone for at least a year now, I still have scars on my fingers from when he fell from his cage and he decided to thank me for catching him by biting several parts of my hands. In his defence, he was scared, and I couldn't really blame him for it.

Because he was always much more comfortable in his cage, we had to learn new ways to keep him happy and social. For rats, loneliness can cause them to become depressed which can have a fatal result. We didn't want this for him, and we certainly weren't going to let it get that way.

As a way to bring this post to an end, I want to share with you some of his loves, his interests, and overall quirks that made Remy exactly who he was, the perfect little character.

He was smitten with our girl.

At the time, we had an older girl who was in a group of four, but due to natural causes, it was left to just her. She hated being in her cage other than at night, so I would have her on either myself, in my clothes, or on my bed throughout the day.

Whenever Remy saw her, I swear the little man had heart eyes. He was fascinated beyond anything by her. It was the purest, most sweetest thing we have ever seen.

He liked to chat.

While we couldn't hold him, that didn't stop him from loving some attention. We would sit next to the cage, talking to him through the bars as he would happily listen.

He was a foodie.

Chips were offered through the bars many a time, as well as pieces of apple, soups on spoons, or even egg whites on a fork. We'd spoil him with treats and boy did he love it.

One of my most favourite memories of him is how whenever my partner and I went to make smoothies, he would know. He'd be at one of the cage doors waiting for his taste test. Remy somehow knew the sounds of the smoothie bags and my god, did he love his smoothie on a spoon. I think he gave the dogs a run for their money in how quickly he could clear a spoon that had a smoothie on it.

He loved tissues.

He loved to play with us by pulling tissues through the bars. The boy loved it even more when we began to buy cheap tissue boxes for him to play with. The sound of tissues being pulled from a box would be all we could hear after cleaning out his cage. It was his favourite thing, the most simplest of things.

We've always adopted dogs before. Rats we would usually get from Pets at Home. But adopting Remy was the best choice we ever made. I will forever be glad that we gave him a proper forever home, where he lived the remainder of his life (a good two extra years!) spoilt rotten like the little king he was.

He was our baby, our family, and we would never have gotten a boy like him should we have been to a store and bought him.

Adoption does incredible things for our animal's lives. It's not just us who gain an incredible amount of love from it. I promise you that.

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