Porthos

Porthos - December 2012 to March 7, 2015

(same pre-history as family)

Lynds of Henry's Haven forwarded me an email from a woman asking for help. Basically she had gotten overwhelmed since having her first oops litter, and then there were more. She ended up with 28 rats (including the 3 original girls) quite quickly. Her husband had/has a snake and she saved the original 3 girls from being eaten. The husband didn't understand rats as pets and was threatening to toss them outside or poison them while she was at work. When her 7 year old daughter decided to mix and match rats, more litters were born and it snowballed. Her MIL told her to just drown the babies as that is what they do with kittens...thankfully this woman did not listen to such terrible advice and and instead saw Lynds' HH Rat Rescue and contacted her. Lynds asked me to email her. We then discovered she was in Toronto, so I ended up taking in a young mom with her litter of 12 2-weekers and 3 young boys (the uncles).

They unfortunately showed up at my home at a time when I didn't realize my colony had SDA...so within a week everyone was sick :(
I managed to save them all and for the most part they seemed healthy but SDA is the virus that keeps on giving and I knew there could be health ramifications later in life. The boys and girls all grew up friendly and sweet, the uncles not so much. One had to be neutered young, and the other 2 still hate handling and will bite if you aren't careful. Porthos lives to take a chomp at me LOLOL. The one uncle Athos was very sick during the quarantine and has chronic respiratory issues since then. The young boys seemed fine until a few months ago then it started to show up and the endless rounds of antibiotics were started.

Porthos was always ready to take a sneaky chomp on me, and I had to be on my game to change his waterbottle, put food in the cage etc. He was suspicious and gorgeous, my first russian blue self...he and Athos lived together happily, while the other uncle Aramis was neutered for hormonal aggression and they would not let him be reintroduced, so Aramis got to live wih his sister and his 5 nieces :)

Porthy and Athos lived in a cage with a chewed base, and on top of my CN. They had a cover over the top so they could come out and wander around since they really hated people but they loved to just hang out waiting for me to get close enough to bite LOL. I forgot about one hole in the base and Porthy tried to bite my head...silly stubborn old man. He was the healthy one of the 2 but that changed after we lost poor sickly Athos. At the end I was able to give him new friends, cuddle him and hold him...took forever to get there but we finally did.

he looked so innocent as a youngster, a lot skittish but still normal.





Mr Suspicious 2 years later:P



My first time touching him with him willing...