The Rat Rat Song

[crabapple]

I just came back from the pet store and they had five hundred rats, thirty or forty mice, a gaggle of fuzzy bunnies, two millipedes, forty giant carp fish, a bunch of dogs and assorted lizards and guppies. So cuuuuuuuuuuuuuute!

[novakru]

Bravo crabby, good song:cool:

[newb]

Wild rats live off man and give nothing beneficial in return. Rats spread disease, damage structures and contaminate food and feed. Rats damage one-fifth of the world's food crop each year. The real damage is in contamination. One pair of rats shed more than one million body hairs each year and a single rat leaves 25,000 droppings in a year.

Rats transmit Murine typhus fever, rat bite fever, salmonellosis or bacterial food poisoning, Weils disease or leptospirosis and trichinosis, melioidosid, brucellosis, tuberculosis, pasteurellosis, rickettsial diseases, and viral diseases such as foot-and-mouth disease. Norway rats can also carry the rabies virus.

The Norway rat and the roof rat are not native North American species. They traveled to the new world with the first explorers. The two species quickly invaded the continent because of their adaptability and fertility. Norway rats are found throughout the United States while roof rats primarily inhabit southeastern, Gulf Coast and southwestern states.

Rats memorize their environment by body and muscle movement alone. They become so engrained by body movements that when objects are removed from their territory, rats will continue to move around them as if the objects where still there.

Successful control depends on proper identification of the different species. Norway and roof rats differ in size, habits, food preferences and regions. Techniques that eliminate one species may not eliminate the other.

Many times roof rats live in the upper stories of buildings, while Norway rats occupy the basement and first floor of the same building.

Rats visit fewer food sites than mice. However, rats eat much more at each site than mice.

[newb]

Rats travel in Packs.

[newb]

on a lighter note

It was discovered that rats emit short, high frequency, ultrasonic, socially induced vocalization during rough and tumble play, and when tickled. The vocalization is described as a distinct “chirping”. Humans cannot hear the “chirping” without special equipment. It was also discovered that like humans, rats have “tickle skin”. These are certain areas of the body which generate more laughter response than other areas. The laughter is associated with positive emotional feelings and social bonding occurs with the human tickler, resulting in the rats becoming conditioned to seek the tickling. Additional responses to the tickling were those that laughed the most also played the most, and those that laughed the most preferred to spend more time with other laughing rats. This suggests a social preference to other rats exhibiting similar responses. However, as the rats age, there does appear to be a decline in the tendency to laugh and response to tickle skin. The initial goal of Jaak Panksepp & Jeff Burgdorf’s research was to track the biological origins of joyful and social processes of the brain by comparing rats and their relationship to the joy and laughter commonly experienced by children in social play. Although, the research was unable to prove rats have a sense of humor, it did indicate rats can laugh and express joy. Panksepp & Burgdorf 2003 Chirping by rats is also reported in additional studies by Brian Knutson of the National Institutes of Health. Rats chirp when wrestling one another, before receiving morphine, or having sex. The sound has been interpreted as an expectation of something rewarding.

[crabapple]

This talk about rats that chirp to each other and laugh is too much for me!

Here, for those of us who can't handle real rats, we have a realistic Halloween rat covered in fur.


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