between medicine and this, we do not honour rats enough

idk, i have two flashlights in my bag (one is my phone, one is just a flashlight) so maybe i’d see the rat

Everyone needs to consider donating to them!

I have a monthly donation set up with them and get a monthly report how many mines a rat managed to find

They were also hit quite hard by the usaid shutdown, so they really can use any help they can get

Also: !petrats@lemmy.world needs more activity

Thanks for the link. This is really cool work! Search and pre-rescue rats are a small part of what Apopo does: they mostly do unexploded mine clearance and tuberculosis detection! 😳

I have three right now. Theyre very sweet little guys with intense personality. It should be a crime how little their life span is.

C4

Some sort of signal emitter maybe? So the rescue team knows to look where the hero rat triggered it.

I do hope it has a little speaker that says “don’t worry human, help is on its way” in a cute high pitched voice.

Its little lunch and a sweater the doc packed in case it’s cold.

My guess would be an accelerometer. Then you can plot out the mouses path and get the location of the person

Cheese

… Yes nimh is real. It’s based on the real nimh!

I mean, you joke, but you couod probabky kit them out with a small Bluetooth earbud to pass off.

Clearly you’ve never been mugged by one in Chicago. We grow em extra big here.

You have to train the rat to train the turtles.

Which means they’re food driven, which means you can teach them tricks using special food rewards (different from their regular food).

if you get rats, you can’t have just one. they’re highly social and need other rats. two is the absolute minimum, but three is better. please don’t get just one. it’s cruel.

eta: also, they need a big cage. since they’ll be spending 20-23 hours a day in it, they need a lot of space. those little hamster cages won’t do (they’re too small for hamsters too tbh). the king of rat cages is the double critter nation. I had one. it was epic. they had soooo much room

they also need at LEAST one hour of playtime outside of the cage. but that’s just the minimum. if you can give them more, that’s even better.

sorry for the rant. a lot of people don’t realise how to PROPERLY look after rats. also, I’m highly passionate about rats and giving them best life possible, and since they only live a few short years, you will want to give them the best lif le possible

Kind of true, but it’s more like an ant scent marking. They know this is a place that’s safe (rats have been here). With good absorbent natural substrate in the cage, and wiping down their free roam area if needed, it’s mostly unnoticeable. I like to compare it to a person needing to change their t-shirt every day, probably not a deal-breaker for interacting, unless you don’t clean for way too long.