By Carrie-Edmund Laben
Melete (Practice)
Getting pet rats can be a lot like buying drugs. You don't see many rats in shelters. More often in small animal rescues. But most likely your first rat experience will involve a friend, or some weirdo on Craigslist, offering you a rat. Later, when you're experienced, you might track down someone who takes their product more seriously and they'll meet you in a parking lot where you'll hand them money and they'll hand you the good rats.
The simile is a bit inexact in some regards. I’m not sure what the drug equivalent would be of acquiring a rat because someone’s snake refused to eat it, or worse, because it was in imminent danger of being eaten by a snake, or because it was bought as a prank, all of which are also surprisingly common scenarios for rat acquisition. But in general, you will find someone who needs to rehome rats or you’ll go to a breeder and yes, the breeder will meet you in a parking lot. Good rat breeders generally don't invite people to their homes to avoid spreading disease (to the rats.)
Start out with three, because a lone rat is a sad, stressed rat, and if you get two one might die or they might not get along. You will want either all males or all females, because otherwise there will very quickly be a lot more rats. Some exotic vets (and you will need a good exotic vet, although rats are among the least exotic species in humanity's ecosystem) will spay or neuter rats, but surgery is a real strain on their tiny systems so it's nowhere near as common as the same procedures for cats and dogs.
More than three is good too; according to a paper in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science the ideal group size is six. But rather than adopting six all at once most rat-keepers prefer to stagger out their acquisition in groups of two or three. Rats have a terrible tendency to get old and die and if all your rats are the same age, they may all die at once and you will become almost impossibly sad. Not everyone's friends and loved ones are good at supporting them through the loss of a rat. But other rats are.
To start you’ll need a decent-sized cage – two cubic feet of space, at least, per rat. With three to six rats that means you’re acquiring a significant piece of furniture. I myself, in a moment of pure self-sacrifice, had to move one of my bookshelves out of the living room to make way for a cage taller than I am. Rats love to climb. An enclosure with vertical space densely furnished with shelves, hammocks, bridges, and ladders encourages them to stay active. They also love to dig so a deep basin that can be filled with bedding (or dirt, if you don’t mind frequent cleaning) is a great addition to the bottom floor of the cage, but for the most part there should be plenty of air circulation. They like things to hide in and things to chew and are often overjoyed by “toys” repurposed from the recycling bin. A cardboard box that once held three liters of wine will hold three large or six small rats in cuddly comfort. A toilet paper tube with treats inside, crimped at the ends, will be a prized possession for a few delighted minutes before it is shredded. You should mainly feed a well-balanced rat pellet – Oxbow and Mazuri are the leading brands – but they also like to eat foods that humans eat, like pasta and banana chips and nuts in the shell, yogurt, various fruits and vegetables. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a rat attempt to dismantle a hard-boiled egg.
They have extraordinarily intense and distinct personalities. When I adopted my hairless rat, Collins, she was very small. Chandler, one of my senior girls, had been a breeder before she came to me, and in her mind a small and hairless rat was clearly a baby in need of nurture. For a few weeks whenever she saw Collins wandering around the cage she would grab the new kid by the scruff and haul her back to an ad-hoc nest she’d made of shredded napkins and paper bags. Collins kicked up a fuss like any teenager being treated like a baby. Capote, Chandler’s niece and the second-youngest rat in the group at that time, treated Collins quite a lot more like a peer, and she remained Collins’ favorite buddy for the rest of her life. Now Collins herself is the senior girl in the cage and though she doesn’t attempt to mother the younger rats – in fact she can be a bit crotchety – she has taken up building nests as a hobby like Chandler before her.
One universal rule: when you first bring your rats home they should have peace and quiet for about forty-eight hours, and be quarantined from your pre-existing rats (if any) for two weeks before introductions. Rats that have been raised with care will usually want your company right away, but even rather shy or traumatized rats will generally befriend you once you start offering high-value treats (although for the particularly nervous or near-sighted, you can offer the initial treats on a spoon – they’ll quickly learn not to bite down.) They have a particular affinity for hanging out in the hoods of hoodies and the pockets of bathrobes, and many of them seem to enjoy watching television. They’re as well-suited to live alongside humans as if they were born to it.
Mneme (Memory)
This affinity for human food, human trash, and human company makes sense because the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, is inseparable from humanity. Science isn't quite sure exactly when they moved out of their river-bank burrows and into human agricultural settlements, but it was probably a bit later than their near cousin the black rat, Rattus rattus. But the brown rat - larger, a better burrower, more able to thrive on a diet of human scraps - has displaced the black to become the familiar urban rat of six continents. A colony of wild brown rats that is not in close proximity to human settlement is vanishingly rare and, outside of Antarctica, Alberta, and few small islands, so is a human settlement not in close proximity to a colony of brown rats.
Hang around humans for long enough and they’re bound to try to domesticate you; so it proved for Rattus norvegicus. The earliest evidence of this comes from China, in the form of a series of rat paintings on silk. One depicts a rat of the now-familiar pink-eyed white type, one of the most widespread color variations of rats in domestication but rare, for obvious reasons, in the wild. Another shows a light brown rat eating a lychee fruit while wearing a tiny golden collar and a leash. These were created circa 1425-1435 CE by an artist named Zhanji Zhu, aka Emperor Xuanzong of the Ming Dynasty. The depicted rats were most likely raised and tended (and apparently spoiled -- lychees were not cheap) in the imperial gardens.
From there, the domestication of rats spread, not unlike the wild rats had done so many years before. By the middle of the Edo era, rats were established enough as pets in Japan that multiple books existed describing the different coat colors and varieties. The hooded rat, with a dark-colored head and back stripe on an otherwise white body, was especially popular in Japan – so much so that that pattern was called "Japanese" in the Western rat fancy until the 1950s.
Said Western rat fancy had a lot of catching up to do. Rat-catchers already existed, but they were hired for pest control and to provide bait for bloody contests in which terriers would be placed in pits with swarms of rats, with humans laying bets on how many rats a given dog could kill in a set time. Around the 1840s, though, some rat-catchers (notably a prolific and keenly self-promoting character named Jack Black) began to keep aside albino and piebald specimens to sell as novelties; the most enterprising bred the unusually-colored rats and tamed them enough to interact safely with their new owners. The natural adaptability and sociability of the rats let them survive this rough start and win friends. England saw its first rat show in 1901, held in conjunction with the better-established National Mouse Club.
Love is the best basis for any relationship, but it has never been the only reason that people own rats. Laboratories are, almost certainly, the environment housing the majority of domesticated brown rats. It's surprisingly difficult to obtain exact numbers on this, because rats and mice are typically lumped together and both are specifically excluded from the protections of the 1966 Animal Welfare Act (including reporting on usage and mortality), but estimates of rodents used in research range from the high hundreds of thousands into the hundreds of millions per year in the US alone. A smaller but still significant number of rats are bred and sold as feeders, intended for owners of snakes, large lizards, or birds of prey. Both feeder and laboratory rats sometimes make their way into the hands of people who keep them as pets instead. And even today someone occasionally picks up a wild baby rat and hand-tames it.
Meanwhile other wild rats are continuously poisoned, gassed, trapped, destroyed in a thousand creative ways, the targets of a multibillion-dollar extermination industry that can't be chalked up to simple bigotry. The consequences of their closeness are that they really do share diseases back and forth with us, really do devour our stored food, really do damage the things out of which we build our lives. They can gnaw through concrete and have a decided taste for the insulation on electrical wires.
Aoide (Song)
Thus the loved and the hated, the used and the disregarded, continue to mingle in the lineage of the rat as they do in the lineage of humanity. And maybe that's the most compelling reason to have a rat (six rats) as a pet. The rat is humanity's shadow and our mirror.
Our reflection is not always pretty. From Beatrix Potter to Brian Jacques and onward, writers and artists have made rats symbols of destructive greed, of cruelty and treachery and small-minded meanness and large-scale pestilence. They accompany Dracula on his invasion of England and guide the narrator of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" to an unwanted communion with his cannibalistic ancestry. When the Party really wants to put the screws to Winston Smith, they drop the word games and bring out the cage of rats.
But everything that's monstered must re-emerge, and no rat stays underground forever. In Ratman's Notebooks and its film versions, the two iterations of Willard, human malice enters a dance of death with rodent misbehaviour that heightens both to horrific levels, but the rats have more of a tang of avenging angels than devouring devils. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (filmed as The Secret of NIMH) shows heroic rats overcoming the adversity inflicted on them by human scientists. And Disney/Pixar's Ratatouille manages to make cuddly comedy out of a rat in a restaurant kitchen, perhaps the place where one would be most likely to trigger reflexive disgust in real life.
My own rats are often in my kitchen, my library, and at my writing desk, despite the risks of chewing and droppings; occasionally one even rides my shoulder into the bathroom. And when they are in their cages, I am still always keeping an eye or ear open for their antics. Caring for them means making time for the material when I might become too abstract, and paying attention to the small squeak in a world of overwhelming forces.
If we must live with ourselves, we must live with rats. If we learn about rats, we learn about ourselves. Every iteration of the meeting between rat and human has something to tell us about the reality that we are still animals, beings that are born and die and eat and are eaten and create and destroy and in-between-times nap and play and need the company of other beings, sometimes even ones who want to eat our food and chew up our things. There is a hooded rat on my shoulder as I write this. Her name is Carson and she is six months old, one of the newest generation of my girls. I've known her entire life because her mother came to me pregnant from, yes, a weirdo I found on Craigslist. She helps me be more human, and rats can do the same for you.
Carrie-Edmund Laben is the Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of the novels A Hawk in the Woods and the forthcoming Smoke Season (June 2026). Their work has appeared in such venues as Electric Literature, Indiana Review, and Outlook Springs. They hold an MFA from the University of Montana and live in Queens.