They are both more or less a year old. Enzio is marked by the disease, he breathing is strained even when he is asleep. Darius seems to be almost totally healthy - he is just sneezing all the time. Will Darius be my only rat within a few weeks time?
So one day I meet Sebastian - an about 4 months old male on death role. He is a light red agouti (genetically chocolate agouti), a bit smaller and thinner than his littermates. He is very nice tempered and mellow. He has a chocolate colored father, a badly marked black hooded mother and some littermates that are albino and ordinary agouti.
I never met the rest of his littermates. Sebastian is the most timid and sweet of them all (a common trait in chocolate agouti rats).
I decide right away to take him in and bring him home to Darius and Enzio. Down in a small box and into the rucksack and off towards home. His littermates is all on death role, but I can't take them all...
He had extremely long toe nails, that I cut, and then I put him in with Darius and Enzio. I was pretty convinced they would not fight because of the new male's mellow temperament. And I proved right!
Darius checked out the new male and decided he was not any kind of threat towards his position as leader of the pck. To be absolutely sure he guarded the feeding bowl a few days to make sure the new male would not eat before Darius himself. When the new male had lived with Darius and Enzio for only two days I find Darius and the new male sleeping together, nose beside nose and tail beside tail, comfortably outstreched in the hammock. Then I realize that the new male is accepted and I name him Sebastian, a name I've always loved.
The same day Sebastian comes up to and take food from my hands (half a piece of clementine) for the first time. He seems to adapt to his new live as a pet rat!
I never see Darius fight Sebastian. However Enzio and Sebastian have had several play fights when they turn each other up-side-down. They are both mellow and neither of them would ever consider fighting a more dominant male (like Darius). Darius and Enzio have never fought eachother - more than very obvious play fights and very hesitantly from both sides. Now when Sebastian and Enzio jumps at eachother and turn eackother up-side-down they look more like equals. They are only play fighting but they are fighting about position.
It seems like if Sebastian has succeded to become number two after Darius with Enzio last, but it is not totally trivial to decide since rats, like most other social animals, actually has a rather complex social hierarchy that moreover can vary from situation to situation.
One thing is certain, though; that Sebastian seems to enjoy his new life, even though he has not even learned his name yet! Besides the fact that he has cheered up Enzio a whole lot.
(Sebastian came from a place where the rats did not have Mykoplasma, and when he moved in with my two boys he caught the infection. But if I had been him I'd have chosen that to avoid being put to sleep along with his litter mates.)
Written by Eva Johansson on the 31th of January 1991.
Copyright Eva Johansson.
Last update: 11th of August 2006.