Denna sida på svenska. Those little plastic containers that you get your roll of film in when you buy ordinary 135 mm film for your camera - there are of course a variety of designs made by different manufacturers - they can be of much use. If you are a rat, you can have much fun with them too.
It started with me getting closely aquanted with a dog almost three years ago. Then I learned a new concept. Activation. The dog had to be activated in order to be happy and contented, and to be a nuisance as little as possible. I read books about dogs, lots of books, and they all returned to the activation theme. It is obviously something of great importance when you take care of a dog. To activate the dog, I mean.
Eventually I understood that this is not true only for dogs - it is true for all animals! (A result of this insight was, among other things, the booklet about activating your rat). I get a whole lot of fun out of trying to come up with new ways to activate my rats, but I often go back to what it all started with. The boxes and film roll containers with treats inside. The rats usually get small boxes - or rather small paper boxes. Like little packets of throat pastilles and other small paper boxes, also toilet paper rolls that have been closed with tape in both ends. All with a hidden treat inside. At the moment the plastic film roll containers are much appreciated. A perfect size and obviously fun to gnaw on. It shows since they leave little teeth marks everywhere on them. Some of their gnawed film roll containers displays such interesting teeth markings that I sometimes consider keeping them - as pieces of art maybe.
Certainly I use to make a hole in them so that the rats can smell the hidden treats inside - ie that it is well worth their effort to work a bit in order to open them. But still: I think it is really fantastic to see how well rats can learn new things!
It only takes a couple of minutes to open them, but when they at last have opened them they find a treat inside as a reward for making the effort. That is exactly what activation is. To make your pet use its brain a while, most often with a treat as a reward. Because the rat of course use its brain in order to learn how to open plastic containers and boxes! When the rat has learned the trick, it is the owners duty to vary the wrappings. A small plastic film roll container one day, a small paper box or a big cardboard box the next, and so on. Eventually you may be doing as you may for a dog - one box inside another, that is inside a third. With a treat in the innermost box. There is many wrappings that are just thrown away every day, these can be collected and used, put a treat inside, seal it with some tape and give it to your rats. It cannot get more simple and more cheap than this, can it?
Besides, I read the other day in quite a new book about laboratory animals (The Experimental Animal in Biomedical Research, Volume II, 1995) that even if you give rats a "big" cage with many play things to explore and enjoy the rats will eventually get bored of it anyway - if you do not rearrange the "furniture" inside the cage and supply the rats with new play things regularly. In fact the book said that it exists a scientific study stating just that... In the view of this I think that simple and renewable diversions like wrappings with treats inside, and also all the fun stuff in the booklet "Aktivering är kul!", is a fantastic idea. Really. (! didn´t invent all the fun in "Aktivering är kul!" myself, I have gotten my inspiration from many sources).
How do you in fact teach your rats to open wrappings to find the hidden treats, then? Well, first I ought to mention that it is often sufficient to teach one rat, this rat will then teach its cagemates how to do it. Rats can learn a lot from each other!
You can take those little paper bags that some more expensive tea bags are wrapped in one by one, put a treat in and give to the rat... or just take a small piece of paper and wrap it round a treat (like the paper round a toffee). Some rats get the idea at once, other rats need a bit of time. When the rat understands the idea, it is time for variation, to start using different kinds of wrappings. Those plastic film roll containers will probably not be the first you try. It takes a while to gnaw into them, so if the rat is not persistent it will get tired before it has gotten to the treat. And then the rat will not at all have learned what you were trying to teach it.
Written by: Eva Johansson.
("Aktivering är kul!" is a booklet written in Swedish with lots of tips and tricks for the rat, based on the idea that rats need activation.)
Copyright Eva Johansson.
Last update: 11th of August 2006.