Bax and Blane were two black littermates, one female and one male, that I bought as pet rats from a rat breeder. Blane turned aggressive rather soon, he was still young when he was put to sleep, Bax was more slowly getting into the habit of biting, so she was about 18 months when I had to put her to sleep, and then she had not been a pet rat for a long while.
Their father was Aristoteles Isarro, a gentle fawn rat I had sold to that breeder, and their mother was Lena Råttan's Nokia, a daughter to El Toro. Nokia's mother Pretty Woman had a rat called Eleanor Rigby as her mother, and she developed the same way as Bax, turning slowly into a biting rat. I know, since I got Eleanor Rigby as a companion to one of my rats... I named her "Elli-pelli Bitråtta", meaning "Elli-pelli Biter".
I have since then learned that this behaviour in females is extremely common among Swedish show rats/breeder rats. These two, Bax and Elli-pelli, were my first and only encounters with that kind of bad behaviour. All the years I had been breeding rats I had never had any rats behaving like that before.
Copyright Eva Johansson.
Last update: 12th of January 2006.