RIP Trip

I want to start out by saying that the last 14  hours have been rough for me this time around. Unfortunately we had to put a young rat to sleep, an emergency euthaniziation last night. Let me explain:

All of our cages in the Chicago facility, which is my home, have been donated. We take in quite a variety of cages from donations and we got a set of cages that had small bar spacing, built in food dishes, and built in wheels, big ones, so thought it would be great for holding some of our younger rats. I was planning to move a group of girls out of one of them last night to get them into a larger cage and to help with getting them better socialized. However, I am on meds for my back that, after a while, cause me to get very tired and I just ran out of energy last night. That I will regret for a long time to come.

As my husband and I were getting ready for bed, just snugglng watching TV, we heard a squeak, we waited to see if it was something serious as quite often if we just to the first squeak, we get out to the rat room, which is just feet from our bedroom door, and turn on a light and get all these little ratty faces looking as us like "What?", so we wanted to be sure that it was something worth getting up for. After about 10 seconds, we realized that maybe it was worth checking into.

As soon as my husband got out to the rat room, he called to me to come out, that he needed help. I came out immediately, turned on the light and saw what he needed help with. We say, what appeared to be, a young female rat with her leg stuck at the top of the wheel. I thought that she just had her foot stuck, so we worked carefully to quickly assess the situation with her. I turned the wheel backwards about 3 turns and she took off. We decided, at that moment, no matter how much pain my back was in, and no matter how tired we both were, to move them to the other cage. So here we are, at midnight, moving rats from one cage to another.

I was not sure which rat had been stuck, so as we are pulling out all of our black bareback girls, I am checking their legs to make sure they are all ok. One, two, three rats, all ok. So maybe the girl (who I named Trip after all of this), was actually ok. THe last rat we pulled out of the cage told me that she was not ok and I am glad we decided at that moment to pull move the rats out.

As soon as I picked her up, I knew that she was hurt as she was not only not using her back leg, that it was just hanging limp, like she could not move it. I turned her over, which she did not fight, and discovered soemthing that brought tears to my eyes. Her back leg had been broken severly by being trapped in the wheel and the bone was actually sticking out of the skin.

What we think happened is that, as happens quite often, 2 rats were trying to share the wheel in the cage. One rat was running faster than the other and Trip got a "go around" or just hung on as she got flipped over the wheel. NOrmally it is a funny thing to watch as one rat hangs on as another gives her a ride. However, in this case, there was nothing funny about her ride. Most likely, halfway through her ride either she tried to get out of the wheel or her leg slipped off and got caught in the bar that holds the wheel onto the cage. Because rats will run at full speed in a wheel, the wheel made a couple of turns before he leg being caught caused it to get stuck. This, most likely, is when she started to squeak. Had it been a scream, we would have been right up, but it was just a squeak, sounding like protest rather than pain.

Because her leg was broken, we took just a moment to determine our options. Even if we took her to an emergency vet, and even if they did surgery to amputate her leg (there was no saving the leg) she would still be in pain for no less than a month, assuming that once it healed that she would be pain free. Most likely the vet would recommend euthanization as well, because of how bad it was, so we made the choice to put her to sleep here. We have a set up here for putting rats to sleep, to help save on money AND so we know the rats are being humanely euthanized, not a heart stick.

So, quickly, we said our good byes to her and put her to sleep late last night. Normally I do it slow, to give them time to adjust and fall asleep, but I moved it up a bit last night, without causing her undue pain, but wanting to end her pain quickly. Once she was gone, I checked out her leg more thoroughly. I know that, after looking at it, that we made the right choice. It was broken worse that we first believed, so I know that we did the best possible thing for her last night that we could.

This is the first injury of this nature we have had here and I am feeling so guilty at the moment, have been since last night. I did not even imagine that something like this could happen from that cage and I know now not to put young rats in those cages. We are going to be moving any rats under 6 months old out of those cages and will start to warn rat owners about this cage an the damage that it could cause their rats. Within the month I will have a warning up on my site as well, to warn everyone about the cag and so my readers here can see what the cage looks like so if they have the cage, they can be warned about the issues that could happen with them.

Have a Blessed Day

Tami
Social Rats Adoption and Rescu