Litter Box Training Pet Rats
First, Oh my this is complicated. :)
And not always successful by any means.
I consider my rats to be very very litter-box trained - but I still find wee spots where I shouldn't. When rats get excited they have a harder time holding themselves. (So cute!)
Factors I think are important:
- Have a distinct flooring for the regular floor and a very different material for the litter box. Myself I use brown paper lunch bags for the normal flooring and Ecobedding for litter boxes.
- Have one litter box on each cage level. Rats can't hold themselves sometimes long enough to make it downstairs. Open play areas also need litter boxes. I have two for example in the 8' x 6' play pen, one in each corner.
- Make sure the litter boxes are large enough to hold the entire rat's length plus tail room. My largest is about 18 inches by 10 inches, and I've used larger. My smallest is 10" x 8". A rat might be okay with pushing his beehind into the corner of a box, but some want to stretch out. Work to accommodate personal preferences. :)
- For the cage set-up, in the beginning I fill up almost all the rats' open flooring with objects (mostly boxes with stuff inside them, including crunched up paper bags for shredding and general entertainment. The aim is to put things in their way and make the nice open litter boxes more enticing to sit in for potty.
- Begin the process by putting poops and urine marked material into the boxes, mixed into the litter. Continually move soiled material from the cage floor into the litter boxes until the training is complete.
- While they're learning, it's critical to keep all materials in the cage clean of urine and poop. Meaning if there's an accident in a hammock replace the hammock immediately. Quickly move all poops to the litter boxes. Discard wet bedding immediately. Don't let anything soiled stay there even briefly. This helps set up in the rats' mind, "There's a clean world," and "There's a bathroom." Where the two are "night and day" clear to the rats. This rule applies to play tables and play rooms too. It will work against success if you try to set up "the right way" in one environment but then let the rules collapse on the play table. The rat gets mixed messages this way.
The biggest teaching comes with some behavioral interventions on the human's part, the theme of which is to show the rats that "Now we do X (or Y, Z, A, B, etc.)" and "Now we pee." (I'll use pee as the example but either pee or poo applies.) Everything a rat does generates some physiological excitement, which can often trigger a pee need, so at every transitional moment in the rats' activities, plant the thought and decision point for the rat by offering the litter box. Think of it as, you don't do anything with your rat - stop or start any activity - without a bathroom break preceding or following the activity.
- What generates excitement? Everything! Waking, eating, playing, moving from this room to that room, watching one's human clean a cage, wrestling with a mischief mate. You name the activity you do or that your rat does, your rat is probably excited by it. Take advantage of having gotten the rat excited by offering a pee break.
- When you wake a rat up (after he's woken up slowly of course :), move him right to the litter box with a cheery "time to pee-pee!!" and "good boy!" if he pees. Then go on to play or whatever you planned to do.
- When you're done with a snuggle session, into the litter box, "time to pee!".
- Ready to eat? Pee first!
- Done eating? Pee now!
- Want to play on the table? Pee first.
- Done playing on the table? Time to pee.
- Ditto: coming out to be held, coming back to the cage from snuggling.
Pee, then do something; finish doing something, time to pee.
I think what happens in the rats' minds with all of these is:
- Clean bed feels good; toilet is for peeing.
- I can hold myself because playing on the table is for playing on the table and peeing happens on potty.
My girls of long ago, whom I didn't begin trying to litter box train until they were adults, had a hard time holding themselves even as babies when we were snuggling, as well as with any activity, so to help them develop good abdominal muscles, we did 2 minutes of holding and then pee break. Gradually extended the time as they realized they could trust me to get them to the potty on time, so it was worth their working hard to hold themselves. This pattern applied to doing other activities too. So instead of a 10 minute play session on the table, we stopped at 2 minutes and offered potties. Sometimes they peed, sometimes not. But on the 3rd 2-minute break, they might potty. The girls were expert litter box users. One of my favorite images is of Chancy ("Chance-ee") blistering at light speed out of a hammock where she'd been sound asleep, down a level, through a PVC connector, into another cage, and wham into the big litter box where she peed. Then she dashed back and up and back to sleep. :)
----
Also, I realized there is more to say about my current 3 boys and litter box training. I said they "were trained from the minute I got them" and that was grammatically wrong. I meant, "I trained them from the minute I got them." They were NOOOOOwhere near anything remotely like being trained on their arrival at 7-9 weeks of age. It was kind of a shock after my four polite girly-girls for over some 3 years. The boys messed up everything including their water bowl (I use bowls instead of bottles). Without quite knowing where it would lead I just doggedly followed the recipe:
- move poos/wet bedding to the litter box
- clean out soiled anything constantly - in this case this meant the entire cage daily
- structured the insides with objects to fill the floor space
- kept the water bowl above the floor level (also put in 2 bowls to insure they had fresh water).
The babies were very unsocialized. While I *could* pick them up, they were helter-skelter. Inside the cage they were not able to process me placing them in the litter box with a nice "pee-pee" in my sing-song baby voice. Nevertheless I did my best and kept to the routine. I did find dozens of poops in the litter box right from the start but the cage overall - It took 2 months (guessing here) to see improvement. I *think* I saw them begin to appreciate their (daily) cleaned cage, as part of what motivated them to get into the groove.
The lesson of placing each one on the litter box before and after an activity also had a learning curve. Toby Toe-Toe was the extreme example. If he was ready to come out to play and instead his human said 'pee-pee first', he would spin around and stare at me with "this is ludicrous" on his face, and abruptly hop out to me. I would place him back in (this was when I had just woken him up and knew without a shadow of a doubt that he needed to pee but was ignoring it). There were times I needed to repeat this 3-4 times, and some of those his reaction was to smile for: He got POOFY at me. "Are you LISTENING to me??? I'm ANNOYED."
Cute but serious too. Toby wasn't going to go this far but some rats will bite because the poofy indicates they've been pushed too far.) What I got from his reaction was he was confused and also experiencing me as teasing him in a sense. So I would pick him up and snuggle him and calm down his poofiness. Give him a few moments of out-holding, and try again. I aimed to not get into a pattern where he would poof.
I think what happens is that they are confused initially, they hop out with "Nope not now" which they stick to, and so I would give in for a few minutes and then try again. Repeating this resulted in them more coincidentally needing to pee rather than connecting the dots about my request. But repetition repetition and success built on success.
I was thinking about this last night and realized that my rats don't come out of the cage except via first being placed in the litter box, and I don't return them to the cage without first landing them in the litter box. Same for the play room, I set them down first into a litter box. On play completion, it's to the litter box in their regular cage. They don't always pee every time, which is fine; it's just giving them the environment that triggers any, "Oh, yeah, I need to go."
With my current boy rats, I have one who is not with the program. I've been watching Toby to understand him and I think it has to do with, he will bolt off to a box to pee, and because I don't intercept him, he doesn't get a signal that his behavior is not okay. I also made the mistake of allowing the rats to hop into a litter box to eat something (I speculate that rats do this because predators may not detect them through the poop smell??) and I didn't argue about that. So by associating the litter box with 'where I eat' and a play box with 'where I pee', Toby has learned wrongly. Currently I'm preventing them from eating in the litter boxes and more rigorously intercepting Toby to redirect him to the litter box. I hope this works, but I haven't figured out how to help Toe-Toe fully understand his responsibility. :)
-----
I've seen a corner thing that seemed too small to me so I've never tried it.
I grab rectangles where I find them...
- 8" x 8" pyrex baking dishes (but for the 1" ecobedding layer these are too shallow. They work but I don't like them much.)
- 16" x 8" pyrex ditto
- A plastic box that was part of an old table fountain that is perfect actually for a tight upper level, 10" x 8".
- recently I found a great plastic refrigerator drawer thing at a local ACE hardware - it looks like it's supposed to go on the bottom of the frig in the drawer slots, a generic size. It's about 15" long, 8" wide, and 5" deep. It's perfect for the "big" litter box. It's heavy duty and hard plastic.
- sometimes I find ceramic plant holders, but they tend to come in odd shapes, be bulky, and have holes in the bottom.
- kitchen plastic storage bins that come with lids can work. I have a hefty semi-soft one like the frig drawer. I love the 5" deep kind.
I realize that plastic is not the best choice so I'm always looking for glass types. If the rats gnaw the plastic I find, I don't use that container.... I can't go to a store that I don't put up my rat antennae and look at everything from the perspective of, "would this make a good litter box?".
-----
Even if the cage is small, give up whatever it takes to fit a litter box.
Since you need to fill the flooring with objects, the litter box can be one of them.
The babies' floor can be 80% litter box and 20% other.
Since they think they should pee everywhere, 80% litter box is actually good to start with.
I had a method in mind once, that if a person has started off with some kind of layer of something on the entire cage floor, and the rats were never litter-box trained, meaning that they're used to peeing/pooing everywhere, then the method would be to keep that flooring as the litter material but slowly make the available area smaller. Slowly bring the flooring-turned-litter to a smaller and smaller sized area. Play boxes and other objects appear, etc. The rats are motivated to pee in what they think is normal floor material, but you've decided to turn that into litter material. As the area of litter material contracts, the rats are already (theoretically) motivated to find it and use it wherever it is.
I'd be curious if this method works if someone were to try it....
Read MoreAnd not always successful by any means.
I consider my rats to be very very litter-box trained - but I still find wee spots where I shouldn't. When rats get excited they have a harder time holding themselves. (So cute!)
Factors I think are important:
- Have a distinct flooring for the regular floor and a very different material for the litter box. Myself I use brown paper lunch bags for the normal flooring and Ecobedding for litter boxes.
- Have one litter box on each cage level. Rats can't hold themselves sometimes long enough to make it downstairs. Open play areas also need litter boxes. I have two for example in the 8' x 6' play pen, one in each corner.
- Make sure the litter boxes are large enough to hold the entire rat's length plus tail room. My largest is about 18 inches by 10 inches, and I've used larger. My smallest is 10" x 8". A rat might be okay with pushing his beehind into the corner of a box, but some want to stretch out. Work to accommodate personal preferences. :)
- For the cage set-up, in the beginning I fill up almost all the rats' open flooring with objects (mostly boxes with stuff inside them, including crunched up paper bags for shredding and general entertainment. The aim is to put things in their way and make the nice open litter boxes more enticing to sit in for potty.
- Begin the process by putting poops and urine marked material into the boxes, mixed into the litter. Continually move soiled material from the cage floor into the litter boxes until the training is complete.
- While they're learning, it's critical to keep all materials in the cage clean of urine and poop. Meaning if there's an accident in a hammock replace the hammock immediately. Quickly move all poops to the litter boxes. Discard wet bedding immediately. Don't let anything soiled stay there even briefly. This helps set up in the rats' mind, "There's a clean world," and "There's a bathroom." Where the two are "night and day" clear to the rats. This rule applies to play tables and play rooms too. It will work against success if you try to set up "the right way" in one environment but then let the rules collapse on the play table. The rat gets mixed messages this way.
The biggest teaching comes with some behavioral interventions on the human's part, the theme of which is to show the rats that "Now we do X (or Y, Z, A, B, etc.)" and "Now we pee." (I'll use pee as the example but either pee or poo applies.) Everything a rat does generates some physiological excitement, which can often trigger a pee need, so at every transitional moment in the rats' activities, plant the thought and decision point for the rat by offering the litter box. Think of it as, you don't do anything with your rat - stop or start any activity - without a bathroom break preceding or following the activity.
- What generates excitement? Everything! Waking, eating, playing, moving from this room to that room, watching one's human clean a cage, wrestling with a mischief mate. You name the activity you do or that your rat does, your rat is probably excited by it. Take advantage of having gotten the rat excited by offering a pee break.
- When you wake a rat up (after he's woken up slowly of course :), move him right to the litter box with a cheery "time to pee-pee!!" and "good boy!" if he pees. Then go on to play or whatever you planned to do.
- When you're done with a snuggle session, into the litter box, "time to pee!".
- Ready to eat? Pee first!
- Done eating? Pee now!
- Want to play on the table? Pee first.
- Done playing on the table? Time to pee.
- Ditto: coming out to be held, coming back to the cage from snuggling.
Pee, then do something; finish doing something, time to pee.
I think what happens in the rats' minds with all of these is:
- Clean bed feels good; toilet is for peeing.
- I can hold myself because playing on the table is for playing on the table and peeing happens on potty.
My girls of long ago, whom I didn't begin trying to litter box train until they were adults, had a hard time holding themselves even as babies when we were snuggling, as well as with any activity, so to help them develop good abdominal muscles, we did 2 minutes of holding and then pee break. Gradually extended the time as they realized they could trust me to get them to the potty on time, so it was worth their working hard to hold themselves. This pattern applied to doing other activities too. So instead of a 10 minute play session on the table, we stopped at 2 minutes and offered potties. Sometimes they peed, sometimes not. But on the 3rd 2-minute break, they might potty. The girls were expert litter box users. One of my favorite images is of Chancy ("Chance-ee") blistering at light speed out of a hammock where she'd been sound asleep, down a level, through a PVC connector, into another cage, and wham into the big litter box where she peed. Then she dashed back and up and back to sleep. :)
----
Also, I realized there is more to say about my current 3 boys and litter box training. I said they "were trained from the minute I got them" and that was grammatically wrong. I meant, "I trained them from the minute I got them." They were NOOOOOwhere near anything remotely like being trained on their arrival at 7-9 weeks of age. It was kind of a shock after my four polite girly-girls for over some 3 years. The boys messed up everything including their water bowl (I use bowls instead of bottles). Without quite knowing where it would lead I just doggedly followed the recipe:
- move poos/wet bedding to the litter box
- clean out soiled anything constantly - in this case this meant the entire cage daily
- structured the insides with objects to fill the floor space
- kept the water bowl above the floor level (also put in 2 bowls to insure they had fresh water).
The babies were very unsocialized. While I *could* pick them up, they were helter-skelter. Inside the cage they were not able to process me placing them in the litter box with a nice "pee-pee" in my sing-song baby voice. Nevertheless I did my best and kept to the routine. I did find dozens of poops in the litter box right from the start but the cage overall - It took 2 months (guessing here) to see improvement. I *think* I saw them begin to appreciate their (daily) cleaned cage, as part of what motivated them to get into the groove.
The lesson of placing each one on the litter box before and after an activity also had a learning curve. Toby Toe-Toe was the extreme example. If he was ready to come out to play and instead his human said 'pee-pee first', he would spin around and stare at me with "this is ludicrous" on his face, and abruptly hop out to me. I would place him back in (this was when I had just woken him up and knew without a shadow of a doubt that he needed to pee but was ignoring it). There were times I needed to repeat this 3-4 times, and some of those his reaction was to smile for: He got POOFY at me. "Are you LISTENING to me??? I'm ANNOYED."
Cute but serious too. Toby wasn't going to go this far but some rats will bite because the poofy indicates they've been pushed too far.) What I got from his reaction was he was confused and also experiencing me as teasing him in a sense. So I would pick him up and snuggle him and calm down his poofiness. Give him a few moments of out-holding, and try again. I aimed to not get into a pattern where he would poof.
I think what happens is that they are confused initially, they hop out with "Nope not now" which they stick to, and so I would give in for a few minutes and then try again. Repeating this resulted in them more coincidentally needing to pee rather than connecting the dots about my request. But repetition repetition and success built on success.
I was thinking about this last night and realized that my rats don't come out of the cage except via first being placed in the litter box, and I don't return them to the cage without first landing them in the litter box. Same for the play room, I set them down first into a litter box. On play completion, it's to the litter box in their regular cage. They don't always pee every time, which is fine; it's just giving them the environment that triggers any, "Oh, yeah, I need to go."
With my current boy rats, I have one who is not with the program. I've been watching Toby to understand him and I think it has to do with, he will bolt off to a box to pee, and because I don't intercept him, he doesn't get a signal that his behavior is not okay. I also made the mistake of allowing the rats to hop into a litter box to eat something (I speculate that rats do this because predators may not detect them through the poop smell??) and I didn't argue about that. So by associating the litter box with 'where I eat' and a play box with 'where I pee', Toby has learned wrongly. Currently I'm preventing them from eating in the litter boxes and more rigorously intercepting Toby to redirect him to the litter box. I hope this works, but I haven't figured out how to help Toe-Toe fully understand his responsibility. :)
-----
I've seen a corner thing that seemed too small to me so I've never tried it.
I grab rectangles where I find them...
- 8" x 8" pyrex baking dishes (but for the 1" ecobedding layer these are too shallow. They work but I don't like them much.)
- 16" x 8" pyrex ditto
- A plastic box that was part of an old table fountain that is perfect actually for a tight upper level, 10" x 8".
- recently I found a great plastic refrigerator drawer thing at a local ACE hardware - it looks like it's supposed to go on the bottom of the frig in the drawer slots, a generic size. It's about 15" long, 8" wide, and 5" deep. It's perfect for the "big" litter box. It's heavy duty and hard plastic.
- sometimes I find ceramic plant holders, but they tend to come in odd shapes, be bulky, and have holes in the bottom.
- kitchen plastic storage bins that come with lids can work. I have a hefty semi-soft one like the frig drawer. I love the 5" deep kind.
I realize that plastic is not the best choice so I'm always looking for glass types. If the rats gnaw the plastic I find, I don't use that container.... I can't go to a store that I don't put up my rat antennae and look at everything from the perspective of, "would this make a good litter box?".
-----
Even if the cage is small, give up whatever it takes to fit a litter box.
Since you need to fill the flooring with objects, the litter box can be one of them.
The babies' floor can be 80% litter box and 20% other.
Since they think they should pee everywhere, 80% litter box is actually good to start with.
I had a method in mind once, that if a person has started off with some kind of layer of something on the entire cage floor, and the rats were never litter-box trained, meaning that they're used to peeing/pooing everywhere, then the method would be to keep that flooring as the litter material but slowly make the available area smaller. Slowly bring the flooring-turned-litter to a smaller and smaller sized area. Play boxes and other objects appear, etc. The rats are motivated to pee in what they think is normal floor material, but you've decided to turn that into litter material. As the area of litter material contracts, the rats are already (theoretically) motivated to find it and use it wherever it is.
I'd be curious if this method works if someone were to try it....
Chancy munches watermelon. Litter box cut with an opening to help hind-end weak-rats enter and exit.
gwen's ratschancy ratgallery litter box training pet ratslitter box trainingecobedding litter
