Snug Holding Pet Rats

At the bottom of this description are several videos of helping pet rats with a "snug hold" or "grip cave." Pet rats - how to help them calm down when they're wiggly in your hands? I'm still hunting for what to call this - "snug hold", "grip cave," "snuggle cave". Many pet rat owners do some version of this, but I've seen it briefly described only on RattyRat.com. If you know of other sites that describe this kind of holding, please let me know.

Holding the rat to give her snugness, a cave, and a hidey-place is tricky when you also must not apply *force*. In these examples, I do ask the rat to tolerate a snug hold, but when she calms or stills, she always chooses to do so. If she does not choose to calm down, she will wiggle free, and there are many examples of doing just that. The rat and human do a give and take: Human asks rat to calm down under a snug "hold", rat may do so; then rat's anxiety returns and she wiggles free, and human supports her doing that. Then the pattern repeats. After dozens and dozens of repeats, the rat becomes calmer and calmer in the human's hands.

The importance of not forcing the rat into a tight unyielding grip, is that if one does that, the rat will panic. As a prey animal expecting a hawk to swoop down any moment, the rat needs to feel she can escape (to safety). And sitting still, which is part of this exercise, is also scary, because a rat in a still position is a great target for a meal. So the human supports the rat's need to move around, in other words, wiggle out of the snug hold, by letting her. She will move here and there, perhaps up to the shoulder. After a moment of calming in this fashion, the human can again invite the rat back into a "grip cave", or "snug hold," for lack of a better term.

Somehow I've got to find a better descriptor for a holding action that involves snugness, snuggling, covering, and providing a cave, where there is indeed a snug hold, but not force. One way it feels, is as if the rat is running from a predator, and dives into a hole in the ground, jamming into the tightest corner, tight tight tight. That seems to provide her with the best safety, the most out-of-sight, perhaps.

In my hands, the rat may shove her nose into the butt-end of my palm, and push into it. Early on when I was trying to understand this behavior, I thought that was a signal she was trying to get away from me, and so I would loosen the "snug", but this resulted in the rat moving forward to the new position of my palm, and pushing into it again. I found I needed to push back into her nose. So we both pushed, and I needed to push exactly as much as the rat pushed. When I do that, the rat will often stop pushing, but hold the tension, and then after a bit of time, evidence a sigh of relaxation. Sometimes this is followed by the rat stretching herself out lengthwise (all under my hand) in a more relaxed shape than the bunchiness with which she starts off.

There are also rats that absolutely do not feel helped by this, or feel helped only sometimes, but not always. Here it is tricky to figure out, does this rat want me to hold more snugly? Or is her wiggling a sign that I'm holding too snugly? Which is it? I don't know how to answer that, but I have a limit to how much snug holding I exert on a rat. Hopefully over time with more videos, finding that balance of, add more snug, or let up, will become clearer.

There is one video in particular that shows a rat that absolutely did not appreciate a snug hold, and there my response is, of course, to help him wiggle free. This video, of Gwen and Keith practicing on two different rats, is a bit funny because I was trying to show Keith how to help a rat, and he had better luck with his rat than I did with mine. Good examples of, go with the flow of the particular rat. Do not impose an expectation on a rat, as that will probably result in applying inappropriate force that will frighten the sweet ratty-kid.