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- Science Bits on Modifying Rat Behavior
- Modify Rat Behavior
- Earning Trust - Science Incomplete
- Let Rats Decide When
- Bathtub, Carrier, Glove, Shirt, or Pouch: These Are Just Things and Not Techniques
- Let Rats Use Their Teeth
- Help an Unsocialized Rat - Any Rat! - Love a Transport Box
- Litter Box Training Pet Rats
- Use a "Neck Box" with Shy Rats
- Help Your Rat Sit Quietly In Your Arms
- Help Friendly Rats Be More Careful with Their Teeth
- Work Inside the Cage to Help Shy Rats Trust
- Snuggle with Rats
- Pockets Pockets!
- Bond with Rats in "Pouches"
- Infant and Baby Rats - Affecting Behavior
- Bring Rats Into Your Shirt?
- Snug Holding Pet Rats
- Use Touch to Help Shy Rats Tolerate Touch
- Use Touch to Help Shy Rats Tolerate Touch - YouTube
- Help Tame Rats Slow Down Treat-Taking
- Rodentistry
- Please Do Not Use "Forced Socialization"
- Forced Socialization - Jane Adamo's Original Method
- Groom To Bond
- Groom to Bond - from YouTube 1
- Groom to Bond - from YouTube 2
- Groom to Bond - from YouTube 3
- Groom to Bond - from YouTube 4
- Aggression & Management
- Rat Behaviors
- Ratbehavior.org - Essential Behaviors
- Major Rat Body Language - RattyRat
- Establishing the Social Hierarchy: Normal Rat Behaviors
- Normal Play Behavior in Rats
- The Dangers of "No Blood, No Foul"
- Are These Two Rats’ Behaviors “Over the Top”?
- Rats and the Concept of "Alpha"
- Submission, Dominance, Appeasement
- Fear Behaviors of Rats
- Behaviors of "Released" Laboratory Rats
- Tail-Flicking in Pet Rats, YouTube 1 of 2
- Tail-Flicking in Pet Rats - YouTube 2 of 2
- Introduce Rats to Rats
- Enrichment
- Rats Hunt Feathers
- Rats Stash Stuff
- Rats and Evil Bandaids
- Fountains, Rubber, Rocks, and Rats
- Rats Stash from YouTube
- Rats Nom-Nom Coconuts
- One Example of a Rat Play Room
- Jump, Rats, Jump!
- Rats and Pumpkins
- Rats Enjoy Water
- Rats Play
- Enrichment YouTube Videos
- Rats Outside?
- Rats Make Trouble
- Fun Wheel, Stress Wheel, or No Wheel At All
- Rat Health
- Oops? Pregnancy, Birth and Babies
- Start Here: Rat Basics for Pregnancy, Birth, and Babies
- Rat Reproduction - by Debbie Ducommun
- Raising Rat Orphans
- Caring for Rat & Mouse Orphans - AFRMA
- Baby Rat Growth: Birth to Weaning - Rat Guide
- Baby Rat Growth: Baby Rat Development - AFRMA
- Baby Rat Growth: Pictures of the Pinkies - Rattie World O' Comfort
- Sexing Rats: Sexing Baby Rats 101 - AFRMA
- Sexing Rats: Alpha Centauri Stud
- Sexing Rats: Litter Journal - Curiosity Rattery
- Sexing Rats: RatRaisins.com
- Sexing Rats: Is This Rat a Boy or a Girl? - RattyRat
- Healthy Squeaks or Sick Squeaks?
- Bandaging Rats
- How To Do a Post-Op Bandage with Anchor Tapes on a Rat
- Slideshow - Post-Op Bandage with Anchor Tapes on a Rat
- Real Life Example of Anchor Tape Bandage Emergency
- When a Rat Won't Leave a Bandage or Wound Alone
- A Veterinarian Demonstrates Bandaging Rossi
- Good Bandages
- Workable But Mediocre Bandages
- Problem Bandages
- Bathing Rats
- Giving Medications
- When Rats Need to Diet
- Rats Do Hiccup!
- Rats Hiccup - YouTube
- Hind Leg Weakness
- Physical Symptoms of Ill Rats
- Videos of Rat Physical Exams
- Compassionate Euthanasia of Pet Rats
- Trimming Rats' Nails
- Trimming Rats' Teeth
- Rat Anatomy, or, Pretty Pictures
- Multi-Level Cages for Older Rats
- Assorted Rat Cages
- Compassionate Euthanasia
- Oops? Pregnancy, Birth and Babies
- Other Sites
- Rats Are Beautiful & Hilarious
- Friends
- Gwen
- Family From Fosters
- Three Rats: Maizie, Robin, Rudy
- Introducing baby boys to Gully, Tookie, and Pemy
- Introducing Maizie and Mijah to Gully, Tookie, and Pemy
- Maizie, Mijah, Reunited with Babies Rudy and Robin
- Maizie's Amazing Boy Babies, Rudy and Robin
- Maizie Has Oops Babies
- New: Mijah and Maizie
- Seven Makes Rats
- Willow Joins Me
- Flight Cage Fun (No, Rats Don't Fly)
- Pemy Joins Gulliver and Tookie
- Gulliver and Tookie
- Bitten By Pemy Rat
- Pemy and Dicey
- Mixed Up Lots 'O Rats Fun
- Old Lady Rat Lives with Young Boys
- Tugger, Toby, Timmy
- Adventures In The Rat Room
- Tugger, Toby, Timmy, Almost Grown
- Boy Rats Play Table
- New Boys Tugger, Toby, Timmy
- A Lila Rat Slideshow
- Chancy Rat, Four Years Old!
- Gwen's Pet Rats - The Girls
- Chancy Rat Boggles
- The Big Rat Room
- The Girl's Rat Room - When They Were Young
- Pen and Box Play Space
- The Old Lady Rat Room
- Clicker Adventures
- Karen Borga
- Lindsay
- Wanda & Tony
- Gwen
- Links - Behavior Modification
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When Rats Need to Diet

Is your sweet rat shaped like a PEAR, instead of a proper SAUSAGE?
Identifying your rat as a pear or a sausage is not all there is to deciding whether to diet a rat. Many factors need to be considered: the overall health of the rat, history of the rat's types of diets, previous weight changes over time, genetic factors, age, and other stressers present, for example if the rat just came from a bad environment and hasn't settled down.
What do you need to properly diet a rat? These are critical:
1. Thorough assessment of your rat's health.
2. Do this assessment with your vet.
3. Use a gram scale to weigh your rats. No scale? Don't try to diet your rat. The 1% weight loss per week is very difficult to achieve even with a scale.
4. Food portions must be controlled by weighing them, and/or controlling calorie content.
5. Track and do not exceed the maximum recommended 1% weight loss per week. This means weighing the rats weekly and doing the math to achieve 1% loss only. (An Excel spreadsheet can be a great aid to this - see below for one.)

Are you considering putting your rat on a diet?
Under the photographs below is a full-length portion of my own Excel workbook from 2008, to show how my Diet Excel form looks in working mode. Contact me if you want a copy of my excel file.
If you would like to help a rat loose weight, and have gotten veterinarian input towards that end, tracking weight loss becomes extremely important, because the recommended weight loss is only 1% per week. One percent per week is a very small amount to lose, and adding a bit more or less food can result in large losses or gains. Using a scale that weighs in grams, and tracking the weight loss regularly, has in my experience been the only way to succeed at helping rats loose weight safely.
Frankly, I never did get control over my rats' weight loss until I invented this Excel template to track the loss. The critical element of this spreadsheet is that is automatically calculates the 1% loss per week no matter how often you weigh the rats. This means you can weigh twice a week, or every 3 weeks, and the formulas still tell you how you are doing from the standpoint of 1% loss per week.
The spreadsheet requires minimal Excel data entry skills. If you would like to obtain the Excel workbook, please contact me (see navbar at the top), and I'll be happy to send it to you and discuss how it works.
Here are pictures of Bright Biggity Buxom Bonny Bon-Bon at various weights. She was my inspiration for enforcing weight loss. Bonny was distinctly obese at 9 weeks of age, and remained so throughout her life. At one point her fattiness got too extreme, and dieting helped me help her back to a more manageable (though still over) weight.
Sample of my Excel spreadsheet for tracking a rat's diet. (First effort on my part to diet rats and to track their weight loss.)
I enter:
1. The starting weights of the rats, and the date I weigh them.
2. A guess about their ideal weight (I can change this any time.)
3. Then, next time I weigh them, I enter the date (light green cell), and their weights (light yellow cells).
4. The critical info to zero in on is, "% change (-/+)". What I want to see here is as close to 1% as possible. In the date of 4/1/08, for the first rat, Bonny, I see -2.81%. This told me she lost WAY more than 1%. So I adjusted the amount of food she got for the next week, UP, to stabilize her weight loss.
But as you can see in the following weeks, she continued to loose weight more than 1% per week. It was not until about 4/27/08, a month later, that I managed to stabilize her portions. I then allowed her to gain slightly, to even out the average loss per week.






