RATZILLA (VIDEO): Train your rats to love water, heatstroke away

Rats love to fish for food under water. It's a great way of fighting heat stroke in pet rats.

Rats fishing for food

Take 2, better lighting

Hi bhes! Like I said before I would be migrating my pet rat articles to this blog. But this is not just a repost and everything here is revised with a fresh new content. Quality matters!

Summer can be very unforgiving here in Manila, especially for our pets. Naturally, hitting the shower and drinking lots of water is what we humans would do. Some pet rat owners might find it a little difficult since rats are afraid of water... at first. But they can be trained in their own terms.

Rats love food, and they would do anything for food. An effective way of introducing them to water and training them to love water is, you guessed it right. FOOD.

You can buy barley (trigo) from poultry feed stores and each kilogram retails around P25. If barley is not available, you can also try dog biscuits or pellets.

First, we begin by throwing in some food into very shallow water. Just leave it there because rats are quick to pick up. You might notice that they adapt real quickly to water this way and can begin increasing the depth of the water level the next day.

Once they really get used to the idea that 'playing in water is fun', you would be surprised that they would even dive down a full tank of water just to fish for food. Yes, I found it amusing, as if they turned into semi-aquatic animals. Talk about positive reinforcement!

You can throw in food like barley to motivate rats to play with water.

Start with shallow water, gradually increasing the depth as the get more used to it.

Even if they hate water, you can easily motivate them with food and they quickly adapt to water as soon as Day 1.

Within Week 1, you can already see the result.

Some of them might be shy and stay on the side, don't force them.

It's very refreshing. Now you feed them and they bathe themselves at the same time.

Now that they're used to water, they're more confident to fish for food on a deeper level.

Too much enthusiasm for water.

Rats love to 'take-out' so many of the dog biscuits end up falling or wasted.
This guarantees that they only take what they need and we waste less food