MAIL!

Hey, Rugby, we got a letter! It reads:

Pictures, oh where are the pictures? To Rugby: Hello! Are you a boy or girl rat? How old are you?What is your favorite food?Do you like Barney (the dinosaur)?*

*Questions courtesy of Madison, age 2 1/2.

don't give me tsuris over the pictures, primate. maybe i am too little to use a camera, but i doubt you could swim through a sewer pipe and up a toilet u-bend if you had to. BUT i can, perhaps when you least expect it, ha-ha!

Rugby, that's no way to talk to company. Anyway, I have pictures here that I took on a recent Bring Your Rat To Work Day. (It was not officially Bring Your Rat To Work Day, but I decided it was high time to start one. Lead by example, that's what the Boy Scouts taught me.) So...

Here is a picture of Rugby searching the Rolodex on Uncle Bob's desk. Behind him you can see a plant growing in a Coca-Cola bottle and a wooden bear toy from Russia.

isn't uncle bob's desk a mess? it is worse than yasser arafat's! that's okay by me because i like to do inspections of new things

...and here is Rugby checking out the telephone. It's not easy getting a rat in sharp focus -- he rarely stands still for more than a second!

To answer Madison's first question, Rugby is a boy -- as you can clearly see in the telephone picture, male rats have extremely large testes for their body size. (This is true of rodents in general, if you ever need to separate hamsters or gerbils by sex -- even when they are very young, males will have a "pointier" rump because of the developing testes. And when they're mature, well, there's just no mistaking.)

As to question #2, we don't know exactly how old Rugby is, but he was still a juvenile rat when he came home from the pet store, so we can guess that he's about four months old. I'll let Rugby answer the last two questions.

my favorite food is anything new! i cant help myself and always get excited if it's something i haven't tried before. but if you want to bribe me, try sunflower seeds which are full of fatty energy, and grapes which are sweet and full of water.

i dont know who this barney is but i have heard that ratlike creechurs used to eat dinosaur eggs! on a scale of 1 to 10 how delicious would a raw dinosaur egg taste right now? i think maybe 11

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Posted by Rugby the Rat | 11:52 PM |