Sooty
Fancy rats
Rattus norvegicus
Born:
Feb/2025
Domesticated and kept as pets world wide
Native range:
My story:
Sooty came to live with me alongside her sister, Sweep, when they were only four weeks old. The two bonded sisters have spent their entire lives together and are rarely far from one another.
They live in a huge rat mansion filled with tubes, cosy hiding places, climbing opportunities and plenty of things to investigate. However, simply giving these clever girls their food would be far too easy! I regularly devise little puzzles for them, such as hiding treats inside cardboard boxes that they must chew open or blocking tunnels with substrate so they have to dig their way through to find the food.
Sooty and Sweep are incredibly inquisitive problem-solvers. Whenever something new appears in their home, they immediately begin investigating, sniffing, digging and working out how it functions—particularly when they suspect that food might be involved!
Did you know?
Rats possess an astonishing ability to multiply. Their pregnancy lasts only around 21–23 days, and a litter commonly contains 8–18 pups. Young rats can become capable of reproducing when they are only 6 weeks old, while a mother may become pregnant again almost immediately after giving birth.
Under perfect theoretical conditions, one male and one female—and all of their rapidly reproducing descendants—could produce more than 10,000 rats within a single year! Real populations rarely achieve this because not every pup survives or breeds, but it demonstrates just how quickly a rat population can grow.