• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

22" rat

Lons

Lons

Old Oak
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Name
Bob
WOW
Not something I'd want to meet face to face. I'd want a more powerful air rifle than the one I have.

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No need to be afraid of rats. They can be wonderful pets. Unless you corner them they are not aggressive at all. Read on what they do with rats in Cambodia and other places with lots of anti-personnel mines. You will gain new respect for rats after reading that.
 
HdV said:
No need to be afraid of rats. They can be wonderful pets. Unless you corner them they are not aggressive at all. Read on what they do with rats in Cambodia and other places with lots of anti-personnel mines. You will gain new respect for rats after reading that.
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Nope sorry but these are not pet rats, my daughter had a pet rat when she was younger and it was fine, these are disease carrying vermin and have to be controlled.
My comment was toungue in cheek, I'm certainly not afraid of rats but won't tolerate them certainly not in my hose or garden.

We clearly need to agree to disagree on this subject as we have very different views.
 
Oh, I realise this was not a pet rat. Pets rats are rats bred for lab purposes that have been domesticated as pets. They will not get old as most will get tumours before they are two years old. I used to have brown rats that were rescued from an abandoned nets on a hay loft. The nest had become a great king rat, but some of them could be saved without amputating their tails. I took them home as they were too young to survive. After that they were not fit to be released in the wild again, so I kept them. The reached an age of more than 5 years.

Of course, you are correct that rats can be carriers of all sorts of deceases. And I wouldn't like to have them in my house either. I do understand your feelings, but indeed, we need to disagree on this subject. I still do like rats, including the wild ones. ;)
 
HdV said:
I do understand your feelings, but indeed, we need to disagree on this subject. I still do like rats, including the wild ones. ;)
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Well yes they're clearly safer on your property than mine. I'm a pretty good shot with an air rifle. I wouldn't want to see any animal suffer of course but a pellet in the right place solves that.

Each to his own. I have a neighbour, luckily not next door who actively feeds mice and a rat who they've named. :rolleyes: Then they had a huge problem with mice infestation in the house, started by catching them in live traps and putting them in the garden and wondered why they found their way back in, stupid people. Eventually called in a controller who removed in excess of 40 of the pests.
 
HdV said:
The reached an age of more than 5 years.
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Wow thats a grand old age for rats. My daughter has kept them for years and I usually get the call to put one out its misery after 2-3years. They do make great pets, much better than hamsters and such. They have way more character and bite alot less.
 
Ah, "Ben"... Yeah, I remember that one. Never knew about "Willard" though. Nice. Will have to look for it.

@wallace : the usual rats people get are what we call whitebellies. They are bred to die young from tumours. Wild rats are much much healthier/sturdier. 5 Years is not an exception, as far as I know and have been told by biologists. It seems they can even reach 7 years. What I had not expected was that they seemed to be more intelligent as well. Probably due to too much inbreeding with the lab rats...
 
Phil said:
This popped up on the news-feed this morning.

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Thats only 32miles from me :oops: . Strangely I havent seen a rat for a while. Used to see them regularly when father inlaw was alive. He was obsessed with feeding the birds and would have every type of seed going from niger seed to sunflower hearts. It was probably a 5 coarse meal for every rodent around. We did used to have them jumping into the pond to get the koi pellets.
 
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