Thanks to a series of events, a cat cafe in Brooklyn is now home to cats and rats, who romp and play for the delight of patrons. Check it out!
Via Daniel C. and Gigi the cat lady (I was saving this for Caturday, but accidentally published it early — enjoy!)
I think it’s lovely that this cafe is showing folks what nice pets rats can be. I adopted a retired psychology rat named Skipper when I was in high school–he was bought from a pet shop to learn to run mazes by a classmate who didn’t want to keep him afterwards. He was a darling pet and I loved him bunches. And major kudos for all their work in finding forever homes for so many kitties!
One of my RAs in college adopted a white rat from the psych lab after they were done with their experiment. I always thought it was funny that the one who was supposed to enforce the rules had a pet in the dorm. Her name was Rosie and she was very sweet. Another friend of ours took her when the RA went home for the summer (she lived in Greece, and he lived only an hour or so from school so Rosie didn’t have to travel too much).
One of my RAs used to get wasted and loudly sing along to Dave Mathews songs. The previous RA quit via an email containing modified lyrics to the theme music from Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Dave Matthews? Did we go to college in the same era? (I graduated in 1997.)
Except for my freshman year, all (well, both, I didn’t live in the dorm my last year) of my RAs were the same year as me.
I graduated 2010. It was very much a “bro culture” thing. Think polo shirts with popped collars, sometimes in layers.
Man, I feel old, now.
My 20 year reunion is in October.
? “…you’ll see cats and rats and elephants…” ?
???
Cats and rats living together, mass hysteria! Well in this case it’s more like mass cuteness!
A lesson for all of us.
I always liked mice and rats, they have an undeserved bad reputation. My only concern is: how can you be sure that the rats are free of diseases? Can the vet determine if the rat is not a carrier of something awful like the plague?
I don’t have sound at work so I can’t hear anything anyone says in the video, but I assume this rat wasn’t just randomly grabbed from the wild somewhere in the American southwest. That makes it a pretty safe bet it’s not carrying plague. Ditto for hantavirus.
Other than those two, rodents aren’t any more prone to carrying diseases than other mammals.
I forget exactly but I think the rat came from another rescue(?). They got the rat to accompany a kitten who had feline leukemia and had to be kept separate from other cats; he was lonely, so they looked for another small mammal that wouldn’t catch the disease from him.
The rescue involved was http://haltrescue.com/. I happen to be wearing a HALT t-shirt from a fund-raiser for the West Side Highway rat rescue. About a year ago some idiot dumped about 100 pink-eyed white rats by the side of the road. HALT was one of the organizations that came in to help out. Unfortunately, it was too late for some of the ratties, due to traffic and the fact that some other idiot in local government had poison laid down before they could rescue them all. In some cases, they rescued rats, only to have them die of poison later. Sad.