Eclectic house pets

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Living / Arts / Overcome by rats: "ANDOVER -- With trepidation, you approach the farmhouse where Ann Thomas lives with her husband, Ben Levy, and after you open the screen door, you are confronted by a reminder that you are about to cross the threshold into a world unlike any you've known.

The clue is the knocker on the door.

It's in the shape of a rat.

Nevertheless, you reach for it and knock -- a-rat-a-tat-tat -- and you wait.

When the door opens, you are greeted by Thomas, who peers through spectacles, then says hello warmly and, apologizing for the floor-to-ceiling plastic sheets that shield the kitchen renovation, leads you directly to the room with the cages.

Suddenly, there they are, all of them, her pets, 10 baby rats and 30 adult rats of varied size and hues, mostly grays and blues, all long-tailed and whiskered and sniffing and twisting and twitching and jumping and climbing up and over and under and alongside and then atop

one another while pressing their noses against, around, and through the wires of the cages, eager and curious about the stranger in their home, you. 'That black and white one there,' says Thomas about a particularly heavy rat, 'she's pregnant, and those babies are three weeks old.' She points to a litter of pink rats the size of a thumb. 'And that one in hiding in the box -- she's the grandmother.'

Thomas agreed to introduce you to her menagerie on the occasion of World Rat Day, technically April 4 but celebrated all this week in Australia, England, and across the United States, including with a potluck picnic this afternoon in Hartford.

Although many people find rats repulsive, the domesticated branch has found favor as pets since the Victorian age.

"They're as different from wild rats as dogs from wolves," says Debbie Ducommum, and she ought to know. She's founder of the Rat Fan Club, which has 470 members in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia.

"This is Debbie, the Rat Lady," she answers the telephone, and then describes her 23 pet rats and her celebration of World Rat Day at a craft party in her hometown of Chico, Calif., all proceeds benefiting the Rat Assistance & Teaching Society.

"Rats are affectionate animals that love to be petted and beg to come out of their cage to play with their owners," Ducommum says, "and they're also smart enough to learn their names and come when called."

Unburdened by musophobia -- a fear of rats or mice -- more than 3.5 million American families keep rats or mice as pets, according to the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association.

In her Andover home, Thomas puts down her Dunkin' Donuts hazelnut coffee with cream and reaches into a cage, and fishing past the corn cobs, chew toys, wheels, and tubes, she retrieves a favorite called Morning Dew, which she cradles on her shoulder.

"I fell in love with rats while I was a psychology major at Reed College in Oregon," she says, caressing Morning Dew. "In college, we had classes with lab rats, and as we taught them to discriminate between light and sound, I discovered they were smart, very nice, and very clean."

Thomas has had rats as pets for nine years and has been breeding them for five, producing about seven litters a year, each numbering eight to 14. "And I have absolutely no problem," she says, "in finding homes for them. I've had teenagers buy rats, although their parents are very reluctant, but in the end, it's the mom who takes care of the rats because she comes to love them."

Rats can be purchased at pet stores for $5, but Thomas charges $20 because of the care she gives them -- holding each one every day to help it adjust -- and also to discourage people from buying her rats to feed to pet snakes.

As a hobby, it's faster paced than collecting stamps. Rats become pregnant as young as eight weeks, and gestation is three weeks.

For the benefit of readers familiar with "1984," George Orwell's novel in which Big Brother breaks the rebellious Winston by placing around his face a cage with hungry rats, what is it again that makes rats alluring as pets?

"They're very interactive with people," says Thomas, returning Morning Dew to the cage, "and very gentle. They usually don't bite or scratch, and they're great pets in apartments or condos because they don't take up much space. In Sweden, rats are taught to compete in gymnastics, and at Wofford College in South Carolina, psychology students teach rats to play basketball."

Thomas segregates her rats by age and sex. Because of the renovation in her kitchen, there are cages in the first-floor bathroom and rats in the bathtub, which is covered by a screen against which they jump and scratch. "There are 11 in there," she says, "and they want to know what's going on."

Thomas and her husband, both 40, have no children. She's a statistician at Tufts Medical School. He programs computers. One reason they ended up together is their affection for small animals. His pet of choice is the degu -- he has five -- a creature once thought to be a rodent but now, based on genetic testing, believed to be a lagomorph, or part of the rabbit family.

Although some people let their pet rats roam the house, Thomas warns that rats delight in chewing objects, including furniture. "They come when called," she says, "and people have taught them to use a litter box.

"Wild rats can carry disease and they're scary," she says, "and if I see a mouse, I jump. It's reflex. Rats and mice go where we go because we have a lot of garbage, but they're clean animals. When people talk about a rat problem, what it boils down to is our rubbish. It's not a rat problem. It's a people problem."

One negative, she says, is a rat's short life span.

"They're prone to respiratory infections and tumors, and they live about two years. People get attached to them, and when the rats die, they replace them."

Rat fanciers are cautious about whom they tell. As Thomas says, it's not something she'd bring up in a job interview.

"Unfortunately, the revulsion is common," says Ducommum. "We don't like to say we have pet rats and have people go `Yuck!' Our goal is to get people to recognize that we love our rats the way they love their dogs."

Has the Rat Lady ever thought of owning a more conventional pet -- say, a cocker spaniel?

Ducommum laughs. "I had an Australian cattle dog named Bonnie, but Bonnie killed two of my rats and we got her another home. After she killed my rats, it was bye bye, Bonnie."

its a a-rat-a-tat-tat to you...