"Exotic Animals: Are They Com-'pet'-ible?,'' opening Sunday, takes a look at the pros and cons of living with unusual household pets, with practical tips on choosing appropriate animals and guidelines for taking care of them at home.
Woltz also sees many owners of exotic pets who successfully coexist with their housemates. "We've dealt with rats over the years, and the clients that have them, they just love them,'' he says. "They actually say they make unbelievably great pets. I don't know how trainable a rat is in terms of 'Sit,' 'Stop,' Stay,' 'Give me your paw,' but a lot of times they're crawling over (people's) hair and their shoulders. It's not for everybody.''
But it's turned out to be heaven for Bernadette Bosky.
Bosky, who keeps 14 pet rats — in cages — in her Yonkers home, fell into the rodent world by accident. About five years ago she was looking for a new pet hamster when the shopkeeper asked if she'd ever tried a rat. She agreed to take one home, named him Bilbo Baggins and "just totally fell in love.''
Bosky and her housemates, Kevin Maroney and Arthur Hlavaty, soon began adding more rats to their menagerie, adopting some from the New Jersey-based Ratta Muffin Rat Reskue organization (www.rattamuffinreskue.org). "Each Halloween, I choose a rat to help me give out treats, and this year I tried Teddy Rattsevelt because he is so mild, he would never bite,'' says Bosky. "But he was scared of the trick-or-treaters and kept trying to burrow under my clothes and hide from them. And then I took out his brother, Franklin Rattsevelt, and Franklin loved the attention.''
In fact, Bosky has found that most of her rats crave attention — and will go to great lengths to get it, even if she is typing on the computer. "One rat I had named Rufus learned to hit the escape key when I wasn't giving him affection, and I ended up having to put a bottle cap over the key,'' she says.
Another rat named Dr. Butch had his own way of making Bosky take notice. "If I wasn't giving him enough affection, he would lightly take my little finger in his teeth, not even pressing down, but just pull my hand until it was over his back,'' she says. "And that was his way of saying, 'Scratch me.'
"They are very intelligent,'' she adds. "A dog will make you feel good when you're sad because they empathize with you. But a rat will make you feel good when you're sad because they're always upbeat. I call it rat therapy.''
Rat therapy may not work for everyone, but naturalists agree that living with non-traditional pets can prove enlightening. "One of the advantages of having an exotic animal as a pet is that it's a window to the greater world around us,'' says Greenburgh Nature Center executive director Bill Lawyer.
...the next new age buzz is rat therapy...
