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Around a year ago, Natalie and I decided we wanted a pet. Now, at this point, we were living in the tiny little apartment we had in Dos Pinos, so we couldn’t really have big pets, like dogs or cats. So I suggested we could get a pet rat or two. I’d had two pet rats before: one during my Cornell year, and one shortly after I came back from the States. They were both female rats, inquisitive, friendly, cute, smart little animals, and I remembered them fondly. Sadly, due to the short life span of pet rats, they had both long passed away. It took a bit of convincing, but Natalie finally consented to at least looking around for a pet rat. So we searched. And searched… and searched some more. Turns out, it’s pretty hard to find a place that sells pet rats here on the island. Most places don’t sell them at all, and the few that do have them, sell them as snake food, so they’re kept in filthy living conditions, allowed to breed indiscrimnately, and not accustomed to dealing with people at all.

We were ready to give up, when a friend of mine from work told me about a guy he knew who raised rats, and who might give me one. So I told him what I wanted: one, or maybe two, very young female rats. The idea was that we knew females tended to be friendlier, more active and inquisitive. If we got her very young, there was little chance that she would be pregnant. And if we got 2 of them, they could keep each other company for those times when we weren’t in the house. So what does the guy give us?

Yuki.

He was large, for a pet rat. He was also male. And about a year old. That’s, like, 40 in rat years. And he hated us. I don’t mean that he was unused to being with people, and was scared of us. No, he was a fairly mean animal, allready grown up, and he actively disliked us, from the first day we got him. We tried to get him to open up, but it was nearly imposible. He would snap at anything put in his cage, he wouldn’t let himself be picked up, he would accept food from us only grudgingly, and even then, with clear suspicion in his beady little red eyes.

To say we were disappointed would be a gross understatement.

So why did we keep him? To this day, I’m not entirely sure. He was a handsome animal, I’ll give him that. Everyone who saw him commented on how gorgeous he was. This, of course, only elicited dirty glares from him. He wasn’t stupid, either. He soon learned how to game us, and would try and pull tricks to get us to feed him more often, like hiding his food, ‘accidentally’ dropping food so we would give him more and then going back and getting the stuff he dropped, stuff like that. He had a personality. Sure, it was an unpleasant, angry personality, but it was there, and we grew accustomed to it. I suppose there was just something about having a little cage in a corner with an animal in it who spends most of his time plotting ways to break free and kill you.

Not long after we got him, we acquired Blue, and Nezumi, the two female rats. Nezumi was pregnant when he got her, and not long after we became the proud owners of Mr. White, She Who Licks, She Who Bites, and Twin 3. So, with a grand total of 7 rats (when we had only set out to get one, maybe two), we continued with our lives. And he continued to glare at us from his cage.

Over the past few months, however, Yuki’s health began to go downhill. Rats, despite what you might think, are remarkably delicate animals, and have short lifespans, averaging 2 years or so. And by the time we first got Yuki, he was allready halway through it. But it was in the past 2 or 3 months when he really began to show his age. He was slower, had difficulty breathing, and could barely be bothered to viciously attack anything you might put through the bars of his cage, We tried giving him vitamins, tried getting him to excercise a bit more, but saw no real improvement. Natalie took it hard, and she tried everything she could think of to save him. I guess she felt a little guilty for seeing his health decline, when we had never really connected to him. I guess I felt the same.

Then, a little over 2 months ago, he had his first major attack. He could barely breathe, his sides were going in and out like a bellows, and he had no strenght. He even let himself be picked up with no resistance. We ran with him to the vet, and he told us it was Mycoplasmosis. We allready knew about this disease: most rats have it, practically from birth. They just live with it. But as they age, if they’re unlucky, their bodies’ natural defenses begin to fail, and the disease starts seriously attacking their lungs and respiratory systems. This is what happened to Yuki. The doctor gave him an antibiotic shot, and gave us some medicine to give him for a few weeks.

Miraculously, it worked. After a few days, we saw a marked improvement in him. It was obvious he had been permanently weakened by the attack and his condition, but at least he was more or less the same ornery critter we knew and had grown to love. Natalie did all she could to keep his health up. However, as the weeks went by, his health continued to decline. He looked older, he wasn’t eating as much, and he was starting to have difficulty breathing once more. Then, last friday, he had another major attack. Natalie ran with him to the vet, where they gave him another shot and gave us another dose of the medicine. We brought him back, moved him to a larger, more spacious cage, and did everything we could for him to be able to rest and live.

Sometimes, nothing you can do is enough.

On Sunday afternoon, after we gave him his food, he nibbled some puffed rice, he slowly crawled down to the lowest level of the cage, and then he curled up and quietly passed away.

I buried him in the backyard, and we said a few words in his memory.

We still have 6 rats in the room, and they are a smart, friendly bunch. Mr. White is the sweetest rat I’ve ever owned, and the girls are a source of constant amusement (and occasional irritation). We just bought them a massive new cage to keep all of them together, and it dominates the entire back wall of the room. But there’s an empty corner now where Yuki’s cage was. And the whole room just feels a little bit emptier.

He wasn’t a pleasant animal. He despised us from the first moment he saw us, and he pretty much kept that up until his last days. A man’s gotta admire that kind of dedication. Sure, he mellowed out a little in the past couple of months, but I think it was more lack of strenght than anything else. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, he achieved all that any of us can ever hope to achieve in our lives, wether long or short: by being in our lives, he made them that much richer.. and without him, the world is that much smaller.

Godspeed, Yuki. See you in the next go-around.