Pet Rat Health Care

"Hi, I'm Laura Fitzgerald and on behalf of Expert Village, I would like to talk to you today about the care and maintenance of your pet rat. Now I am going to talk to you about your rat's health care. Generally rats do not get sick. They have a feel things that need to be done to take care of them to keep them of well-being. I am going to talk to you about that today. The first thing is that you need to make sure is that their eyes stay clear, that none of the dust or dander from the cage will poke in their eyes or crust up their eyes. If they do, you can just use a soft gauze to wipe around their eye to get rid of the gook that gets in their eye, so you can just get rid of it with a soft warm gauze pad. The second thing is their teeth since their teeth do not fall out like ours do, they will continuously grow. So chewing on the wood in their cage is going to make their teeth shorter and shorter and shorter. You can also brush their teeth with a gauze pad, by taking some gauze pad and putting it with some water. You can actually take the gauze pad, and if your rat actually likes you that much, you can take it and rub it on his front teeth and clean his teeth. You also have to be very careful, never stick anything into your rats ears, q-tips or anything. If the rats ears seems to be dirty on the outside, you can take your pinky and a little gauze pad and just wipe the outside of the rat's ear, but never stick anything down in your rat's ear. Rats have excellent hearing, and you never want to damage their ear drums. Rats also have skin irritations. They can get skin irritations due to the bedding, they can get skin irritations from perfumes or dyes or something like that. So you have to be very careful, even the perfume that you are wearing can irritate your rat or make their hair fall out or get bald spots on your rat. Brushing your rat with a kiddie brush or baby brush is always a wonderful thing to do to keep their blood circulating through their skin or keep their skin healthy and keep their coat healthy. You can also take a warm soapy gauze pad to wipe their tail, it will keep their tail clean and also make sure that there is not any damage to their tail, any sores or bruising done to their tails. Also it is very important not to have wire bottom in their cage since the wire bottom can cause irritation on the bottom of your rat's feet and the get sores on the bottom of their feet, and you don't want any irritation. Also the bedding can cause irritation if it has any dyes or perfumes or anything of that sort. Also keeping your cage clean and free of urine. Urine can burn the bottom of your rat's feet and cause irritation at the bottom and cause burns and sores. So you have to make sure that the bottom of the cage stays clean and dry, so not to cause irritation at the bottom of your rats belly or feet, very important."