ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

It’s exactly a week since the return of rat, and Pippin appears to be reviving well enough, although he’s very cautious now. He seems shyer and more contemplative than the other two, and I don’t recall him being that way before his long estrangement from food and society. However, considering his ordeal it’s not very surprising. Comparatively speaking, it was the rat equivalent of something like “Alive”, only with less food and minus the psychological trauma of eating your dead companions. Either way, an upsetting experience. And upsetting experiences tend to stay with you. For people, they can be life-changing events. So I’ll go easy on the little guy and let him go at his own pace. Interestingly, he isn’t particularly skittish about being picked up and petted, less so even than Holly and Jenny.

Jenny learned today that the cage has an inside and an outside. I think she understood the concept of “I’m in the cage” versus “I’m not in the cage” but didn’t realize that the cage had actual surfaces on the outside just like on the inside. She discovered this because I cleaned the cage today and she was the last one to go back. When I moved to put her back in the clean cage, I went too fast and she got a little scared so I let her climb onto the top of the cage and get her bearings for a second. She climbed around a little bit for a minute and then stopped, looking down at one of her jingly toys. It was interesting to watch her looking at things she recognized but that she couldn’t reach because they were inside.

After not very long, she came over to me and I put her back in the cage with the others. The first thing she did was climb to the top and look at the ceiling, poking her little nose through the bars. I was impressed, because a lot of animals wouldn’t be able to recognize the same place from such a different perspective. Later I opened the cage and she ran to the door and tried to climb up and out. Before today, she would lean out and look but was too afraid to actually climb out. So I think she learned about outside, and now she wants to go there again. I bet they discover electricity soon.