Yesterday morning (2/22) I went to Petco and got 10 white male rats. They are living in my studio for the time being. Their names are Aldo, Bruno, Ciro, Dino, Elio, Fausto, Giulio, Ivo, Livio, and Mario. To tell them apart I’m going to write the first letter of their names between their shoulder blades in non-toxic washable marker (standard practice for rat disambiguation in the home). I got 8 ‘medium’ rats, all from the same cage, and separated them 4 and 4 in two duplexes with mezzanines. Shoulda sprung for bigger tanks. I’m going to get another tank on Friday. The two ‘large’ rats are on their own for now because they were not part of the same colony. Another reason for writing letters on their backs is to know how they’re getting mixed up after play/training sessions.

When I got them to the studio yesterday, they were understandably shocked and non-responsive. I suspect they were not hand raised and not hand-fed. It’s only now, 38 hours later, that most of them will take food from my fingers, and one of them is showing a genuine interest in climbing on me, and looks at me like ‘thanks’ when I give him banana. That will be Bruno.

I have a training session planned for the morning.

Tags: animal behavior, art, performance, RATS

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2011 at 1:59 am and is filed under Body Island. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.