Go ahead and call me crazy, I do.

On Sunday morning I came into work to open my store. I work in a pet store so we go in a few hours before opening to care for the reptiles, birds, fish, and small mammals that call the store home until they go home with one of our customers. I started my tasks and a coworker came in and began to help me. I was working on one small animal cage while he did another when he started freaking out. He locked up the cage and backed away quickly as I came to see what the fuss was. One of our adult female rats had given birth in the night and nine tiny pink babies lay in a pile. We seperate our animals by sex, those that aren't spayed and neutered anyways, so I checked all of the rats and there was no male in the cage by then so someone had realised their mistake at some point. Or intentionally put males and females together and then seperated them again. Regardless, the end result was a bunch of rat pups. I set up a cage in our back room and transfered the babies and identified the mother and moved her back with them.
The guy who takes care of our reptiles in the mornings feeds the babies to monitors and snakes when an unplanned birth such as this happens. I'm not sure why exactly, but I felt a particular empathy for these poor little creatures, doomed to be born one day and dead the next. I had also been intending to get myself a pet rat soon, I asked my manager if I could take them, she said just don't bring them back. At the end of my shift I tried to talk myself out of it and failed, bought a water bottle, nestbox, and bowl, and brought them home in a paper box. I set them up in a tiny plastic cage I had sitting around, too cramped for a rat however she was doing nothing but tending to her babies so she could manage in a small space for a few days. I read up on the best foods and got a rat book and settled in to watch them grow. And grow they have. A full five days old now they have the beginings of fur and I can see what colors they are likely to become.
All told I have ten rats. As far as I can tell at this point, two little boys, seven little girls, and their mother. When I look for homes I'll look for commited homes that will take two of them. They're social creatures.

I'm mad, totally and completely crazy. But I knew that already.
M.