Ship rat pros & cons

Coloured drawing of grey-bellied ginger ship rat

PROS & CONSThe advantages and disadvantages of ship rats as companion-animals. Go to text version Return to Hello Sailor start-page

Ship rats:

are intelligent, clean, and exceptionally playful and entertaining

can be very loving, and often form profound personal attachments to individual humans and/or other pets

are as bold and nutty as monkeys

are fascinatingly agile

have an extraordinarily varied vocal range

are very strong and hardy and are rarely ill

land on their feet if dropped

are attractive, unusual and historically interesting

are brave and bold

are cheap to feed

have small litters

produce dry droppings and very little urine, and so need cleaning out less often than almost any other animal

have only a mild bite

Ship rats also:

don't live very long

have quite a strong smell

have an extraordinarily loud vocal range - and a passion for things that rattle and twang

are flighty and excitable and prone to fads in which they e.g. pretend not to know you

are willfully naughty and bloody-minded wind-up merchants, and play you up just for the fun of making you run about trying to catch them

are unbelievably fast, and can run straight up embossed wallpaper

are often determined escape-artists, both from their cage and from the room/house, and are extremely hard to catch if they decide they don't want you to

chew things

are usually very nocturnal: you may not see much before 11pm except a ball of scruffy fur rolled up in the corner of the nest

require very large, therefore expensive cages (expect to pay £70-£120)

have a tendency just to give up and die if they do become seriously ill, probably due to their lack of fat reserves; whereas a Norway rat would fight to live and would probably win

tend to be very difficult to breed from

make nervy mothers who may eat their babies if disturbed

can be startlingly aggressive, especially towards same-sex members of other pet species, and can develop profound personal dislikes for individual humans and/or other pets