Blaze

Acrorat extraordinaire

Source of Her Name

Blaze was particularly fast and agile, even as a baby. Rachel and Andre, owners of Blaze's mom, Panda, has already developed a few nicknames for her before we brought her home. Rachel referred to her as "Blaze", both because of her speed and because of the white blaze of fur extending up from her collar into the black fur on her scalp. Andre called her this until the incident in which she left off my shoulder, at three weeks old, at 11:30 pm. (Andre and I quietly waited for her to return from behind the furniture for about two hours, while Rachel slept in the next room, getting ready for surgery rotation ungodly early the next morning.) Andre started to refer to her as "Banzai" after this incident, but by then the Blaze name had already kind of begun to stick.

Bio

Blaze was an acrorat (acrobat rat) right out of the starter's gate and loved to show off her talents for the humans' amusement. She quickly learned how to hang from the ceiling of Panda's cage by her toes and walk upside-down, and later showed her sisters and nieces how to do the same in our home. (She helped me train the entire brood to walk upside-down across the ceiling of their cage whenever I shook the yogurt drop box.) At the age of four weeks, she leapt from my shoulder and ran around her grandma's apartment for an hour and a half, then returned to make faces at her brothers and sisters from outside the cage. That was a clear demonstration of her independent spirit and endeared me to her immediately.

Unfortunately, as an independent spirit, she seemed completely oblivious to, or at least didn't seem to care about, the rat social hierarchy. I believe she had the strength to become and alpha female, but most definitely not the interest. She instead lead a rather stress-free life by demanding to be as close to the bottom of the hierarchy as was safe, allowing anyone, including baby rats a third her size, to dominate her. I swear I even saw her get dominated by her own shadow one night!

One aspect of her life that Blaze did not seem to enjoy was her sexuality. She went into heat every four days (a little faster than average) and stayed in heat for a full twenty-four hours (twelve hours seems to be more then norm). Tired of the constant pursuits, she learned how to position herself on a box on the top shelf of the cage, to keep other rats from being able to touch her easily. She seemed to fully embrace rattie menopause when the time came.

Thanks to her relatively stress-free lifestyle, Blaze lived a long and healthy life, resisting the respiratory infection that has affected several of our rats, and going through only one surgery for a mammary tumor -- at the ripe old age of two and a half! She often seemed like a rat half her age, and really only began to seem old during the last few weeks before her death. We believe she may have begun to have a series of small strokes, which increased during the last twenty-four hours of her life.

We made the hard decision to euthanize her as the strokes seemed to be increasing in intensity and she left us very quickly after receiving the needle. Leave it to Blaze to leave a smile on my face even in her death (morbid as this may sem) though: After her heart had stopped, muscle spasms kept her legs and chest moving, as if she were playing "alive" for us for one last laugh.