This is a story about three baby-loving male rats and how I found out about their gentle ways.
If you breed successive litters of rats so that the first one is weaned a few days before the second one is born, you’ll see the most amazing things happen. When I did this, a small portion of the weaned babies always related to the pinkies as siblings and nested with them, while not competing for milk.
The fuzzies that cuddled with the pinkies were almost exclusively female, but once in a while there was a boy fuzzy who did this too. I kept every single boy that did this, because it was a behavior I wanted to breed for. I wound up with three adult males who loved to cuddle with pinkies. Tragically, this behavior turned out to be harmful.
The pinkies that were being cuddled by the boys were getting their primal need to be loved met, but they weren’t getting milk. Unfortunately, the lactating females didn’t understand that the boys weren’t food givers and didn’t share nests with them. It was this situation that led me to separate the boys from the girls before it was necessary to limit population growth.
A baby’s need to be cuddled is more immediate than its need for food. Perhaps you’ve heard about an animal experiment in which baby monkeys were separated from their mothers. The baby monkeys were put in a cage with two mannequins: one furry, but without milk, and the other a wire frame with milk bottles mounted on it. The baby monkeys clung to the furry mannequin almost all the time, and ventured onto the wire frame only when they were desperately hungry.
As many animal lovers will agree, this was a cruel experiment. I read about it in Scientific American. The scientist who led the experiment and wrote the article lamented the fact that it was socially unacceptable to perform this experiment on human babies. My experiment, on the other hand, had the best interests of the animals in mind. But it turned out to be harmful too.
It’s a heartwarming sight to see a big, burly, wide-headed male rat curled up around a nest full of squirming newborns. I suppose that if there were just one father rat and one mother rat, the babies wouldn’t fall through the cracks. But I had a large mischief (colony) where almost all the girls—even ones who hadn’t gotten pregnant—joined in nursing the little ones. As long a pinkie was being cuddled, the lactating girl rats assumed everything was okay. Sadly, they were wrong.