Rat training

Ratties are doing well.  I joke that Penelope is my pet and Evee is Penelope's pet.  The little girl is still very easily startled and when out of her cage she doesn't venture too far from under the cage or behind the tv where it's safer.  But yesterday for the first time she did start "grooming" my fingers!  Lots of little rat kisses and a few tiny nibbles.

Let us out!

Penelope continues to be a little rock star and I finally started a little bit of trick training with her.  We're working on offering interaction with props :)  Going in the little tunnel, 4 feet on a little box, and standing on the teeter.  PP is starting to get the concept of it but gets stuck a lot with trying to just mob me directly for the food.  She's so cute as she runs off to eat the treat and then runs right back.  And after a few treats she just quickly runs to stash it away but is so food motivated she will keep coming back forever!  Sometimes she just stores a little piece in her mouth and then tries to tell me I didn't give her one.

Evee is still working on coming to the recall noise.  And sometimes I can get her to lure onto a prop.
Super boring video of a training session a few days ago:

New xpen setup is working alright.  But I was a fool to think they couldn't climb it without the horizontal bars!  I've removed Penelope about 30 times the first night.  Thankfully she seems to be climbing it less and less each day. I don't doubt that it will need to constantly be watched, but I am hoping that she will mostly give up.

Kitty is behaving himself.  He has not been allowed to interact with them, but I'm not too nervous that he would injure them if chaos happened and they ended up meeting.  With the (wild) mice we had in our house last fall (eek!) Kitty sadly only toyed with them and was of zero assistance to our problem.  Still, based on how he played with the ferrets I think he would be too rough with the girls.