Once your rat is trained, you can take him out of his cage and into the wider world. A talented rat can be a great travel companion and a fierce sports competitor—and even an actor.
NOW THAT BEN AND IRA KNOW ALL THESE GREAT tricks, what next? Time to show off!
Think about the things you enjoy. A bike ride? Traveling to visit family and friends? Hiking in the woods? Going to the movies? How about the Xtreme Rat Challenge? Rats can be a welcome addition to any activity. In fact, they are very good travelers.
Traveling with your rat is very easy. You rarely have to make special arrangements as you would for a larger pet. Ben and Ira can be transported in a small, hard carrier supplied at all times with food and water. They’re small enough to store under an airline seat or in a large carrying bag. They won’t make much noise, either. That means other passengers will hardly know you’re traveling with rodents. Just be certain that your rats don’t get jostled about, or they might become very stressed. A stressed rat is more susceptible to airborne contagions, as their immune systems weaken. Don’t allow them to go nose to nose with any other animals. You don’t know what diseases unknown creatures might be carrying.
You should also be very cautious when deciding whether to allow other people to hold your rat. Humans carry germs on their hands. If you want to allow others to enjoy the company of Ben and Ira while you travel, bring along some antibacterial hand sanitizer. Once the person’s hands are clean, he or she can hold your precious rodent as long as you (and Ben) will allow. However, permit this handling only in an enclosed area, as one big rat leap can mean hours of chasing down your friend in a busy airport or train terminal. That can be a nightmare!
Because traveling is unavoidably stressful, I recommend that time spent outside of the rats’ cage en route be kept to a minimum. Airlines have rules about allowing pets out of their carriers. In fact, they often don’t allow it at all. If you are traveling by bus, train, or automobile, it is safest for Ben and Ira to remain in their carrier, as you never know when the vehicle will have to stop suddenly or might go over a pothole, sending your rats flying out of your hands and onto the lap of a very surprised person in front of you. That can create an interesting situation but not one that your rats will enjoy.
If you must transport your rat via the cargo hold of an airplane, consider the temperatures outside at the time of travel. Although the cargo hold temperature is normally animal friendly, the outside temperatures on the tarmac may not be. Extreme temperatures could prove fatal to Ben and Ira. Make certain that your rat’s carrier is airline approved. Attach some sort of identification card to the cage with your name, home address, and phone number as well as contact information while you’re away from home. A padlock on the cage door is also a good idea, since you never know when curious people might try to open the cage for a quick look.
Make certain that your rat is comfortable in his carrier with clean, soft bedding; food; and a small water bottle filled with fresh water.
Prior to your trip, pack a kit for your rat. He will need wood chews, bedding, food, a scoop, plastic bags for cage cleanup, treats, toys, a harness and leash, and perhaps some vitamins such as Nutrical. I have found a portable exercise box such as Great Wall is a useful piece of travel gear. It’s a rolled-up sheet of plastic that opens up into an exercise space large enough for you and many rats. While this may not be practical if traveling by air, you might have space for it in your vehicle.
Rats are very popular pets, and several rat clubs currently sponsor well-organized shows for all varieties of rats. You can either participate in a rat show or just show up to cheer on your favorite variety. Either way, it’s a fun activity you and your rat can share.
There are two types of rat shows: pet and variety. At a pet rat show, entries are judged more on personality than they are on appearance. They are also judged on their overall health, the cleanliness of their coats, and their appropriate weight and musculature, among other factors.
This rat impressed the judges.
The variety rat show has more divisions to accommodate the many rat “breeds,” or standards. Each animal is judged as an individual representative of its standard. Thus, there are divisions for the Fancy, Rex, Velvet, Odd-Eyed, Tailless, Dumbo, and so on. The rats are judged on structure, color, coat, condition, personality, and behavior—judges do not look kindly on a rat that tries to escape or shows aggression.
Ever watch a dog or horse show? The exhibitors present clean, well-conditioned, and well-trained animals. This is no less the case at a rat show.
As a participant, you must bathe your rat, clip his nails, and make certain that his personality is well suited to show situations. Your pet cannot be shy or anxious. He must be in perfect physical condition without deformity of any sort.
When you fill out your entry form, be sure you enter Ira in the correct group or class. Entry in an inappropriate class is cause for disqualification and forfeit of the entry fee. Check out the specifications for each variety before filling out the entry form. Make certain that your rat fits those parameters as closely as possible. This will ensure entry and give your rat a chance to place in his class.
Debbie Ducommun’s book Rats includes an excellent chapter on how to show your pets. If you are interested in this sport, I highly recommend this book and her suggestions for show preparation and exhibition. She’s an expert on all things rat.
In recent years, outbreaks of viruses such as sialodacryoadentitis (SDA) and Sendai virus (SV) in rat colonies throughout the country have prompted the Rat and Mouse Club of America to urge rat owners not to take their rats to a show because of the risk of contracting one of these contagious and fatal viruses. The Rat and Mouse Club considers the risk so high that it no longer sanctions shows. Before you fill out the entry form, therefore, weigh the issues of safety.
A champion competitor rests atop his trophy.
Unfortunately, inadequate or ineffective quarantine procedures (or lack thereof) continue to allow infected animals into the show environment, where the viruses may then spread to other participants. Therefore, exercise caution in deciding to show your rat—and do your homework. You can obtain more information about this at the Rat and Mouse Club of America Web site: www.rmca.org. The club not only tracks the virus outbreaks but also offers a huge amount of information about rat clubs all over the world.
Dr. Marty Klein began the Extreme Rat Challenge at Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1974. What began as a culmination of a basic learning principles course in the psychology department has since become the Xtreme Rat Challenge, an annual campus event that attracts widespread radio and television coverage, such as a segment on the Discovery Channel’s Wild Wild World.
Each year, students are given a white laboratory rat and charged with teaching the rat some basic skills through operant conditioning techniques. The rats are taught to jump, run, climb, and lift weight. The trained rats then compete in five primary events: weightlifting, rope climb, long jump, hurdles, and tightrope. The students use stimuli such as sounds and lights to initiate the desired behavior. This is similar to your tapping to have your rat come to you—a visual and auditory stimulus.
In the tightrope event, the trainers and rats have three chances to get the fastest crossing time. The time begins when the rat is put on the beginning of the platform and ends when the rat’s nose reaches the end of the other platform.
In the rope climb, the rats are timed on how long it takes them to climb all the way up. The timer begins when the rat is placed on the bottom platform and ends when his nose reaches the top of the upper platform.
The hurdles are also timed. The rat contestants are let loose on a track with 2-inch hurdles, and the rat is given three chances to run entirely around. The fastest time wins. Observers can watch the rats run the track on a big-screen television.
The weightlifting event consists of a box with a lever on the inside. The weights are on the outside in a small bucket. The weights are 10 grams, 7 grams, and 3 grams. The scoring is based on the percentage of his body weight that the rat lifts.
You can set up your own challenges by building obstacle courses and timing your rats as they find their way through.
The long jump is the toughest behavior to train. A rat is placed on a launching platform and must jump from a stand, without a moving start. He gets three minutes to perform the jump.
Rats are showcased not only at rat shows, where the rodents are judged on appearance and personality, but also on screen as animal actors. Just think of the many movies and television shows that feature rats as either extras or leading characters. These rats had to undergo many months of training to perform in their acting roles. For film roles, several rats are typically trained to fill specific, specialized requirements. There are several Hollywood rat trainers who have provided rats for movies such as 2 Fast 2 Furious, Cats 
Dogs, The Ring, Catwoman, Ben, and Total Recall, among many others.
One of the busiest animal trainers in California is Boone Nar. His animals have appeared in hundreds of feature films, including The Year of the Rat, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Rock, Willard (2003), The Craft, The Green Mile, Edward Scissorhands, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He provides all types of animal actors from exotics to dogs and cats; however, I single out these films as they all feature rats (or mice) in more than one scene.
Boone Nar prefers to provide well-trained and prepared animals to having many of the animal effects done with computer graphics. Often, a set is designed around his animal stars, and they are trained within that environment to promote a level of comfort and decrease the possibility of distraction while filming. However, animals can’t always do what a director has in mind, so computer graphic imaging (CGI) is often used if a stunt might be too dangerous or impossible for a living creature.
Because of the magic of movies, a scene can be made to appear far different from reality. One example of this was a scene in 2 Fast 2 Furious in which a man is being tortured with a rat on his chest. In the scene, a rat is put on the man’s chest, a metal bucket is lowered over the rat, and a blowtorch is used to heat up the bucket. According to this plot, the rat becomes hot and claws the man’s chest. There is even a shot that shows the rat inside the bucket. What actually occurred is hardly gruesome: a trained rat—Socrates, known for his role in the 2003 remake of the classic Willard—was placed inside the bucket. Prior to application of the blowtorch to the bucket, the rat was removed. For the shot in which the bucket is removed, the rat had been replaced. For the shot in which the rat is shown inside the bucket as the flames are surrounding him, CGI had been used in conjunction with images of Socrates, who had been trained to stand up on his hind legs and lean toward a large hole, which had been placed in the top of the bucket to allow a camera to peek inside. As Socrates had been trained to target on this hole, he automatically stood on his hind legs to reach upward.
Standing on an object can be one of a rat actor’s trained behaviors for a scene.
In the movie The One, starring Jet Li, a rat was featured scampering out of a woman’s high-heeled shoe wearing an antenna that detonates a bomb. This scene was produced by first attaching a light-weight antenna to the base of the rat’s tail. The trainer then let the rat go from a hole in the floor under the shoe. When the rat was released, he followed a trail of baby food. Naturally, a fake rat was used for the explosion.
Samantha Martin runs an animal actors agency in the Midwest called Amazing Animals by Samantha. She got her start in the business by having rat actors available. Her love of rats began at the age of sixteen, when she walked into a pet shop and saw the playful rodents in their cages. As she was not allowed to have pets at the military school she attended, she kept her rat hidden. Her secret friend was soon found out, however, and moved to the science laboratory, where she visited him daily.
While employed at a pet shop, she worked with some cats, demonstrating how well the animals learned. This grabbed the attention of potential customers. As she had owned rats for several years, she decided to try the same techniques with them. Her Acrorat troop was born! Samantha’s first business was The Rat Company. As she spent time training at the pet shop, she dreamed of a day when a producer would walk in, see what she had accomplished, and offer her a production job. Samantha’s unlikely dream actually came true. Her first job was the independent film Sam Sara. Her rats had to run across a field and climb into a box, and Samantha Martin was the rat and reptile wrangler.
The production was covered by a subsidiary of CNN and shown worldwide. A producer in Italy saw her work and hired her to perform in a holiday show. Her fame snowballed from there. She was featured on Inside Edition, Early Edition, Geraldo, and in extras on the DVD for the Willard remake. Her rats have appeared in several rat documentaries, entailing worldwide travel to places such as Austria. On one of her forays to Europe, her rats performed for Mino Damato, the Italian equivalent of David Letterman. While working in Los Angeles, she met Moe Disesso, who trained and provided the rats for the original Willard film in 1971.
Samantha Martin and her rat actors.
Since becoming known as the Rat Lady, Samantha Martin has diversified to working with other animals, including cats, dogs, and small exotic mammals. Her main technique in rat performance involves the use of cues with a beeper. Initially, she pairs the beeper with the advent of food. All of her rats learn to come when they hear the beeper.
For the movie Sam Sara, she taught several rats (she works with more than one at a time to compare rats’ performance and abilities and select the best-qualified actors) to come to their travel crate, which contained the food, from farther and farther away—back chaining. In a short period of time, her rats could cross the field and climb into a box. Her food of choice for training and working through a production is Cocoa Krispies. The rats love it and eat it quickly. Plus, the cereal doesn’t leave them too full to perform well.
When teaching her rats to move in a specific place, Samantha works with the back-chaining exercises and beeper. As they continually cross the surface, they leave their own scent trail, so there’s no need to lay a path of smeared food to obtain the desired behavior.
Samantha uses a clicker when she has to teach very specific behaviors. One behavior chain she taught was for a rat to go into a burning dollhouse, bring out a doll, and place it in an ambulance. Working with several rats at the same time, she back chained the entire behavior sequence. She has discovered that competition drives rats to learn faster and perform more efficiently.
One of her early jobs was a comical television commercial for the Indiana Lottery. She provided eighteen rats that had to meander across the floor beneath some people who were tied up and forced to listen to awful music. Just beyond camera range was a hole in the wall of the set. Throughout the filming, the rats would disappear into this hole, and Samantha would pull them out. Upon completion of the job, she discovered she had five more rats than she started with! She decided to keep her new friends and put them to work in future productions. Looking back, she knew she should have blocked the hole. That would’ve saved her much anxiety and hard work.
Another interesting experience occurred while Samantha traveled in Italy. One of the rats’ tricks was to ride around on remote-controlled cars. While she was going through a security checkpoint, the movement of the vehicle caused the toy cars to activate. Her vehicle was quickly surrounded by armed soldiers. An interesting but frightening experience.
As Samantha often travels overseas with her rats, she has to make certain to have health certificates and permits. On one occasion, she was separated from her rats as they were held up in Amsterdam, awaiting documentation, while she was already in Austria. That was one experience she doesn’t wish to repeat. It was one thing to have her rats travel in the cargo areas but another thing entirely to be separated from them for two days as she dealt with the differing requirements from country to country.
Another precaution Samantha takes when traveling is labeling her animals “Long-Tailed Honduran Hamsters” instead of rats. This reduces the potential for incidents, as people are often repulsed by rats and alarmed by their presence.
Samantha uses specific sexes for specific jobs. Female rats are used for the live shows, since they are more energetic for longer periods of time and less likely to “leak.” People also tend to be turned off by the male rat’s larger and more menacing appearance. Because many movies use rats to establish an ominous mood, these male rats can come in handy. Her current movie project is a made-for-television horror flick titled April Fools. In this film, her rats have a simple, nonhorrifying job: run down an alley, a simple point-A-to-point-B behavior.
Samantha performs for hire with her female rats on Halloween. She lies in a casket as the rats run all over her body. Sound like a reality show? To someone who loves her rodents, it’s loads of fun. What can be better than earning money while spending time with her friends?
Samantha’s other rat production work includes the documentaries Rat, Rat Among Us, and War Zone; the feature films Unconditional Love and The Evil One; the television shows Pet Star and Animal Planet’s Wild on the Set; music videos for Megadeth and Savatage; and commercials for breathmints and the Salvation Army.
Moe Disesso, the rat trainer for the original Willard, lived in Los Angeles before his recent death. He spent most of his life training rats—one at a time, unless the scene called for group action, in which case they were trained to perform their point-A-to-point-B motion as a unit. He too used a beeper to move the rats to their destination. While he was often impatient with humans, he had neverending patience for his rodent pupils.
I have provided rats for television shows and a couple of movies. Each part required several months of preparation for all involved. I’ll detail two of my jobs. The first was for a movie based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” shown on The Learning Channel. The second was for an independent film. The Poe movie required some very natural rat behaviors—running around and chewing. The indie film, however, required many more hours of preparation, as the rat had to learn to wear a military outfit, with helmet, and salute on cue.
Here’s what I did to prep the rats for the Poe movie. First, I had to find rats that looked like a wild Norway rat. This is a very large brown rat. Unfortunately, they’re tough to find in a pet shop, so I settled for a couple of black rats, one gray, and one dark beige. (Prior to going on camera, each rat had to go through makeup to become brown!) They were males, so I didn’t have to worry about mating during business hours. This also meant, however, that when they reached maturity there was a risk of more frequent rat fights. Needless to say, I obtained a very large, three-level cage for my rat actors so that they could exercise and remain in good condition as well as have their own space when they wished. Remember that a crowded cage will cause more scuffles than a roomy, multilevel cage.
Moe Disesso and his famous rats.
I began by teaching all the rats to come when called for their breakfast lab block. This was easily learned, as they knew that not coming to the tap meant no breakfast. The only rat that offered any resistence was the beige rat, which was somewhat antisocial. The black rats were of the fancy variety and therefore very social and eager to learn. They had obviously received a lot of attention from a very young age. The gray rat began showing signs of illness shortly after I bought him, so I separated him from the others.
Each training session, I worked on teaching targeting and the come tap. I also conditioned the rats to follow a trail of mushed food. As one of their tasks was to appear to be chewing the ropes on the victim, they needed to really dig in with their teeth. The mushed food had to be rubbed in, but not so much that they would lose interest. Since the set was really an old operating theater in an abandoned veteran’s hospital in Washington, D.C., there was a risk that the actors would run off instead of working. The rats had to be very interested in their rewards.
I had two assistants with me that day. It turned into a very dirty job as the floor had been gooped with spilled coffee, mud, moldy food, and other filth to portray an old dungeon. What was to be a simple job of having the rats remain on the actor’s chest and chew the rope turned into a wild rodent chase as they became interested in all of the crazy smells around them. We completed the job in six hours, covered in filth and very tired. Who said Hollywood is glamorous? That certainly does not apply to the animal trainers!
Here’s what I did to prep the rats for the indie film. I obtained a white laboratory rat and a black fancy rat. The white rat was for this indie film, and the black one was for another project. As both were very young when I bought them, I had thought it unnecessary to worry about their sex. Besides, the pet shop dealer told me they were both female. I should’ve checked for myself. It can be difficult for novice rat owners to recognize sex differences in young rats. I knew better but trusted this pet shop owner, since I had obtained many animals through him.
I spent at least an hour each day training the white rat to wear a GI Joe outfit and stand up on cue as well as to come to the tap. Two weeks before filming, the white rat started growing large. It was then that I noticed the black fancy rat was a male. He had barely begun to show the testicular sacs near his tail. I only hoped that the birthing day would not be on the same day as the filming. I lucked out; it occurred three days prior to production day. However, the mother rat had thirty babies! I have owned rats for most of my life but never saw a brood that large. (The average litter is eight.)
The way I acclimated the white rat to her outfit was to begin with the harness-training procedures. She learned to go into the costume in order to eat her dinner. Once she had it on, I began teaching her easy behaviors that she already knew well, such as to come to a tap and stand up. She quickly acclimated to the outfit, which sported a helmet and ammunition belt attached to a camouflage military shirt.
On production day, I brought mama and babies along with the costume we had been practicing with for a month. The rat was very comfortable in costume and didn’t bat an eyelash at all the commotion involved in making a movie. She still had a large belly from carrying all those babies, but she performed like a soldier.
Your rat will be what you make of him. If you want someone to cuddle with while watching television, Ben will spend many hours snuggled close. Should you want an Acrorat like those of Samantha Martin, all it takes is a few minutes each day to train specific behaviors, best done around feeding time. If you want a traveling companion, rats are perfect as they require little time and space, giving you freedom to go wherever you wish.
Open your imagination, and let your rat shine.