Psychiatrists hate her! One weird £5 trick for Mental Normality

[Ennn]

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I'm also not keen on keeping incompatible species of pet, though - lots of people are fine with the idea of having pet dogs and owt rats in the same house but I feel it's unfair to the rats as even if the dog is friendly and they appear to cope, I suspect the presence of a carnivorous predator like a dog will keep their cortisol levels high long-term and lead to stress-related illness (fancy rats have had the fear of humans bred out of them but not the fear of other predators - incidentally, that's one of the reasons that keeping wild rats is problematic - they don't live long in captivity even if captive-bred and hand-raised, because they're dispositionally unsuited to captivity and humans and are running at high stress levels constantly).

owt pet

Barney looks like a sweetie.

Joe looks a bit puckish.

Joey can be a cunt

which is a shame

They can live in a cage in the bedroom but might be a bit noisy - they're not technically nocturnal and will adapt to your schedule but really they nap at various tines and are quite likely to be active and haring around ad some points of the night. And it needs to be quite a big cage.

They don't smell much but if you don't clean the cage (pooey corners probably daily, thorough cage clean weekly) you will get piss smells. Male mice smell a LOT.

No, you shouldn't keep a lone rat, it will be sad. Same sex groups - two or three rats together.

Yes, they escape, but their behaviour depends on the rat's personality. Some will get lonely in their hospital cage and escape and climb upstairs despitw horrivle tumours to come and see what you're doing, some will spend the next week hiding, and stealing all your antacids and fountain pen cartridges, some will just chill out sitting on top of the cage, and some will manage to boot up your PC and hack into the BIOS (all things my rats have actually done)

I have to admit some rats do bite but the vast majority of tame pet rats don't and would never dream of it, even when in a lot of pain.

Of the very few who do bite, some of them will nip if they think you are food, which is easily solved, some just don't like your fingers sticking through bars, some of them will bite if you surprise them suddenly or to protect their babies, and a tiny number are just nasty (I've had one rat who was untrainable; would run over to bite you ) but I've had a lot of rats and almost all of them I would have happily agreed to give you a thousand quid if they bit you.

Okay Chap

Mice are faster, less interactive, less intelligent, but don't need as big a cage. And the males stink.

Who is participating indayinthelifemh.org.uk/ tomorrow?

not me, but it looks interesting

I'm off to see a friend tomorrow and will be vv mentally normal. Otherwise I would take part because I like doing stuff that isn't watching telly and knitting.

It's ok to do it even if you are mentally normal on the day

kids do that just to piss you off.

I once deliverately threw a french vocab test when I was 15 and the teacher made me learn the past historic and read a french novel in penance

She was eeevil but I luffed her - I left that school at 15, learnt no more new french at my next school, but when I did the joining test at the local sixth form college that they did to find out what level people were at, they suggested I go straight into the A2 classes as even with what I'd forgotten in the intervening period, she'd taught me enough French to do so.

Parents email you to complain about punishments?

She used to lose her voice quite frequently - on those days, we all had to be completely silent in between speaking tasks and listen to her whispering