Is it ever ok to keep a single rat?

[Slapntickleothewenches]

DS wants a rat for his 10th birthday. As he has recently (the last year or so) got so much more responsible with helping out with the dogs and cat, we think he is probably ready for his own pet (supervised obviously)
As a child I also had rats but often had them singly. IIRC it was even recommended at one stage that you had a single to allow them to bond with you better, possibly introducing a second later on.
Now the advice seems firmly to be that rats should be kept in pairs or single sex groups. My single rats always spent a great deal of time out of the cage, not something that would be so easy here as we have dogs downstairs.
So should we go for a pair or would a single be ok?

Unless rat is going to have a really long time out of cage with company each day i'd say definitely not a single. They get so depressed on their own, human company is fine but it needs to be a lot to replace rat company for them.
I love ratties, would love to get some more but small kids and cats make it impossible atm.

Good luck

A bored rat is a grumpy rat, so I'd keep them as a pair.
You could talk to Vicarinatutu. She has many rats and a dog and has the situation well sorted.

Well we are having two after all :o
They are to be called James (Bond) and Hermes (regardless of sex) and they will be gracing us with their presence at some point this weekend. That way they can have a few days peace and quiet to settle in before it's actually DS's birthday.
:o

That's my name change blown then :o

Haha, blown indeed. Glad to see that you're getting two. We regret not getting the third rat we had a choice of now. They are so cute and cuddly together!

Make sure that you find a good very with experience of rats now. We've had our boys for three months and girls for one month and they've all had to be treated for upper respiratory infections at least once each! It's important to catch it early with rats as it can cause serious problems if it gets to their lower respiratory systems.

Confused can you get rat medical insurance?
Lots of the sites I trawled were cat/dog/rabbit.
I found one which covered guinea-pigs but it was really £££ for cover especially as one of our boys is 'middleaged'.

(If you do have , you could maybe recommend --or advice which to avoid- for the OP )

RE last post: vet not very :)

70 I'm not sure, but I don't think it'd be worth it for rats tbh. Howl's eye removal cost us £100 and for the appointment and Anti-Bs for all four of our rats when they all had URIs a few weeks back it only cost us £20-30. But then our vet only saw two of them, charged us for one appointment slot and gave us meds for all four of them.

We try to have a couple of hundred set aside for them but unless we were really unlucky and all four needed big operations at once, we'd never really spend all of it. I also don't think insurance would cover spaying/neutering, which is the main cost with rats as girls practically have to be neutered young due to the risk of tumours, but even with that the most expensive place quoted us £80 per girl and £40 per boy.

If they lived longer it might be worthwhile I suppose, but seeing as they live to few years at most, you're not going to end up spending much on rats for healthcare unless you are either very unlucky, or have rats who are really prone to URIs. We've had both

Apparently a lot of vets struggle to pick up on URIs in rats, which is why you need a vet who has experience doing it, we were lucky in that one of our vets specialises in rodents whilst others in the practice own rats and have done operations on them. Took a bit of phoning around though! They're also the cheapest thankfully! :)

For small pets it's often better to put a small amount aside every week (as you might do for insurance anyway) rather than find a specific policy that would likely overcharge.