a lesson in rat dentition

About a week ago, my daredevil rat, Pilot, took a flying leap out of Brian's arms and landed face-first on the brick floor.  She knocked both her top teeth clean out, and spent several days being very shaken and sore, but is healing fast and well now.  Still, it was pretty upsetting for everyone.

She jumped for no reason.  Well, except for whatever reason suggested to her by the little voices in her head.  Pilot has done this sort of thing before, and I imagine will probably try to do it again in the future -- she just leaps into the unknown with complete confidence in her own invulnerability.  Pilot is approximately eighty years old in human terms, so you'd think she'd have learned better by now, but she hasn't.

This is Pilot, by the way.

It drives me crazy when my pets do dumb stuff for no (apparent) reason.  Of course, it drives Maya crazy when I do dumb stuff for no (apparent) reason too.  Keeping pet rats may well fall into this category for her.  I know she find them interesting, but the whole not eating them thing is clearly a very frustrating mystery to her.  There I am, with five temptingly plump, squeaky, fluffy creatures, all of whom come when I call them, and I never even take a nibble.  Humans.

If Maya has trouble seeing inside the human mind, it is nothing compared to the difficulty I sometimes encounter when trying to see the world as my pets do.  Consider Pilot's teeth, for example.  Rats have the most extraordinary teeth.  Twelve of them are just like ours -- the twelve molars that sit in the very back of the mouth and are used for grinding food up when eating -- but the other four are completely different.  Here is Puck, showing a dainty glimpse of her ratty incisors.

 

There are two things most people immediately notice about rat incisors: first, the top two are a startling bright orange, which is normal and healthy but not at all the color we expect; second, they are huge, much larger (proportional to the skull) than human teeth could ever be.  As Nimbus shows us here:

 

Less obviously, rat incisors continue to grow throughout the entire life of the rat.  Pilot damaged her teeth last Sunday and then they fell out, one on Monday and one on Thursday.  She already has a new tooth growing in, and I expect to see some signs of the second soon.  Can you imagine?  It's fascinating to watch; if all goes well, Pilot should have two brand-new top teeth within about six weeks.  However, if the root of either tooth is damaged enough to make it grow back crooked, I will spend the rest of Pilot's life trimming her teeth back to make sure they do not overgrow (a dangerous and uncomfortable possibility).  Since the thought of trimming teeth gives me the heebie-jeebies, I am hoping for normal regrowth.

But the best and most amazing part of rat teeth is how integral they are to the ratty umwelt.  Rats use their teeth in a way almost unimaginable to humans, similar (but different) to the way we use our sensitive fingertips.  In fact, when I meet a rat, I reach out to it with my fingers, because that's how humans learn about the world.  Rats may steady themselves or the object of their attentions with their hands, but they investigate with their mouth, tasting, licking, nibbling, smelling, and otherwise gathering valuable information. They communicate with their teeth too, nibble-grooming one another (and sometimes me) with exquisite control over pressure, or grinding their teeth together in the ratty equivalent of a purr.  Imagine trying to tell someone you love them using just your teeth!

My rats live in a different world than I do.  It is a tactile and scent-filled world, and one filled with companionship.  My rats spend upwards of eighteen hours a day in physical contact with one another -- piled up asleep, grooming, or just hanging out side-by-side.  When they are not confined to a cage, they seek out this same physical closeness with me, napping on my feet or lap, sitting on a shoulder and pressing their bodies against me.  Pilot, feeling awful and sore this week, would crawl gloomily into the palm of my hand and curl up there, falling asleep to the warmth of my skin and the rhythm of my pulse.  Maya also sometimes seeks comfort in closeness, but physical contact matters far less to her than to the ratties.

But Maya, like the rats, relies heavily on smells.  Rats scent-mark even more than (most) dogs do.  Sometimes they use a dribble of urine, but rats also have scent glands in their wrists and chin that can be employed to mark practically everything they come in contact with.  When our rats free range, they are usually in a single room, which I am sure bears a complex tracery of overlaying scent mapping.  And when Maya comes in afterward, she drinks up these smells with intense enthusiasm, following rat trails around and learning about what they were doing.  More often than not, she succeeds in finding the secret place where the rats have hidden their snacks.  I suspect that Maya and the rats live in a world of smells to a degree that I simply cannot understand, no matter how much I crawl around on all fours and sniff corners.  We are three species sharing a house and so much more, yet having distinctly separate spheres of perception and thought.

All of which is to say that I don't really know what Pilot's thoughts have been like this past week, anymore than I can truly understand the scope of loss involved for a toothless rat.  But that doesn't mean I don't know quite a bit.  I know her mouth hurts, but is healing.  I know she is sleeping right now, with the press of soft rat bodies all around her and the smell of friends in her nostrils.  I know she is always going to leap without looking, always going to gallop headlong into the unknown, and never going to take heed of her own limitations.  I may not know everything that goes through her head, but I know who Pilot is.