Having been a breeder, and doing a little rescue, for 6 years...I've been involved in the pet rat community for some time now. I was a member of a HUGE pet rat forum, RatPalace, for a while and made several friends there. Last February, the owners decided to shut it down for good, and I created a new forum for the members to migrate too.
So, I've been running a pet rat forum for about a year now. I've made so many friends in the rat community, I could hardly list them all. I remain friends with one of the former moderators of RatPalace, and while she decided not to spend much time on the new forum she and I e-mail and Instant Message and generally stay in touch. I've always considered myself pretty darn knowledgeable when it comes to rats- but she really takes the cake. She taught me so much and I don't know how I'd have gotten through the recent loss of most of my rats without her.
A member here, Nikki_Burr, is a moderator on my forum. I also met her at the old forums, but we didn't really become friends until I started the new forum and asked her if she wanted to moderate for me. She's pretty much become my best friend in the world- and she's all the way across the country. We talk daily via instant messenger, and I really don't know what I'd do without her. She also adopted two rats from me when I as still breeding- which is really saying something, because my adoption process was HARSH for people I didn't know like the back of my hand. [
] She's who directed me to this forum, and I'm SO glad she did.
I really can't see how the rat community would really exist without the internet and online forums. Backyard breeding is SUCH a huge problem with rats- I'd go so far as to say it's an even bigger problem than it is with dogs. Rats are easier to get, cheaper, smaller, and easier to breed. So many people just go to the pet store, pick up a male and a female, toss them together, and call themselves breeders. Most of these people, while they "enjoy" their rats, think of them as totally disposable- their female pops out 12 or 14 babies, gets pregnant within about 6 hours (because who ever heard of seperating males and females?) and before they know it they have about a million rats and a very sick, overstressed female. So what do they do? Sell the babies to pet stores, give them away with no screening, or even flush them down the toilet or sell them as feeders.
Try to educate them on genetics, on the importance of NOT breeding rats of unknown background...and 9 times out of ten, you get scoffed at. They're "just rats," after all. [&o]
I would say, in all honesty, there are probably less than 200 reputable rat breeders
in the world. I highly doubt there are even that many...I can name less than 20 off the top of my head And because we're all so spread out, (how many people do you know have pet rats and actually know something about them?) the rat community really only existed in very small, concentrated areas prior to the internet. Of course, people had rats in other places- but they didn't know how to care for them, much less have any idea as to how to breed responsibly. How could they? There was simply no information out there for them.
The CARE that the average pet rat gets is even worse- tossed in a 10 gallon tank, alone, in pine shavings, and fed commericial rat diets, hamster food, or dog food. Why take them to the vet? You can just buy another one for 3 bucks at any pet store. PArt of it is misinformation...the other part is that the smaller and cheaper the pet, the more disposable people consider it to be. [
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Because of all the misinformation out there, an animal that COULD have a lifespan of 6 or 7 has a lifespan of 2 or 3....when adopted from a reputable breeder. Rats from petstores usually succumb to genetic health problems after about 18 months. The situation is that bad.
Anyway, I'll step off of my soapbox now- suffice it to say that the rat community, if it existed at all, would be in FAR worse shape than it is now. So many dramatic improvements in the collecive knowledge about them have been made since the internet came about...I'd hate to see the shape we'd be in without it. I really don't see how the fancy managed to do much more than flop around on its belly for 200 years before the internet came around. Real participation in the rat world, and the knowledge that was out there, was soooo insanely limited to just a few small groups of people.
Wow, I didn't mean to make such a long and mostly irrelevant post. [8D] Anyway, I really don't know what I'd do without forums. All of my best friends I met online...and my husband too. The internet has made such a huge impact on my life, I don't even know where to begin.