His Patients Go Into a Recovery Cage

By KATIE HAFNER
©New York Times
08rat.184

The tumor, a subcutaneous growth the size of a Ping-Pong ball, must be removed.

Dr. Tom Reed, the surgeon, puts on his gloves. His assistants have administered the anesthesia and shaved the patient's chest. Precise and efficient, Dr. Reed makes a cut no longer than three-quarters of an inch and gets to work. The mass he extracts is almost perfectly round and self-contained. The operation, which took less than four minutes, produces remarkably little blood.

"He's so quick there's no time for blood," said Steve Gardner, a colleague of Dr. Reed's who has entered the operating room.As he sews up the patient's chest with four small stitches, Dr. Reed, a man of few words, grows ever so slightly chatty. The stitches are stainless steel wire.

"We do that so she won't chew them off," he said.A minute later, the patient, a one-year-old rat named Zver, is awake and appears to be listing slightly but otherwise faring well. As the assistant places Zver in a recovery cage, a heating pad tucked underneath for warmth, Dr. Reed takes a look. "Her coloring makes her look a little like a ferret, doesn't it?" he said.

Dr. Reed's admiring tone, tinged with wonder, gives no hint that over the last 30 years he has seen countless patients that do not look terribly different from Zver. In fact, when it comes to pet rats, Dr. Reed, a veterinarian in Albany, Calif., has seen it all. He has consoled rat owners who arrive awash in grief over a gravely ill pet, which sometimes turns out to be already dead in the shoe box. He has removed tumors from at least 800 rats and has examined thousands of ailing rodents. He has performed surgery on rats with tumors one and a half times the size of the rat. "They haul them around," Dr. Reed said. Their owners let the tumors go so long without treatment, he explained, because they could not find a vet who would perform the surgery.Rat owners (this reporter counted herself among their ranks until recently, when her daughter's rat, Peanut Butter, finally succumbed to a respiratory illness) often grow intensely attached to their pets. Once people get beyond the reptilian tail and the yellow, angled teeth, they grow to love rats because they are loyal like dogs but not so demanding, and cuddly like cats but not nearly as fickle.

"They're born tame, but they have to be exposed to humans so they'll bond with them when they're young," said Debbie Ducommun of Chico, Calif., also known as the Rat Lady. "You can take an older rat and socialize it, but it won't be quite as trusting."Ms. Ducommun, who operates a Web site (www.ratfanclub.org) for rat fans, said that when she started out as the Rat Lady in 1985, hamsters were by far the most popular pocket pet. Now, in California, still a trendsetting state in at least this regard, rats appear to be more popular than hamsters.

Hard numbers supporting this claim are difficult to come by, but Ms. Ducommun said that 11 years ago she began calling pet stores to do her own informal surveys. "In 1992, they were still selling way more hamsters than rats," she said. "Now pet shop owners try to steer people toward rats instead of hamsters," said Ms. Ducommun, who has 20 rats of her own, most of which she rescued from a pound after their owners decided they could not afford to keep paying the medical bills.

Alex Rincon, the manager of Your Basic Bird in Berkeley, said this was certainly the case at his store. "Rats are much more social than hamsters," he said. "They like to hang out with you, and they're not crabby the way a lot of the hamsters are."

Ms. Ducommun attributes the rat mania in California to the relative openness of people here toward new things. "If you find out that rats make good pets, maybe a Californian would be more likely to follow that up," she said. "Whereas someone in another state might brush it off and say, `You've got to be kidding.' And then there's a snowball effect." As objects of affection go, rats are rather fleeting. The average life span of a pet rat is two years, the latter half often spent coping with various diseases. Not only are benign mammary tumors like Zver's common in female rats starting at around 18 months, when rat menopause hits, but so are respiratory ailments and unpleasant skin conditions.

Dr. Reed is careful to point out that the rats he treats are not the wild sewer rats that annoy, bite and generally spook New Yorkers. Nor are they the roof rats that infest people's homes. They are a tame variation on Norway rats, which are thought to have evolved from ship rats over the last 1,000 or so years.

As for associations with The Plague, Ms. Ducommun is quick to say that it was the fleas on those rats, not the rats themselves, that carried the disease.

Dr. Reed, 58, a tall, lanky man with a handlebar mustache that descends a good four inches below his chin, did not set out to be a rat specialist. Things just turned out that way. His veterinary training is in orthopedic surgery, and he operates on most of the animals that come in for surgery. Thirty years ago, not long after going into practice, he treated his first rat.

The practice doesn't make much money on rats. It costs the office nearly as much to perform surgery on them as on dogs or cats. Yet Dr. Reed sees how attached people grow to their rats, which is in part what motivates him to do what he can for them. In recent years, as word of his rat expertise has spread, mostly via the Internet (although the doctor himself does not own a computer or go online), rat owners have come from neighboring counties to have their rats' tumors removed.

Dr. Reed did not have pets while growing up in Lake Arrowhead in Southern California. His father had been raised on a farm. "He didn't believe animals belonged in the house," Dr. Reed said.
So as a boy, Dr. Reed fed the squirrels in the neighborhood, and when he grew up and moved into his own place in Newport Beach, Calif., he acquired snakes. At first he fed mice to the snakes. But he disliked the smell of mice, so he switched to rats, which clean themselves several times a day and are generally less odorous than other rodents. Then he noticed how likable and intelligent the rats were and began granting them amnesty. Before long, he had gotten rid of the snakes and taken up rats as pets. By the end of a year, he had 175.
"You started with one and ended up with 175?" this reporter asked.
"No," he said quietly, a bit surprised to have to impart a lesson in the birds and the bees to a fellow adult. "I started with two."
Now his own pets are confined to two cats.
It has been a dry spell for rats lately, Dr. Reed noted after he removed Zver's tumor and prepared to spay a young border collie. Zver was the first rat Dr. Reed had operated on in a couple of months. But the dry spell probably portends a rush on rat visits, he said.
"Now they'll pour in the door by the thousands," he said. "Like `Willard.'"