My pet rat is dying. I can’t stop thinking about all the things he taught me | Joseph Earp

5 hours ago 1

I’m a writer and painter, two professions with the occupational risk of turning you, to put it delicately, a little bit weird. Insularity is the name of the game with both – you have to spend a lot of time inside, not really talking to people, trapped totally in your own head.

For some time now, the solution to this problem has been my rat, Bob. I’ve had him for two years, and in that time he has been my sounding board, creative confidant and unwavering ally. I’ve written two books with him in the room and I am certain he knows when I’m writing, because he has to deal with me hugging him more, as I try to take breaks from the cruel demands of a first draft.

I am aware what this all sounds like – becoming a rat guy is not, on the face of it, a means of becoming less weird. The film Ratatouille aside, most of the mainstream representation that rats get is as harbingers of death and destruction, so keeping a little dude in your house whose largest contribution to society is the bubonic plague admittedly lies on the stranger side of pet ownership.

But here’s the thing: Bob is my son. He is kind, cuddly, stubborn and wilful. Even people who don’t like rats are moved by him. He’s never even bitten anyone, except my friend Susie, who dared to talk to him when he was gnawing on a cucumber.

More than anything else, Bob adores two things: his wheel, and me. (The order of those things is deliberate – I know he’d jump over my dying body for one more hit of the wheel, and that’s fine.) For much of our time together, when I have picked him up, he has stuck out his little ratty hands and asked to grab my hair, which he will then carefully preen. When I googled this behaviour, I discovered it meant that he considered me one of his brood. So we are on the same page: I think he’s my kid and he thinks I’m his too.

Ask any rat person (go ahead, we don’t bite, unless we’re eating cucumber) and you will learn that rats are smart, funny, affectionate and sweet. Probe a little deeper and you will also quickly unearth heartbreak. Rats live for two years. You form a deep bond with them, get used to their constant chatter and then they get wrenched away from you.

Because Bob is a remarkable rat, I always assumed he would defy the odds on the issue of mortality, and that in 10 years time he’d be sauntering around with a cane, writing his memoirs, old but not gone. About six months ago though, it became unignorable that he had slowed down. He doesn’t run in his wheel much, if ever, any more. If I pick him up, he settles into my arms and makes little chittering noises that indicate he’s happy.

But the days of him preening my hair are mostly gone. If I hold him up to my head, he weakly, gently, runs his little hands through my hair. I like to imagine his mind is willing but his body is not – that he wants me to know how much he still loves me but his joints are too stiff now to show it. He can’t tell me either way.

This is one of the remarkable things about pets: we understand them totally, except for the striking times when we really don’t. Owning and caring for a creature takes us outside of ourselves – not just us insular weirdo artists, but all people. The animals who live in our home are little scraps of a universe and natural world so much larger, and more complicated, than us. That we can understand them at all is remarkable and beautiful. The times when we can’t understand them, and we remember that they are so profoundly different to us, is remarkable and beautiful too.

We exist with our pets in a strange, wonderful middle point, a meeting ground between species. I never stopped being a person. Bob never stopped being a rat. But we became each other’s little one. We looked out for each other.

Each day now, I give Bob a cuddle and try to work out what might be going on for him. There’ll be a time soon when the pain is too much and it’ll be time for him to go. Will I know it? I like to believe I will. And in the meantime, I’ll be sitting here with a little cuddly scrap of the universe in my lap, thanking him for what he’s given me and assuring him I will be OK, even if I have to brush my own hair when he’s gone.