Best Friend Rodent Rescue

This week has been a rough one for Best Friend Rodent Rescue.  We received a call from a rather frantic niece. Apparently, her Aunt had gone in to a long term care home and had allowed her nephew to stay in her home. We're not sure of all the details. However, we do know that the nephew was evicted by the police about 2 weeks ago.  There were also some other homeless people removed from the home. Apparently, no one went in to the home to check for animals or anything though. Other family came over from Yakima and were going to help their Aunt sell the house. They walked in to the home extremely surprised to find cages full of rats "walking all over each other." They immediately called and left a message with us and also got a hold of Tacoma Animal Control. It took us about 5 calls and to the following day to finally find out more details. At first we were told there were about 50 to 60 rats. Tacoma Animal Control arrived first and confirmed there were only about 15 rats. The real estate agent advised us that animal control was glad to hear we were coming to help because the remaining rats were extremely friendly. Animal Control was kind enough to remove the majority of dead bodies and give the rats some canned cat food and fill bowls of water until we could get there. When we arrived the wonderful real estate agent was waiting for us and though she was not found of rats herself and refused to go back in to the house she let us in and allowed us to do whatever we needed to save the remaining rats. There were actually a total of 16 rats and 1 hamster remaining alive......we have no idea how long it had been since they were feed. There are a few other graphic details that we won't discuss in this post as to not upset the faint of heart. All the rats were extremely skinny and weak, most probably only had 24 to 48 hours before they would have passed also. We know that it had been at the very least 10 days since any human had been inside the house. There was one guy that wasn’t moving much and seemed to be shutting down. We got him back to the rescue and put him on oxygen and tried syringe feeding Ensure. While we were getting the lactated ringers solution ready to try rehydrate him, he gave up the fight.

Best Friend Rodent Rescue already has approximately 90 rats in the rescue before the addition of these new Tacoma rats. Most of the rats in the rescue are older and about ½ of them are not highly adoptable. With mounting medical, food, cleaning and cage accessory bills the rescue is already having a tough time keeping up. Most of the food has already been being paid for by myself and the other directors out of our own pockets.

Can you please help us help these amazing creatures? BFRR is a 501 (C )(3) tax exempt non-profit, so anything you donate including money or other items like food, fleece, towels, cleaning supplies such as vinegar etc. can be used as a tax write off for you. If you’d like to follow the story or Best Friend Rodent Rescue please visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/bfrrwa!