Rat Training

Surprisingly, training a pet rat is not as difficult as it might be to train most rodents; however, this is only the case if the pet rat in training is a domesticated rat and not a wild one.



Wild rats are extremely difficult to train and most domesticated rats that are pets have the disposition that they do only because they have been in the company of human beings as pets for many generations. The most important part about training any kind of pet in its adulthood is to earn its trust; this is especially the case if your pet rat has been brought from a pet store.



If, on the other hand, your pet rat has been exposed to you since birth, you should have a much easier task when your pet rats are in training.

The most important part of pet rat training is to gain its trust and assure it that you do not mean any kind of harm and hurt.



One of the things that you do have going for you is that pet rats are naturally quite curious and playful. To start with, you must get an adult rat used to you by feeding it and using soothing sounds to reassure the animal that you do not mean any kind of harm. This is also the start of the first part of training a rat, which is to teach the rat its name. This can be done by uttering its name when feeding it, as this will make the rat form an association with the sound of its name. Rats are naturally very playful and intelligent, starting their activities of learning as soon as they are old enough to open their eyes. It is worth remembering that rats are popularly used as subjects by scientists to understand animal intelligence. To this end, you can train rat to do an entire bunch of tricks as long as there is a reward at the end.

Though rats are extremely intelligent and amenable to training, they can take some time to master a certain task. Another thing that you must remember is that rats do not work very well with negative feedback and will get intimidated with an aggressive approach and negative feedback. Each rat has a very individual personality and this will give you an idea of the type of tasks that would be suited to it.