A Few Of My Favorite Rat Photos

According to my phone, it says I have 11,288 photos of my rats stored on it. This does not include about 90% of the ones I took prior to 2016. A portion of those are stored on an old laptop and a hard drive, and the rest seem to have been lost to rapidly changing technology. This count also doesn’t include pre-digital images; those physical photographs are all buried somewhere, deep in my garage. Plus, had I not been ratless for the last year and a half, I would likely have taken a couple thousand more.

All this to say, I have a shocking amount of rat pictures!

Are they all good pictures you may be wondering? No! Many are blurry and absolutely not worthy of being shared and should be deleted. But I can’t bring myself to delete these memories, even the blurry ones.

I’m not the only pet owner with a photo obsession. But for me, taking pictures of my rats used to be part of my job. For 13 years I published a monthly magazine called It’s a Rat’s World (IARW) and photography was an integral part of each issue. Besides needing images for IARW’s social media, I also needed them to accompany articles and for the cover.

Shortly after starting IARW, I decided that it would be fun if the the cover image and The PapRATzi Page(s), the section that was solely dedicated to the readers’ photo submissions, had a monthly theme. Holiday months were themed with their respective holidays, but the rest of the year I tried to come up with ideas that would be fairly easy for owners to capture. The easiest ones were grooming, sleeping, and eating. But I also had yawning, rat tails, rats and their friends, rats with other pets, rats and their people, rats and children, rats traveling, rats outside, and many others.

I’m not a professional photographer, which was obvious during the first couple of years. Over time, though, I’d like to think my covers really improved, and I’m quite proud of them. This month, I’d like to share some of them with you, along with a couple of candid moments that could have been covers.

Sleeping Rats

Rats are adorable no matter what they are doing, but one curled up, fast asleep, is the very definition of preciousness.

This is a candid shot of Preacher, on my birthday, during the height of covid in 2020. Stuck isolating at home with just my husband and son, I spent the day watching movies with them and my rattie boys. Wanting to lift my spirits (at least this is what I tell myself), Preacher gifted me with a moment so irresistibly darling that it took everything in me not to disturb him with kisses all over his sweet face. Napping, belly up with his legs straight in the air, his eyelids fluttered, and his nose twitched, all while dreaming whatever it is that rats dream. Watching my boy, with no cares and absolute trust in the humans around him, brought me a sense of joy that I needed in a time of chaos.

This is from a series of sleeping pictures I took of baby Brinley shortly after adopting him and his brother, Moffett. The two of them were known for being back sleepers, and I’ve written about this many times in past articles. I’ve probably used this very photo before in one of them, but come on, who doesn’t want to see it again? This is even one of my rotating home screen pictures on my iPhone.

Getting a photo of these wiggle-monsters asleep isn’t difficult, but the minute you attempt it for a cover, that’s when they are fully awake and uncooperative.

The first time I chose “sleeping rats” to be IARW’s theme-of-the-month I skipped using one of my younger rats for the cover of the May 2012 issue. Instead, I chose my heart rat Brockton, who was a senior, and I used a blanket to hide his arthritic legs and patchy fur. It didn’t take much to lull this precious old man to sleep, because I did the photo shoot on my bed. This is now one of my all-time favorite photos of Brockton.

When you want your rats to be energetic and alert for photos, that’s exactly when they choose to take a nap.

Here’s baby Castiel, who decided the pink feathers for the Valentine’s shoot were just too cozy to pass up. I probably could have used it for the February 2016 cover, but I ended up going with a photo of his brothers, Winchester and Crowley. I also posted a video of all three boys in the feathers.

Rat Dress-Up

Many of my covers featured a rat in costume, which forced me to get creative. Sometimes I was hand-sewing and cutting holes in felt, and other times I repurposed items that were intended for something else entirely. Here’s a small selection of non-holiday themed photos of my rats “playing” dress-up.

In December 2015, after a 30-year wait, there was a flurry of excitement when the first of the final episodes of the “Star Wars” saga was released.

I, too, was swept up and decided to dedicate the January 2016 issue to the franchise, which meant a “Star Wars” cover. Hairless rats have always reminded me of a pink Yoda, and luckily for me, I had two at this time. I immediately whipped up a camel-colored cloak for my boy Sterling and grabbed a couple of Yodas from my son’s “Star Wars” collection. You probably can’t tell in this photo, but even my son’s bedding and headboard (which I designed) are “Star Wars” themed.

Many years ago, I spotted a small rat-sized snowman plushie that was wearing a striped, knit hat and matching scarf, and a lightbulb went off. After carefully removing the snowman’s winterwear, so as not to put holes in it, I stitched a thin strip of elastic to the hat to create a chin strap and, voilà, an instant rat costume! Many of my rats have posed for photos wearing this ensemble, but it was my boy Crowley (Castiel’s brother) that modeled in it for the January 2018 cover. Due to his natural modeling abilities, he was on many of my covers.

In fact, here’s Crowley again, posing as a Scotsman for my October 2017 cover. During a family trip to Scotland earlier that year, we came across a whisky liqueur being sold at the Stirling Castle. The bottle just happened to be topped with a tiny, rat-sized tam made out of one of our family’s tartans (plaid), so of course I wanted it. Back at home, I stitched an elastic strap to the tam and then hunted down some flannel with a similar pattern, to whip up a matching kilt and bagpipes. Yes, I even made some (non-functioning) rat-sized bagpipes!

My sewing skills are limited, so for the September 2012 cover I commissioned Natasha Matherly, one of IARW’s longtime columnists, to make this artist smock and beret. I did paint the mini Picassoesque rat painting though, for my little “Pablo Racasso” (whose real name was Wolfgang).

Holidays With Rats

I’m particularly proud of my holiday covers because it was not easy coming up with new concepts and color schemes for each one, year after year.

Like Crowley, Wolfgang was incredibly photogenic, which is why he nailed the perfect pose for my February 2013 issue. This is seriously one of my top ten favorite pictures of all my rats.

Fun Fact: These are the same feathers that Castiel fell asleep in three years later.

I have a lot of favorite Easter pictures, making it impossible for me to narrow down, so my husband picked this one. This is Custer (Preacher’s brother) posing as the Easter Bunny Ratty for the April 2019 issue. And yes, I did make those ears, and they have appeared on a few covers.

This photo of Sirius turned out EXACTLY as I had envisioned for the Halloween October 2014 cover. He proved to be another modeling pro.

Here are some fun facts about this photo:

• I made the candy corn hat and in the October 2017 issue, I wrote a how-to for making it.

• In 2015 I made an illustration of this picture and posted it on Instagram. In 2024, one of my followers had a GIANT tattoo of it done on her thigh, which came out perfectly! I have since become online friends with Aja, the tattoo artist.

• Sirius did not get to eat all those candy corns, I didn’t even let him finish the one he was nibbling on.

You might be thinking I made Winchester’s (Crowley and Castiel’s brother) hat to be a perfect match to the wicker hat prop he’s sitting in, but you’d be wrong. I found this prop, exactly as you see it, in 2016 and used this photo for the December cover. But… I made the hat nine years earlier for my heart rat Delphiniums Blue, and his picture was used a year later for the December 2008 cover. When I came across the wicker hat, I knew immediately it was going on a cover.

These last two pictures are my absolute favorites of all my Christmas covers. I was tired of red and green for the December covers and decided it was time for a softer palette. Plus, I love the color pink.

I got the idea for using only ornaments for the December 2018 cover, after I found this glass one that was big enough for a rat to sit in. What I especially love about this picture is that Preacher somehow looks more like a plushie than a living, breathing rat. Even people online kept asking me if he was real.

Last, but definitely not least, is the final Christmas cover I did in 2019 for IARW, before I ended the magazine in July 2020. I loved the idea of creating a sugary, pastel wonderland.

After meticuluosly securing each prop to the set (which I still have somewhere in storage), I used it to take pictures of the baby rats I had adopted a month before. Something about this set brought magic to the photo shoot, because it was the first time that almost every photo was useable. It was torture trying to choose which of the four brothers would be featured, but ultimately, the coveted spot went to my nervous baby Gatwick.

Thanks so much for going down memory lane with me and giving me a chance to share some of my favorite pictures. A lot of these photos can also be found on items in my Zazzle shop.