This is a video of Casper, my albino male rat! I took this video back before I actually adopted Casper and he was still a lab rat for one of my courses, Animal, Learning and Behavior. The video was taken at the end of a work day, Casper had already been run for his lab session and I was sitting at the lab table typing up the results for the day. As I was doing this, I would usually have Casper in his cage with the top off so he could sniff around and interact with me. On this particular day, he got a little daring and sneaky, attempting to climb the edges of the cage before perching on the corner closest to me. I looked over and smirked, thinking to myself, “Is he going to climb out?” This is when I grabbed my phone and started recording. From Casper’s perspective, I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking: “Must…escape. Must…not…slip.” The full video of the GIF pictured at the left shows Casper giving up after he almost slips and just staring at me, like “I didn’t do anything wrong…”; no rats were harmed in the making of this video/GIF.
I decided to chose this GIF for my home video one because Casper is my pride and joy, and two because it was a funny video I wanted to caption and create into a GIF. When it comes to animals, we never really know what they’re thinking or why they do the things they do. Having a lot of experience with pet rats myself, I’ve noticed that these creatures tend to be sneaky and daring with stunts they pull, especially when they’re familiar with their owners. What I mean by this is that if you own a rat and have a close bond with it, they tend to do things they know will get them in trouble because they want to play with you. Casper somewhat knew he shouldn’t have tried climbing the sides of his cage from the many times I’ve told him no repeatedly; rats are able to learn words and understand what they mean, especially single-word phrases such as, “No.” I do let him get away with things, but sometimes it’s to see what he’s doing and what he’ll do if he accomplishes it, such as climbing out of his cage. This was a fun assignment to create and something I enjoyed doing, especially because it involved my little pet ghost.
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