Walter, the Rat

I was talking on the phone with a friend last night and the multi-topic conversation swung over to rats. He had a pet rat when serving in Vietnam - also some pet cockroaches until the rat ate them, and I remembered Walter whom I haven't thought of for a long time. When I was finishing my psych degree at Colorado State University, I took a class called Learning; you'd think there'd be more to a class title but that was it - Learning. Anyway, one of the many things we did in that class was train rats.

We were assigned lab partners and given a small, white rat with tiny pink eyes. We named ours Walter and trained him with positive and negative rewards to run a maze, climb a tall building and fly over the ocean; you know, things like that. He was a fast learner and I do believe he should've received a plaque for Valedictorian or something to that effect.

At the end of the class I took Walter home to my parents with whom I was staying for the last year of college. He was such a dear thing. His otherwise pink tail was gray from the newspapers in his cage and was as long as his body; he had grown ten times as big as he was when I first saw him; and he had developed a yen for adventure. So, I let him out of the cage to roam the house much to my mother's chagrin. He'd climb up on my shoulders, sniff my ears and I could feel his whiskers tickling my earlobes. Sometimes he'd nibble on them but it didn't hurt.

Later after Walter and I had left the premises to get on with our lives, my mother discovered tiny holes in things like bed sheets, towels - ya know, small stuff. I told her Walter didn't mean it but that didn't seem to appease her much.

I'm just glad we got out of the house before she discovered his little chewing hobby.