Rat
Rescue :: Rat
Article
How to hear your Rats speak
Did you know that your rat makes an amazing array of sounds
that range in interpretation from “Well hi there, how are you
doing?” (usually a male-female conversation) to “Mum/Dad, any
chance of some food please?”.
You may smile, but many of us have never had the amazing experience
of actually hearing our rats speak. Yes, that’s right, you can
actually hear your rats speak to each other and to you.
Of course, we’ve all heard the odd squeak out of them – usually
when play fight with a cage mate – and we can communicate as
such with our rats by interpreting their moods via watching
their body language.
However, with a simple piece of equipment which picks up sounds
normally inaudible to the human ear, you can hear your rats
speak – and it is an amazing experience!
To experience a taster of rats speaking, click on our Radio
4 interview recorded in 2003 – and hear
Grammar Rat flirting with Rigby Rat!
To listen to your rats, all you need is a simple bat detector
to hear them conversing. Bat detectors are electronic gadgets
that can translate the high-pitched sounds that bats use when
flying in the dark into sounds within our range of hearing and
it picks up rat sounds too!
Bat Detectors
The detector works well if you have groups of rats - twos and
threes of the same sex aren’t as chatty as groups of does and
a bucks. You’ll get the very best results if you put a doe near
a buck (we hold one up to another’s cage so that they cannot
get close to each other and add to the rat population!).
You’ll hear the difference in sounds – a doe will make sweet
little squeaky, chirruping noises while the buck will make a
deeper, more pronounced series of sounds, almost like coins
being dropped from a great height into water.
Through our experience, the buck is saying something along
the lines of “Hello darling, fancy going for a drink sometime?”
while the doe is going “Hi there nice boy, you are cute!”
When it comes to feeding time, both the sexes make a similar
sound to each other – a squeaky, high pitched chirrup. It is
fascinating to experience these different conversations and
different tones – all which are rally pleasing to the human
ear.
Recent
research shows that mice make melodic sounds
to attract a mate and if you listen to your rats conversing,
you’ll hear melodic tones too.
And if that isn’t enough, when it comes to hearing us speak,
rats can tell the difference between languages! Now how clever
is that? The
article states that scientists in Spain
did an experiment using 16 rats that showed that they were able
to pick up enough cues from the rhythm and intonation of human
speech to tell spoken Dutch from spoken Japanese!
