Critically Endangered
This is the last of pest week. That doesn't mean I won't do pest paintings any more, but just not a theme of them for a week.
This is a nocturnal burrowing rat. That seems to be the extent of the information known about them. Actually, that information also appears to be assumed, and based on behaviours of a different but similar species. They are endemic to a small area of India. Unfortunately, they are classified as vermin so I'm not sure if there is any real protection for them. There is a sort of secondary protection, because many of them live on land that the ministry of defense owns, so it won't be developed. That doesn't mean the rat is safe though.
We had a rat once. It wasn't on purpose, not as a pet sort of thing. Actually we had a rat twice. One was a feral rat (probably escaped from a place that breeds them as snake food or something) that we rehabilitated so that one was on purpose. That rat liked my singing which I thought was interesting. The other time was one that showed up when construction started down the street. That one caused so much trouble. It decided it loved the hoses on the dishwasher. It ate through them, we replaced the hoses thinking actually that maybe they had just been deteriorating since the dishwasher was 20 years old. He ate through the replacement hoses...which caused water to leak all over the wood floor every time too! After that the dishwasher decided it had been abused enough and stopped working. We eventually caught the rat using trail mix as bait. We let him go in an area where he would have plenty to eat, but also plenty of predators around to eat him and keep things in balance, but no homes or food crops for him to cause problems with.