Some friends of mine, who have this symmetrical rat history with me, acquired some baby rats from a somewhat shady "mom n pop" local pet store. With my own self still feeling a terrible loss from Thom's death, I decided to also go out and purchase babies. I felt guilty continuing the vicious cycle that goes along with breeding rodents in this kind of place, but all the breeders that used to be within range of me have closed up shop or moved away. I felt even worse considering the conditions were really subpar, but in retrospect I realized at some point every pet store's baby rats are going to be in that same sort of cramped aquarium situation. And at the end of the day I spared these three from that situation or to go on to be fed to something or taken into another bad setup.

These boys are Robbaz, Melon and Jazz. I don't know if they are all actually brothers or not, there were two zoned out looking mommas in the tank at the time. I initially purchased only melon and Jazz (the two on the right) but within a couple days I went back and picked up robbaz, who is really the friendliest of the three.

Here they are together in a tube, the photo quality isn't amazing because I took it on my phone but the shot itself was so precious.