From Twitter 02-04-2011

( Tweets. Scintillating, innit. )

Tweets copied by twittinesis.com

And then there were three.

2009-2011

Last night, Altaïr succumbed to the respiratory infection we’ve been trying to fight off.

It wasn’t a surprise, to be honest. He’d dropped a lot of weight, wasn’t really eating or drinking on his own, and was visibly in pain — a thing rats conceal very, very well under most circumstances. I’d been hopeful he might rally, but mostly he spent a lot of time in the hammock. In his last couple of days it was hard to get him to accept more than a nibble of food.

So last night, when I found him laying flat on the rat house floor, I picked him up and tried to hold him. When that turned out to be too painful for him I put him in our smaller enclosure and just stroked him gently while he died.

It’s hard. It feels unfair because he died much younger than he should have done. He was a good rat, and a good friend, and I’m going to miss him.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com