The love of rats started a long time ago with my daughter Jess deciding she wanted a rat as a pet. At first I was against the idea as like a lot of people I knew nothing of rats as pets and only knew the stories of wild rats. Well Jess saved money, bought books and nagged and nagged. Sadly we didn’t look online at the time and only used books (out of date information) as our research information. On Jess’s 12 th birthday we went to the pet shop and talked to them about what cage and accessories we would need and after what we thought was good advice, came home with one little girl, a glass tank, a bag of wood shavings and a bag of reggie rat food. Little did we know how wrong all of this was and it is something we regretted when we found out later. Sadly Rebs passed away at the age of 19 months after suffering a PT. After only a short time 2 new rats came to live with us and I totally fell in love with these 2 boys and really felt that I would love 2 girls of my own … so along came Beth and May. Well GMR is hard to control when you have these wonderful friends in your house and our numbers grew by a few more. Although we had discovered on our own that wood shavings made the rats sneeze so changed our substrate to carefresh, we still had not found out that there were rat breeders around the country and many rats were awaiting homes in rescues, so our rats at that time came from pet shops.

Let’s zoom on a few years to how our site got its name. Just before we found the wonderful information that was available on the internet, we had a very sad accident in one of our cages. 3 young brothers lived in a 2 level cage with a ladder leading to a shelf between the 2 levels. One night our darling boys were charging around the cage playing and Romeo (in the photo at the top of the page) must have slipped down the ladder, onto the shelf and straight into the side of the cage. Very sadly we didn’t notice what had happened until maybe an hour later by which time the damage to Romeos face had been bleeding heavily during this time. By the time we found Romeo he had lost a lot of blood and he died shortly after at the very young age of 7 months. This sad accident left us all very upset and we agreed that his short life would never be forgotten and so our rats have become called the ‘Shakespeare Rats’ with any new rats joining us (that have not already got names) being given names of Shakespeare characters.

Our Shakespeare Rats no longer come from petshops. We have a few from breeders but most are rescues and if you visit our 'Rats' and 'Fosters' pages, you can read all the lovely and sometimes sad stories of how our rats came to live with us.

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