Ok, time for me to speak up! I've watched all of this nonsense go down and tried my best to hold my tongue... I even stuck up for her for a long time until I went over to her apartment to meet her rats (pre-'rescue') & babies and started to see all of the lies she had herself caught up in. =P I didn't want to betray her confidence in me because I didn't think it was worth losing a friendship over, but it's become clear that she only wanted to be 'friends' with me for rat-support, and she dropped basically all contact with me once I told her that I wasn't going to take one of the babies after all, and stopped texting me when I told her I wasn't going to put up with her lying (so she stopped telling me the truth as well).
I still feel kind of bad for betraying her, but when the person in question continues to tell blatant lies and try to pass herself off as an acceptable 'rescue,' trust in general kind of goes out the window. =P So here goes!
Just to clarify some things that she told me (again, these are her words, not mine):
She tried to put Taz (who is alive) to sleep herself by suffocating him, basically. She squeezed his ribcage until he 'died' and then put him in the freezer. She checked on him an hour later and he was definitely alive and scratching at the freezer door... this is a hairless rat we're talking about. =P No vet. I doubt if she ever got meds from anyone. =P
I know that at least two of the babies' missing tails were due to her cat catching their tails from through the bars.
Another tidbit: she hides ALL of her rats in her attic once a week when her mom comes to visit (her dad doesn't mind and apparently encourages the situation...). The cages she can't fit in the attic she breaks down and hides under her bed. I don't know how the heck she does it every week, but apparently she makes it work. =\ I don't understand how you can be that rebellious...
I'm not sharing these things to slander her, but because I want it to be very clear that while she does love animals, she does not know HOW to love animals properly. =P
It sucks to see all her CL ads in my area, asking for cages, trying to re-home rats... she posted a new one the other day asking for an odd-eyed rat, any gender. She's a collector! It's crazy! I mean, I tend to be on the side of the fence that says 'they're animals, give them good care out of respect for life but you don't have to spoil them,' but what she's doing is ridiculous. It is ABSURDLY easy to modify your cage with hardware cloth, took me one afternoon to add on enough extra space to my rabbit cage for 3 rats (where I will house two females), and it cost me $15 at Joann's for enough fleece for liners and four or five hammocks, not to mention the paltry sum of money I spent at the Dollar Tree for a kick-a** cage full of hideouts and toys, if I do say so myself... UGH. She's unbelievable.
Would it hurt to call Animal Control about her?
