Oh man, it was even worse, I'd grind up two 100mg pills of doxy and spend almost an hour mixing them into powdered sugar and peanut butter and then cutting them into something like 60-80 pieces and then rolling each piece in powdered sugar again for storage. Unfortunately since I mostly had them as a kid there wasn't a huge interest in getting them taken to a vet, and most vets in our area didn't seem to know what to do with them and I didn't know how to advocate for them.

I've learned a lot since then (and make my own money, hah), but once I got my first dog a few years ago I stopped getting new rats. They were such great critters because they are basically tiny dogs, but when you've got the real thing, it was hard to balance both and I felt like i was neglecting them.

It's funny, my parents wouldn't let us get dogs, just rats and goats. Once I got a dog, I realized I had basically raised my rats and goats exactly like dogs, down to training them to do little tricks and agility courses. I just wish I knew what I know about dog training now back then. Some days I still dream of getting myself another goat and using force free operant conditioning to train it to do all sorts of stuff. They're wicked smart and don't do things unless they want to (they don't care about pleasing you), and they are not intimidated by people really at all (at least our 200lb ones weren't), so they're a great challenge. We eventually did figure out ours could be motivated to do just about anything if they thought kettle corn might somehow be involved eventually, lol.

Sorry, now I'm on an animal ramble, haha. Needless to say I'm an adult now and both our dogs go to the vet regularly and are in excellent health (other than the foxtail my poor dude had to get removed from his nose last week).