Goodbye to our brave little girl, Apricot

Apricot up to mischief

As I’ve said before, Apricot had been very ill for a long time and over the past month her condition had deteriorated. She had been scratching her skin a lot more, and she had quite a few open wounds. They weren’t deep or anything scary, but they must have been causing her some discomfort - not that Apricot ever let it show. She had also developed a head tilt and was having problems with her balance, so she would often topple over when she was running about. On top of this she had two tumours, one behind each armpit.

Even though Apricot looked a bit of a fright, she was still our beautiful little girl. She would be waiting for us a playtime, as keen as always to come out, and go running around like nothing was wrong. Still we knew she couldn’t carry on with things the way they were, so we made the difficult decision to have her put to sleep.

Like her sister, Apricot was a fun and active little rat and she loved nothing more than charging around their room at full pace and bouncing. Even at the very end Apricot still wanted to play, but we knew we had to say goodbye before her condition started to really affect her quality of life.

It is always hard to lose a rat, but somehow saying goodbye to Apricot was doubly difficult. I guess it’s a mixture of losing so many of our rattie family, one after the other, and that she is one of Daisy’s babies. We’ve never had a mum and her babies before, it always seemed very special and losing Apricot is losing another part of that experience.

Peach, Apricot and mum, Daisy