Rat Tat Review: Rats by Carol A. Himsel, DVM


© Karen Yang
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May 12, 2000


Rats: A Complete Owner's Manual With a Special Chapter: Understanding Rats
by Carol A. Himsel, DVM
Softcover, 72 pages
1991
Barron's Educational Series, Inc.
250 Wireless Boulevard
Hauppauge, NY 11788
ISBN# 0-8120-4535-1

If you love poster-quality shots of rats, this is the book for you, but if you love good rat information, it's just not worth the bother. The rat pictures by Karin Skogstad are fantastic, and you'll want to look at them over and over again. Unfortunately the quality of information just doesn't match. Dr. Himsel may be a vet, but she seems to have a very uneven knowledge of rats, which is a great disappointment. With the impressive title, which promises a Special Chapter on Understanding Rats, you'd think you found a real treasure, but frankly, you can begin to understand rats much better by sitting and watching them for fifteen minutes and not bothering with the chapter.

The best parts of the book are the section on nutrition and the bit on reproduction and breeding. Dr. Himsel goes into a great deal of detail about rat diet - maybe more than most people need, but much of the information here is very useful. She covers the amounts of nutrients that rats need and has a nice table on vitamin deficiencies along with a few good suggestions for feeding ill rats. Equally good is the chapter on breeding, which is goes into more detail than most rat books. Dr. Himsel covers most of what you need to know from courtship to the birth process to coping with possible birth defects. However, she has very little to say about how to raise orphaned babies except to find another nursing mother, which isn't always possible.

The rest of the book was very disappointing to me. I have the greatest problem with the chapter on understanding rats - I was expecting all sorts of rattie psychological goodies, and all I got was a halfhearted zoological history of the rat with some statistics and trivia thrown in. The fact that the pictures of Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus are switched around on the 8th page really starts the book off on the wrong paw! I also found her beginning "Note of Warning" about rats transmitting diseases to humans to be a bit sensationalized - later in the book she more-or-less refutes this, but this ends up making her look really indecisive or attention-seeking. If only she covered all the diseases rats can get from humans as well!

       

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Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: View all related messages
1.   May 12, 2000 6:28 AM
that I've found is Debbie Ducommun's. I own that book, the book reviewed in this article, and Ginger Cardinals' book and they all have problems, but as far as I'm concerned, Debbie's has the FEWEST p ...

-- posted by Marella



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