whenever you read those “10 things to know before getting this pet” things they’re so basic, just stuff about lifespan and diet and stuff, no one ever thinks to tell you “your rat is going to want to open your mouth and stick his head in” or “bearded dragons sometimes just swell their eyes to the size of ping pong balls’ or ‘chickens will try to eat your cat’
“Your rat is going to pop their eyeballs in and out rapidly, because it loves you.”
Okay I need to ramble about this because I love it so much. The above is called boggling and it looks like this:
And it’s caused by the rat bruxing it’s teeth. Now bruxing is rat’s grinding their upper and lower incisors. There’s a whole range of reasons rat do this. The most prominent one being to file their teeth down, as the upper and lower incisors are constantly growing.
But rats will also brux based on emotional responses too. Mostly when they are anxious or stressed, or when they are content (kind of like the rat version of purring). When rats are so relaxed and content, they’ll brux so much that it’ll cause them to boggle.
This is because of the masseter muscle. This is a muscle that attaches to the jaw bone and runs up under the eye socket, as shown below
When a rat is bruxing, this causes the muscle to tighten and loosen rapidly with the intense grinding / chewing, under the eye socket of the rat, that causes their eyes to pop forward out of their heads and wiggle.
what if we were both mousegirls and we got our tails tangled together with like five other mousegirls and couldn’t get them loose and we developed psychic powers and were never alone again
what if we were both mousegirls at a sleepover doing each other’s makeup and we couldn’t stop giggling bc we love each other and are so funny and cool and cute and kept messing up our eyeliner and had to use micellar water
