Nice “Opiate Withdrawal” Photos

Some cool opiate withdrawal images:

Trust

Image by ressaure
A still-nameless 2-month old Wistar boy lies trustingly in Lena’s hands. He and his twin brother escaped their end as ferret food in one of the most touching lab rat stories I’ve heard so far.

They were in a control group in an experiment on the effect of an immune system booster on opiate withdrawal syndrome.
The researchers there work with lab animals all the time – and killing those animals is yet another routine. You learn to be heartless doing this job.
But with these two guys, something truly extraordinary happened. Every time the researchers came up to their cage, the boys would grab some wood shavings, stand up and hand them to the researchers. When they took those shavings from the little animals’ hands and handed them back to them, the boys would take them…. and hand them back – as if saying, "Hey, it’s a gift! You don’t return gifts!". This was so strange and unusual that it caused a major meltdown in the scientists’ hearts, so major, in fact, that they actually took an active effort to save the boys from slaughter and find them new homes.

Luckily, we have a mutual friend = my rats’ vet, who used to work there a long time ago, taking care of the lab animals.

I didn’t hesitate a second.
Last week one of my mom’s soft, cozy white boys from the White Boy Cage died suddenly, and his two elderly friends have been mourning him, refusing walks and food, until now.

A lot of grooming, sniffing, squeaking, puffing and happiness going on right now in the White Boy Cage 😀