Rodent Lovers Seek Better Image for the Despised and Lowly Rat : Pets: Pedigreed rats, mice and hampsters don't deserve the bad press, say their owners, who will parade the furry critters at a breeding show.

By JOHN M. GLIONNA

Jan. 19, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Mary Macdonald and her family live in a spacious Point Loma home that overlooks the blue Pacific. They share the place with nine rats.

The wiggly rodents scurry across the floor. Sometimes, they crawl into bed with Macdonald’s daughter.

But Mary Macdonald wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I’m a rat lady,” said the community college teacher. “These poor creatures have gotten a lot of bad press over the years. But, around our home, they get nothing but respect. We love them like we would any other pet.”

Joelle Abruzzo feels the same way about the dozens of mice she breeds in cages in her Pomona home. She would take the company of her mice over some people, thank you.

And Jackie Penny of Escondido believes that the hamsters she and her 14-year-old daughter raise are just about the sweetest things on earth.

Today, these and dozens of other local rodent raisers will have a chance to strut their pampered and often pedigreed pets in an annual breeding show sponsored by the American Rat, Mouse and Hamster Society.

Entrants in the society’s second annual show at the Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe will compete in two categories--examining both good breeding and pet characteristics--where judges will eye everything from the creatures’ temperaments to the color of their coats.

Win or lose, says Mary Macdonald, the show will be a validation for 150 society members and perhaps thousands of other rodent-lovers nationwide that it’s OK to raise a rat. Or hug a hamster. Or multiply mice.

“We’re a support group for those people who have this hobby,” she said. “It’s a way to say we’re not just a bunch of eccentrics.”

Over the years, group members say, rats have been saddled with perhaps the worst reputation of all rodents. They’ve been connected with diseases such as the bubonic plague, labeled as modern-day scavengers of garbage dumps and unsanitary homes.

And those tails! People have nightmares of rats that grow as big as house cats as they swish their long, hairless, prehistoric-looking tails.

“The tails are the thing people fear most about rats,” said Linda Franson, educational director at the Woodward Center and owner of more than 50 pet rats. “It’s naked. It reminds people of a snake.”

Franson’s mother would never let her raise rats as a child, telling her daughter that anything with a monstrous tail like that couldn’t be good for children.

But, years after she endured the jealousy of seeing others with friendly rats perched on their shoulders, the 25-year-old Franson has found that the rodents make just about the best house pets you can imagine.

She has hairless rats. Rats with curly coats. And she’s got standard rats.

“They’re really intelligent,” she said. “For me, they’re the kind of animal you can really have a personal relationship with. They’re like a dog because they recognize you and can get used to you.

“And they’re smart. I know people who have taught their rats to sit up and do tricks.”

The biggest misconception about rats, she says, is that they’re dirty creatures. “Rats are just looking for food. They’re attracted to places with open bins of food. They’re not attracted by filthy conditions. They’re very clean animals.”

Franson once had a job taking rats to local schools throughout Los Angeles in an educational, get-acquainted program for young students. “The kids would touch the rats and afterwards, the little creatures would clean themselves, as if to say ‘Uggh! Those filthy kids touched me.’ ”

Mary Macdonald says comparing her well-bred rats to the wild variety is much like equating a wolf with a well-clipped poodle.

She has names for her pets such as Chico and Harpo, Tarzan and Steamroller. Her husband, an oceanographer, even named one for a secretary in his office--though the woman doesn’t know it.

Macdonald has a friend with a rat named Tilly who once stayed at the Hotel del Coronado and who has shopped at Nordstrom. “They take Tilly wherever they go, wrapped up in somebody’s sweat shirt.”

In her own house, rats have been known to curl up at night with Macdonald’s daughter. “My daughter always used to sleep with Bernard,” she said. “If he had to go to the bathroom, he’d go to his cage, do his thing, and then come back to bed. He was so cute.”

Joelle Abruzzo has taken a more scientific approach to her passion of raising mice.

Abruzzo, a student at California State Polytechnic University, keeps 30 cages with dozens of mice in her apartment, methodically breeding them on different hunches to come up with the perfect mouse.

“Breeding mice becomes addictive,” she said. “I always liked to watch mice in cages. But now it’s become something like playing the numbers. I’m playing with their genetics. I want to combine their recessive traits to come up with a finer example of the species.”

Undesirable traits such as a bad temper can be bred out of the mice she raises by selecting which mice to mate, she said. She can also breed for mice with a particular color of fur.

“Some people throw their mice into a cage and see what happens,” she said. “I breed mine methodically.”

Abruzzo will be a judge trainee in Saturday’s show. And she’ll have certain traits in mind when she examines all those orange mice and strawberry roans.

“It’s like show dogs or cats, there are good types,” she said. “I’ll look at the size of the ears and the way they’re placed on the head. The tail should be long and free of kinks and strongly attached.

“The underbelly shouldn’t be too thin. And the eyes. They should be large and not too beady.”

Abruzzo became a mouse lover quite by accident. Several years ago, she and a boyfriend were raising several snakes and spiders and began buying baby mice as food for their reptilian pets.

“We started keeping the cute ones,” she recalled. “We’d say, ‘Oh, we can’t feed that one, it’s too good-looking.’ The ugly ones got fed to the snakes, though.”

She says mice have suffered a bad public rap.

“Think about it. The farmer’s wives jumped up on chairs at the sight of mice. They cut off their tails,” she said. “Even elephants are supposed to be afraid of them.”

But Abruzzo surrounds herself with famous literary quotes about mice. She doesn’t see them as a rodent prone to eat its young.

“It’s the breeder’s fault if a mouse eats its young,” she said. “People get too curious, they don’t respect the animal’s area. They peer inside the nest and upset the mother. She thinks there’s a predator around. So she eats her young rather than lose them.”

There is one creature that has earned a poor public image, even in the indulgent world of rodent raisers. And that’s the hamster.

Privately, rat and mice lovers will bad-mouth the hamster as an antisocial creature that’s prone to biting the hand that feeds it.

But Jackie Penny will hear none of it. She says the hamster’s sometimes unsavory reputation comes from the poorly bred creatures being peddled by some pet stores.

A well-bred hamster, she says, is a friend for life. And she gets a little miffed at having to defend her pets.

“Selectively bred,” she said, “hamsters make nice fluffy, cuddly pets. Sure, they’re nocturnal but they don’t have to run their wheel all night, driving you and your family crazy.

“They’ll lick your hands. And they know their names. If you call a hamster’s name in a group, the other hamsters won’t even respond to it. And they don’t smell like rats or mice and don’t spray urine on your furniture like rats do when they mark their territory.”

But even Penny concedes that a hamster alone does not make the perfect pet.

“The ideal little pet,” she said, “would be a hamster with a rat’s personality. Or a rat with a hamster’s body. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to breed one of those.”