Hello everyone, welcome back to relax with Animal Facts. I am Steph Wolf and today I'm going to be

learning with you about our furry, scaly, or possibly even slimy friends. And in today's case,

it is for sure going to be a furry friend of ours as it is the rat. So I'm very excited to get in today's episode. It is a special

listener episode, of course, to Shannon, who wrote into the show and was the star of the

listener mail last week. So thank you so much, Shannon, for supporting the show and for sending

in your suggestion.

So I definitely have a few sort of negative feelings about rats, which is specifically why I wanted to do the episode is to dispel some of those things and maybe break some of those

statements that I have.

And I'm sure a lot of our listeners have about these little guys because it seems

as though they can be wonderful pets for those that that are into that kind of thing. So just

before I get into the episode, I wanted to talk about a few things. The first thing being is that

we just passed the other day, we just passed 500 followers on Spotify, which is amazing.

And next week, I'm going to be doing a two-parter episode, meaning two animals in one,

just to show some appreciation for those of you that listen to over Spotify,

and also to those of you that listen on every other podcast sort of network or

whatnot like Stitcher or Apple Podcasts. So thank you very much for your support. All of you,

I really appreciate it and it definitely helps more people relax with animal facts.

So today's facts are going to be coming from live science or live science still to this day. I am not sure how to pronounce that. And

then the other one is from terminix.com. So I used two websites this time as to do with the rats and I am very excited to get into this.

So why don't we just get right into the show.

So rats are thin-tailed, medium-sized rodents that originated in Asia and Australia but are

now found all over the world. True rats, as they're deemed,

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