Feelin' blue, but not in a bad way

[soc_puppet]

Hat tip to brittyone for this: Blue Food Dye Treats Spine Injury in Rats

Before you do anything, click the link and scroll down to see the adorable rodent picture ♥

My thoughts:

* Man, I am so tempted in a horrible way to give food coloring to my rats now. Even though the one with a head tilt got it from an ear infection and not a spinal injury, and it's well past the time when application would be useful.

* Finally, a legitimate reason to make animals strangely colored! (There was an episode of Animal Cops that featured a whole bunch of chicks that'd been dyed, which is a Bad Thing apparently. ...I will totally get over my whole "color" thing in a minute, I swear. Edit: It has been brought to my attention that dyed chicks get shunned and possibly killed by undyed chickens, which is definitely a bad thing (H/T asrimal). Makes me worry about the dyed rats' social lives.)

* Is it permanent? Well, either way, it'd make a damn interesting sci-fi story. I'm half-tempted to leave it as a prompt over here, except it's almost over already, and I don't know if anyone would see it or be interested.

* ...I would totally adopt at least one of each (control and variable), if I had the room and I knew they were closer.


I'd also like to note that, for the record, paraplegia is fairly common among older rats, and they usually do pretty well (with a little special care). So I imagine that the control rats are probably not too horribly badly off.

Comments

[asrimal.livejournal.com]

"Dyed" chicks aren't permanent. Colouring is injected into the egg and the chick comes out colored, when it loses its fuzz it's normal chicken coloured.

[soc_puppet]

That was part of the Animal Cops episode I mentioned; we got to check in with the chicks again at the end, and most of their coloring was gone.

With the rats, I'm wondering if it's tattoo-permanent, henna-permanent, or permanent-marker-drawing-permanent. My assumption would be for somewhere between the first two, leaning towards henna, but there's a lot of things at work here that I don't know much about.

[asrimal.livejournal.com]

Who knows.

The thing about chicks though is that if they're dyed, they get shunned and possibly killed but normal chickens

[soc_puppet]

Ack! That's definitely not good >_O Really makes me wonder (and worry) about the social aspect with the treated rats.