Understanding environmental enrichment for rats

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Understanding environmental enrichment for rats

Providing environmental enrichment for your pet rats is essential for their overall wellbeing. Rats, like all animals, thrive in environments that meet their mental and physical needs, which includes allowing them to express behaviours that matter to them. By understanding what environmental enrichment involves and how it benefits your rats, you can create an ideal living environment that promotes good welfare. Read on to learn about the importance of environmental enrichment, what constitutes normal rat behaviour, and how to build an enriched and optimal environment.

RSPCA Australia
Monday, 24 March 2025

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Providing environmental enrichment for your pet rats is essential for their overall wellbeing. Rats, like all animals, thrive in environments that meet their mental and physical needs, which includes allowing them to express behaviours that matter to them. By understanding what environmental enrichment involves and how it benefits your rats, you can create an ideal living environment that promotes good welfare. Read on to learn about the importance of environmental enrichment, what constitutes normal rat behaviour, and how to build an enriched and optimal environment.

What is environmental enrichment?

Environmental enrichment is the process of enhancing an animal's environment to encourage behaviours that are important and beneficial to them. For rats, this means providing opportunities to engage in species-typical activities like burrowing, climbing, grooming, and socialising. Enrichment allows rats to express behaviours that matter to them, resulting in positive experiences that improve their mental and physical well-being.

Enrichment strategies must be carefully tailored to the specific needs of the species and the individual rat, taking into account their behaviour, physical attributes, and environment. Simply introducing new objects or stimuli is not enough if the enrichment doesn't align with their natural tendencies.

Understanding rat behaviour

To effectively provide environmental enrichment, it’s important to first understand what behaviours are typical for rats. Rats are nocturnal or crepuscular, meaning they are most active during the twilight hours, throughout the night, and in the early morning.

Rats are highly social creatures and enjoy being in the company of other rats. They often sleep together in groups and grooming one another is a common social activity that strengthens bonds within the group (although not all rats will engage in social behaviours equally).

Other important behaviours include chewing and gnawing (this also helps to keep their teeth healthy), nesting, hiding, and exploring their environment using their sense of smell and touch. Because their vision is not well-developed, their sense of hearing and smell are critical for understanding their surroundings. It’s important to ensure that their enclosure is quiet and free of strong smells, as these can disturb them. They also rely heavily on their whiskers and other sensory fibres around their heads to navigate their surroundings.

Providing optimal environmental enrichment

Environmental enrichment should begin while your rats are young to help them experience good welfare from the beginning and help prevent potential health and behavioural issues stemming from an inadequate environment (e.g., boredom, frustration, and abnormal behaviours such as aggression and over-grooming). Enrichment is about more than just giving your rats toys or exercise wheels; it involves creating an environment where they can engage in behaviours that are rewarding to them.

Here are some options for providing enrichment for your rats:

Foraging enrichment
Foraging enrichment encourages your rats to engage in the important behaviour of searching for food. You can scatter food around their enclosure, hide it in bedding or toys, or hang it from different parts of the cage. Providing multiple food and water stations allows your rats to explore and exercise their foraging instincts.

Social enrichment
Rats are social animals, so it’s essential to give them the opportunity to interact with other rats (preferably of the same sex). Allow them supervised time outside of their enclosure in a safe area to explore new spaces, engage in reward-based training, and bond with you.

Physical, sensory, and occupational enrichment
The design of the enclosure itself is a critical aspect of enrichment. It should be spacious enough for your rats to move around, with multiple levels, hammocks, hides, and tunnels for them to explore. Climbing opportunities such as ropes, ladders, and branches also help keep them physically active. You can also enhance their environment by offering new scents or tastes and providing a day/night cycle to match their natural activity periods. Making sure that your rats also have occupational enrichment by providing opportunities and items that elicit activities including exercise and problem solving, learning, and choosing and controlling some feature in their environment (e.g., providing materials so they can build a nest and positioning wood or cardboard blocks so they can gain access to another area by chewing).

Rats enjoy variety, so it’s a good idea to frequently switch up their activities and enrichment items while keeping in mind that rats are neophobic (afraid of new things to begin with) and giving them the choice to engage or not while they take the time they need to get used to the new activities or items).Regularly reassess your cats’ behaviour and environment and make adjustments to ensure their needs are consistently being met.

A good enrichment plan provides the opportunity for your rats to live a comfortable, low-stress, and enjoyable life.

For more information, visit the RSPCA Knowledgebase

This piece was originally published in Australian Community Media newspapers.

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