My rats like food. This is, I know, a shock. But feeding time is always the same, and it's freaking cute. They recognize their food bucket when I pick it up, and start going nuts.
Corvus and Arcturus run back and forth in the cage. Sometimes Corvus will cling to the door, and it's always the door that I need to open to access their food dish, which is kind of awkward because it always takes him a little while to figure out that whole "door is opening and I'm dangling from it" thing. Arcturus always lingers for a nanosecond after the full food dish is placed in the cage, as if to say something like, "thank you for the food I love you and would enjoy cuddles BUT EATING TIME IS NOW."
Also, right now, the bottom floor of C&A's cage is blocked off (I have to fix something, but I'm lazy, so it's taking a while), and that's where Arcturus usually lives--right at the bottom, in a pasta box or pantyliner box or sometimes a big Diet Dr Pepper box. Depends on what I used and/or consumed that week. Decide for yourselves which things get eaten and which don't. I think he's mildly perturbed that he can't currently go "home," and he's been stashing his food not in the box he sleeps in (as usual) but on the very top platform of the cage. And the food he stashes is generally all pasta noodles, because anything else can get eaten straight off, I guess, or maybe he just likes those best.
The problem with this is that there is a pile of hard noodles as well as a clumsy rat on the topmost level of the cage. The cage which sits right next to my computer, which sits right next to me. The effect of this is that--from my point of view--Arcturus has been flinging food at me, stealthily and with amazing accuracy.
I do prefer it to flinging poo, definitely. I'm pretty sure that he's just being clumsy--no rat would willingly give up its food! But there is a slight chance that he's upset at being denied his place of choice and is trying to... kill me?
The blue trio is still in their own cage, because, I don't know, I guess I fear that snuggly bear-like Corvus would flip his shit if he met them, or Mordred would transform into a giant arachnid and consume everyone. Whatever, they're damn happy and I'm not too displeased about having an extra cage to clean. It's actually the easiest cage to clean. But it's also the easiest cage to escape from when I open it to get the food bowl. And when I do open it to get the food bowl, they're all insane because they know what's comin' and they want the food and they want it now because they haven't eaten in weeks and they might waste away to nothing and oh god food now.
Before I open the cage, they focus on the place nearest to me and all try to exist in that cubic inch of space simultaneously. I really need to take a video of this. They act like puppies on speed. Mean puppies on speed. They punch each other, kick each other, stand on each other, shove each other, and generally just act like dicks. It's adorable, trust me.
The weird thing, though, is that when I do open the cage and fill the bowl, a process that maybe takes ten seconds, Mordred has already fled the region and is scurrying under a couch in Cambodia. I have no idea how he can want food so much and then forget about it the moment the cage is open. He doesn't do this if I just open the cage to change the water, or pet them, or take one out. I can only assume that the prospect of food has made him so hyper that he forgot what made him hyper in the first place and rocketed away with suddenly unbound kinetic energy. So I usually have Derek herd them.
They remain cruel little demons after they've been fed, too. C&A tend to rummage around for the best bits and carry them off, about as sedate as a freshly-fed rat can ever be. The blue boys all do the same thing: They promptly stick their heads into the food bowl. The food bowl can hold three rat heads, I suppose, but it can't hold a lot of food at the same time, so food goes flying. I don't know why I even use the food bowl, other than the joy of seeing three rats shove their heads into food at the same time. And, I suppose, a general desire to not be the creature who just poured food onto litter that presumably has urine somewhere in it. If they want to do that on their own, who am I to argue.