Category: Casper

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Daily Create #tdc3077

The Daily Create challenge for June 15th, 2020, was to introduce your pet in a tweet and tweet something they would say if they could talk. Many of you have probably been introduced to my pet from my other posts and pages, but this is my pet male albino rat, Casper! He is almost one year old, he will be on June 22nd, 2020. Casper is very expressive and playful rat, always wanting to socialize and be loved by myself or anyone who will interact with him. When thinking about what Casper would say, I felt the caption above in my Tweet really captures who Casper is: “Hi! My name is Casper! My favorite things to do are running around in my ball, eating all the treats I can (especially banana chips), and snuggling/annoying my mom!”

Casper loves running around his ball; when I work out in the morning, as I’m getting ready, he’ll start jumping around his cage and getting excited because he knows it’s his ball time. He is also trained to get a treat after he’s been out and plays with people, with his favorites being banana chips, flavored fruit yogies (like little chocolate chips, but flavored with fruit and yogurt), and orange-cranberry cookies. Casper is quite playful and loves to be snuggled, especially when I have him out on my bed while watching TV or doing homework; he’ll crawl up right beside me and snuggle right up, wanting to be pet and loved. He can also be quite the sneak, sometimes trying to climb on things he shouldn’t or hide behind things. Casper is a pet I am lucky to have as I’ve never owned a rat who’s been so expressive and loving in his personality, especially towards people. Casper is definitely my pride and joy, and is a pet I will always love and cherish because of the strong bond I have with him.

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Home Video GIF

This is a video of Casper, my albino male rat! I took this video back before I actually adopted Casper and he was still a lab rat for one of my courses, Animal, Learning and Behavior. The video was taken at the end of a work day, Casper had already been run for his lab session and I was sitting at the lab table typing up the results for the day. As I was doing this, I would usually have Casper in his cage with the top off so he could sniff around and interact with me. On this particular day, he got a little daring and sneaky, attempting to climb the edges of the cage before perching on the corner closest to me. I looked over and smirked, thinking to myself, “Is he going to climb out?” This is when I grabbed my phone and started recording. From Casper’s perspective, I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking: “Must…escape. Must…not…slip.” The full video of the GIF pictured at the left shows Casper giving up after he almost slips and just staring at me, like “I didn’t do anything wrong…”; no rats were harmed in the making of this video/GIF.

I decided to chose this GIF for my home video one because Casper is my pride and joy, and two because it was a funny video I wanted to caption and create into a GIF. When it comes to animals, we never really know what they’re thinking or why they do the things they do. Having a lot of experience with pet rats myself, I’ve noticed that these creatures tend to be sneaky and daring with stunts they pull, especially when they’re familiar with their owners. What I mean by this is that if you own a rat and have a close bond with it, they tend to do things they know will get them in trouble because they want to play with you. Casper somewhat knew he shouldn’t have tried climbing the sides of his cage from the many times I’ve told him no repeatedly; rats are able to learn words and understand what they mean, especially single-word phrases such as, “No.” I do let him get away with things, but sometimes it’s to see what he’s doing and what he’ll do if he accomplishes it, such as climbing out of his cage. This was a fun assignment to create and something I enjoyed doing, especially because it involved my little pet ghost.

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Turn a GIF into a FIG – Third Animated GIF

For the third animated GIF assignment, it was based off the “Turn a GIF into a FIG” assignment where students had to “Find a video clip, or shoot one of yourself, and then make it playback in reverse over and over again as a GIF. Try to find a situation that is absolutely mind-blowing when played backwards.” Looking through my camera roll for a good video to turn into a GIF and then reverse it, I found the one to the left of Casper when I had him as a lab rat. Have you ever seen a rat spin around backwards for a treat? The original video shows Casper spinning in a forward direction before he is rewarded with a treat for performing that behavior; something he is very good at, I might add! When I was reversing this video, it was quite hilarious to me because as hard as my group members tried in the lab course, we could never get Casper to spin in a backwards direction (i.e., this is a hard trick for a rat to learn spinning forwards). Now, I have my own personal video of Casper spinning backwards – hopefully no one will figure out it’s edited so it just looks like my rat is performing a cool trick!

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Daily Create #tdc3069

For The Daily Create’s challenge for June 7th, 2020, the challenge was to design a postmodern birdie with an emotional color. Looking through my photos, I remembered that while I was Belize, I had taken pictures of a lot of birds, one of favorites being a male Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus); the little guy picture above was always very chipper in the morning, bee-bopping from treetop to treetop, making it very difficult to get a picture. This is one of my favorite pictures I got of him, nestled in the over-crossing of branches and leaves high up in the trees. Turning this bird into a postmodern birdie with emotional colors, I decided to use the colors yellow and green. The color yellow emotionally symbolizes things such as bright, sunny, energetic, warm, happy, and joy; the color green emotionally symbolizes things such as freshness, the environment, money, fertility, and the earth. I chose to use yellow shadows to enhance the bird’s dark colored body to now resemble it’s perky, bright, and energetic behavior. I also chose to use green hues to enhance the environmental aspects of the picture, such as the branches and leaves, to resemble the freshness of the earth and area the bird was in. Putting these colors into this photo made the birds body pop with the shadows of yellow, and the environmental aspects around him, making for a fun and eccentric postmodern birdie displaying emotional colors.

I have also provided another picture based off of this Daily Create challenge of my rat Casper, pictured on the left. I chose to use the colors blue and pink for his emotional colors. The color blue emotionally symbolizes tranquility, security, loyalty, peace, and trust; the color pink emotionally symbolizes healthy, happy, sweet, compassionate, and playful. I chose to use pink hues to enhance Casper’s happy, compassionate, and playful behavior while using blue shadows to enhance his tranquility, security, and trust in his home environment. I hope you have enjoyed my take on a postmodern birdie/rat using emotional colors!

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Selfie with My Pet!

Getting Casper to take a picture never goes well…

This is my male albino rat, Casper (the friendly ghost)! He is almost a year old – he will be on June 22nd, 2020 – and is one my first actual pets I have owned myself. Casper came into my life December 6, 2019. I adopted him from the rat lab conducted on campus involved with the animal behavior course Animal, Learning and Behavior. In this class, eight different groups were divided up with one rat per group, Casper being the rat in my group. We conditioned the rat’s in operant conditioning chambers – similar to what B.S. Skinner conducted in his studies – and trained our rats to press levers and retrieve a reinforcer for pressing the lever. This was done on multiple different levels, with Casper needing to press the lever once, twice, even five times, etc. to retrieve a reinforcer. Once this behavior was established, Casper was taught how to spin and receive a reinforcer for doing so. Once the class was completed, students had the opportunity to adopt rats to have as pets so they would not end up being euthanized. I felt an established bond with Casper while I was training him in class, and knew this was the rat for me to adopt. Casper definitely has grown and blossomed since I’ve had him, teaching me more about the bond between animals and humans too. Rats are able to bond with their humans through trusting them and eventually becoming accustomed to the way their human’s are and the way their human’s life is. Since I’ve adopted Casper, I’ve gained his trust and have been able to provide him a healthy and happy life, even teaching him some new tricks, too. Casper is definitely an animal I will always love, even after he’s gone, for the bond and connection I made with him.

Here’s a picture of Casp enjoying a banana chip!

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