Cheesy Image Is Her Pet Peeve : Rat Lover Defends Her Award-Winning Breeds as Best of Friends

Mary Ann Isaksen held the rat above her head, then affectionately drew it near and kissed its furry head. Another rat sitting on her shoulder stuck its nose in her ear.

“Come here, Lexis,” she said in a baby-talk voice to the rat in her hands. “It’s OK, You’re a good boy. Yeeeeeeeesss.” She nuzzled the rat to her nose.

These rats are not the slimy 10-pound variety with menacing teeth that allegedly crawl out of sewers and chomp on children in New York City. Those are wild rats. These are domesticated rats, and Isaksen has 38 of them.

She played with them at last year’s Orange County Fair’s Rat and Mouse Competition, and on Friday she returned to the competition that rekindled her love for the rodents and won four awards.

Much to the horror of many parents, the Rat and Mouse Competition is traditionally one of the most popular fair events. Isaksen resents the attitudes of people who won’t even look at the animals because they think they are dirty and carry diseases.

“They’re just uneducated,” she said. “These rats are domesticated and clean and in most cases regarded as one of the family.”

Isaksen keeps her 38 pets in a rat room at her Huntington Beach home, complete with a wall covered with at least 250 rat-and-mouse stickers, a calendar with her rats’ birthdays listed and 8-by-10 framed glossies of her rats who have died.

“That’s Tawny,” she said, sadly pointing to the picture of one rat that looks like it’s posing coyly for a Cosmo cover. “My Tawny was the one that liked to wear costumes.”

Stomper, who has pneumonia, is quarantined from the rat room and stays in an aquarium in Isaksen’s bedroom with his rat “roommate” Bluto.

“Sometimes they get a lot better quicker when they have a buddy to be with,” she said.

Isaksen and her husband, Scott, run a bathtub and counter resurfacing company out of their home, and she set up a linoleum-lined “rat playroom” in the office. It has a treadmill and lots of plastic tubes through which her furry friends scamper. Volumes of rat pedigree information sit on her desk.

She took another rat out of its aquarium and cradled it to her chest. “This is Mr. Big Show Winner, Sandy. As far as rats go, he is a gorgeous rat.”

Sandy is a two-time best-in-show winner at bimonthly rat shows sponsored by Orange County’s American Fancy Rat and Mouse Assn. Isaksen hoped Sandy would place at the fair, but last week, Sandy scratched himself and ended up with a few scabs. Isaksen has medicated him religiously, but he didn’t heal in time. Rat judges are entirely too picky to put up with scabs, she said.

“Their color has to be perfect,” Isaksen said of the judging criteria. “Nice big eyes are very important, and they have to have a good shape. And, of course, a good tail. Tails are very important.”

A grade school friend gave Isaksen her first rat when she was 13. She kept Sam in a Big Wheel box in her bedroom closet and would sneak table scraps to him. Her mother discovered the rat when she was vacuuming and said it had to go.

Isaksen said that many rats have come in and out of her life since then. But she gave up breeding them when her husband developed an allergy to them and got tired of seeing how devastated she would get when one would die.

“He couldn’t stand seeing me lose them every two years, so he bought me a cat instead. I hated it. I really missed my rats.”

But when Scott saw her playing with the rats at the fair last year, he relented and surprised her with with Steevie and Screamer, rat sisters.

“He saw how I was hurting not having any rats,” she said. “He likes them now, and he names them for me.”

The Isaksens are looking for a new house because three more rats are pregnant, and the Isaksen’s rat family has clearly outgrown Mary Ann’s rat room.

“There’s a special bonding that goes on between rat owner and rat,” she said. “It’s unlike dogs or cats or any other pets.”