When Bringing Your Rats Home Try to keep the car's environment as comfortable as you can for your rats on the trip home (meaning a nice temperature and NO loud music.) If the travel container your rats are in isn't already dark, drape a towel over it. Darkness makes your new rats feel more comfortable and safe. Their cage at home should already be set up with food, water, litter, and a sleeping den. Also, their cage at home should be covered with a towel, or cloth, so that they are going from one dark environment into another. (Be sure the cage is still getting air flow, though, you don't want them to suffocate!) When you get home, take them straight to their cage. Open their cage's door, and first sprinkle in their soiled litter that you collected from the place you got them from. Place the travel container directly in front of the cage's open door. Open the travel container and press it against the cage and encourage your rats to come out into their new home. If they don't come out immediately, you can try tapping on the box or angling the box so that the rats slide out into their cage. Close the cage door. Hear comes the hard part. Leave your new rats alone! Don't talk to them. Don't have the family crowd around them. Don't try and feed them treats or take them out. Just let them settle in and get a chance to deal with one situation at a time. The first thing your new rats need to cope with is that they are in a brand new and completely unfamiliar environment with all new smells and sounds. This can be scary enough on it's own without having to deal with some strange, scary, person, trying to grab at them too. After about a couple hours, take the towel off. Give your new rats at least 24 hours to settle in completely and make their new home theirs. Try to keep the room they are located in as dark and as quiet as possible. Check on your new rats regularly to make sure they are doing ok, and eating and drinking, but don't disturb them. After the one AGONIZING day of wait, it is now time to start your relationship together. Move on to "Bonding With Your Rat" next in the menu of this Guidebook section to see where you go from here. Note: If you have adopted rats from two separate locations, you will have to quarantine them and go through proper introductions. See "Introducing New Rats to Your Colony" within this Guidebook to learn more about what you should do in this situation.