The rats (sadly no longer with us) are Peanut (left) and Millie (right).
This poem is about them:
Rats!
Long after they’ve vanished
I remember the time
when I went away and you cared for them
not wisely but too well,
letting them out of their cage
despite dire warnings—
so you sat up half the night
with the door propped open,
staring over your glass of whisky,
bedevilled by their witching tails.
Dorothy Yamamoto
from Landscape with a Hundred Bridges (Blinking Eye Publishing, 2007)