RATS & BUTTER LOVER'S POPCORN

"The only good rat," my dad claimed, "is the one on the end of a pitchfork."

You had to forgive him, all those years growing up on a farm made him that way. In fact, I'd never seen him so squeamish.

"Rats are more social, more friendlier, than gerbils, hamsters, or guinea pigs," I said, justifying why I'd spend $200 on a 5-tier rat cage for my living room.

"They're still rodents."

You couldn't change his mind no more than you could change how the sun comes up in the morning. You couldn't get him to sit on the right side of my couch either, with those beady-eyed rodents looking down on him.

"And they carry all kinds of diseases."

What living, breathing thing doesn't have that kind of potential? "We all can carry diseases, Dad."

"They're more susceptible."

I could've brought up the gerbils my brother and I had as kids. After interbreeding three or four times too many, they started eating the tails off of one another. Cannibalistic gerbils. Not pretty. And they'd bite. Mean little bastards. Rats are friendly. There was no point in changing his mind, and even though he was in my house, I agreed not to get them out when he was visiting.

When my wife and I would sit down to watch a movie, Kiwi, the rat pictured here, would cling to the side of her cage, nose poking through the wire, trying to catch a whiff of the Butter Lover's popcorn I'd usually make. She never got any because, as my wife explained it: "It's bad for them."

Now wait a minute, I often thought, then why the hell am I eating it? My wife would often leave the room to get something from the kitchen, and I'd usually slip a few popped kernel's into the cage. Kiwi's bunkie, Daisy, loved popcorn. Unfortunately, she had developed a rather large ugly tumor, and while I was away at the catfish tournament, my wife decided to have the neighbor put her down.

If my dad had said rats were more susceptible to tumors, instead of diseases, I probably would've agreed. Has anyone done a study to figure out the long term side effects of eating Butter Lover's popcorn? Studies have shown . . .