Samantha Martin has loved animals for ages. When she was a kid her parents didn’t allow her to have pets, so she’d often nurse injured wildlife she found near her house in Princeton, Ill. When one of her “pets” would die, she would bury it in a cemetery near the house and erect a tiny, wooden cross.
She got her first rat at age 16 when her folks sent her to a co-ed military boarding school.”I just didn’t belong,” she says. “I didn’t have any friends and was going through an ugly stage where guys would ask me out as a joke.”
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It was at that time – when the human race let her down – that she turned to a different race altogether: the rat race. “I had read in a book on animals what great, intelligent animals rats are and what great pets they make,” she says. And a rat seemed the perfect animal to sneak into her school, which didn’t allow pets.
On a Christmas field trip Samantha got her chance. “I went into this pet shop and, lo and behold, there were rats. So I bought one and smuggled it into the dorm,” she says.
It was love at first sight.
“It was so smart and loyal. It would sleep on the end of my bed and follow me around. It would even sit on the rim of the tub when I took a bath,” she says.