In Alberta, Canada, pet fancy rats are illegal. If you are a big pharma company or highschool that wants rats for animal testing and vivisection, and wants to keep them in cruel confinement, then you can have fancy rats. But anyone who wants rats in Alberta as a loving pet finds it impossible, and those that try to sneak rats in have their pets taken away, killed, and then they're fined. "Yeah we just murdered your pet that you care about all because you wanted to move into our province, now pay us money! Oh and, welcome to Alberta." 

The reasoning behind this? Alberta is "Rat free". But it isn't, that's the thing. We've had rat outbreaks at an Alberta dump, we have rats in the fields, we have wild rats. Period. We're bordered by Saskatchewan, British Columbia, the Northern Territories and Montana. All of these places have rats. It's literally an impossible thing to say we have no wild rats. Especially when there's evidence for the contrary. 

Now on top of all this, the only reason FANCY rats are banned is because they think that fancy rats and norwegian brown rats are the same animal. Are you kidding me? Rattus Norvegicus(Norwegian rat) are the wild basis for the fancy rats, yes, but next you'll ban pomeranians in areas with a ban on wolves and wolf mixes! When you heavily domesticate and selectively breed an animal to the point of it having a different morphology, whether it's under the same scientific name or not it is no longer the same animal. 

I've wanted pet rats for ages. They're intelligent, sweet and affectionate animals. But myself and many like me can't have pet rats because we're not a large company looking to torture them. Loving pet owners beware, Alberta is not the place for you. I'd like to see this change.

When I've decided that I've gotten adequate sigantures I will forward the list and the petition to the Alberta Government, as I can't add their contact email to the list so they're contacted directly. But method of contacting aside, let's stop this foolishness and allow people to discover that the stigma behind rats is false, and that they really are loving animals.