I've been a long time lurker on HC. Nearly two years ago my wife talked me into buying some Robs. We ended up getting 3 brood sisters (Aleph, Beth and Gimmel) who all seemed happy and healthy up to last week, thanks in no small part to the wealth of information at HC.
Then, on Wednesday last week, quite suddenly, Gimmel died with no obvious preceding symptoms - running around one night, dead the next day. She was always the smallest and had gone through bad patch of weight loss last month, but with focussed "feeding up" had regained a lot of weight and we really felt we were winning, which made her death even more of a shock.
Then over the weekend Aleph became more and more listless, and showed laboured breathing. Then, yesterday night she appeared to have wet-tail. We cleaned the cage and fed her some baby-food and dropped some water into her mouth. I resolved to get her to the vets the next morning but I was frankly unsurprised to find she had died in the night. Today has been a very sad day indeed.
It seems more than a coincidence that Gimmel and Aleph were next door neighbours (we had them separated into 3 cages a long time ago after they drew blood fighting) and I have read that they form relationships even "through the bars". Part of me wonders whether I'm seeing something prosaic like a wet-tail contagion or something more profound like death through grief for her brood sister.
The more obvious worry is that Beth, the remaining brood-sister now seems sad and listless too. We cleaned her cage today and thoroughly disinfected everything, but is there anything more we can do? Does anyone else have any experience of this kind of domino effect? Their dates are from when we bought them (which I expect was at about 6-8 weeks old), putting them at 23-24 months - so could this just be old age?
And finally I find myself bewildered by the depth of my own grief. As a 40+ professional male, I somehow didn't expect to be so upset, but I see no benefit in denying that I am heartbroken, and shed many tears as I laid them to rest, and indeed, as I type this...