#pack rats

Me, animated and excited: oh yea your family’s from the East Coast you don’t know all the Western lore so we’ve got these critters called Pack Rats, see, they’re kinda like Desert Squirrels, like, you know how Squirrels get by by being clever and stashing food all over the place when it’s abundant and fetching it when it’s lean, right, so, clever beasts, but that lifestyle is harder to do when you don’t have loose forest leaf litter topsoil to dig into so, like, at some point some Squirrel Ancestors at some point branched off and started living in the desert and instead of doing that they started building big intergenerational family houses that the biologists call Middens, see, and they stash all their shit there, very fascinating critter, quite the varmint, but the really neat thing is that they love shiny things, so like, you can “trade” with them by dropping a coin in front of one and they’ll drop what they’re carrying to pick up the coin oh plus they trade with each other very smart little rodents big fan

Holy crap. I went to open up a new browser tab and this popped up: