I must compliment you on your stylish and dashing avitar.
Tom
Why thank you, Tom. Yours looks equally smashing. It’s kind of sad, you know, the way the others pale by comparison.
Will you two get a room already? Sheeesh!! 
Hmm… Looks like SOMEBODY’s been smoking too many unfiltered Camels. 
“Badgers? We doan need no steenkeen badgers!”
I agree that badgers are very very adorable! (I hope my exclamation point didn’t offend anyone.)
Look at this baby badger. It’s so cuuuuuute!
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Even grown up ones have a special charm to them:
When I finally graduate college in 50 years, I want to get a pet badger.
However, even though badgers are cuteness personified, rats are truly where it’s at. Look at these cute faces:
There are many more galleries of cute rats at www.dapper.com.au
Actually, the correct term would be “get a burrow,” I believe.
Holt, surely?
Dapper Rat number one is an interesting photo. You can see how the whiskers function to tell the rat the dimensions of nooks and crannies it investigates in the dark. (Very cut rat.)
It’s my understanding cats’ whiskers work the same way.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Speak for yourselves.
Everyone already knows that it’s the Hugh Laurie avatars that are tops. 
Why not get one of each?
djm
No thanks, I’ve already got two eahs, on the side of me head, an’ they work fine, thanks.
… ummm… maybe I have, and maybe I haven’t. 
Cranberry, do you have a camera behind my mirror? Compare your picture with my avatar.
And therein lies the root of my badger avatar. It all started with a fit of uncontrollable bad humor on the flute forum between Dave Parkhurst and myself. If I recall correctly, the thread mysteriously disappeared.
Pants. I hate it when that happens before I get a chance to read the good stuff. It’s as bad as having a perfectly good thread transported to the rubber room.
Shhh! You weren’t supposed to tell anybody!
Yes, rats’ whiskers function just like a cats’, but sometimes they guess wrong. One time I had an adult rat try to squeeze through a toilet paper roll. She didn’t fit.
And I had a rat once who licked people like dogs do. This is an oldish picture of her:
You can see her whiskers and her tongue. She always thought she was part German Shepard.
You think?
Now, disappearing posts on the otherhand, would be very similar to disappearing threads.
Cran, that’s the best picture you’ve ever posted.
My only experience with badgers was when I was a wee lad and we camped in the Upper Penninsula. I stumbled on a badger while roaming the woods and it was not happy. Scared the daylights out of me.
Hey, Cran, as far as pets go stick with the rats. Badgers are beautiful, of course, but we’re meant to run (actually sort of waddle) free as the wind.
Besides, we don’t make very good pets. Besides the smell (hardly on par with skunks, but we do belong to the weasel family after all), there’s the annoying habbit of digging up your flower bed (and your lawn, and your driveway, and your kitchen floor…), the decapitated prarie dogs left on the front porch, and of course the predaliction for acts of extraordinary (but completely understandable and justified, from a badger-centric point of view) violence.
How many times have we all stumbled across the sleeping dog while going for a glass of water in the middle of the night? You do that with a badger, you’re going to lose some toes. 
TW