A 22-pound nutria swims in a family’s pool, sleeps in the bathroom, and makes them laugh

Denny said that Myra not only accepted that her husband brought home a rescued water rat, but it was she who figured out how to feed the infant rodent.

Kitten milk?

After a little research, Myra discovered that Petco sells kitten milk replacement that can be fed via plastic syringe to an infant cat. Or even a recuperating baby rodent, as it turns out.

Note: We’re pretty sure that kitten milk replacement is not produced by milking cats, though the possibility did momentarily cross our minds.

Myra sometimes woke up twice in the night to feed the new addition to the family. “I remember my wife saying, ‘What am I doing, getting up and feeding a rat,’” Denny said, laughing.

But, Myra said, Neuty was “fluffy, and sweet, and so cute that it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with him.”

It’s a good thing he was so fluffy, sweet and cute, because he sometimes liked to use those big, orange teeth to chew on things.

Like the baseboards around the house, and the controls under the electric recliner couch, AND the $1,400 dollars’ worth of wiring beneath Myra’s year-old Mercedes that she parked in the backyard without suspecting that Neuty had a taste for German engineering.

After the car had been towed to the shop, a mechanic concluded that maybe a rodent had done the damage. 

‘Spoiled rotten’

That particular rodent, Myra said, “has taken over my life.”

She instructed Denny to return the culprit “to the canal.”

But she didn’t really mean it.

In December 2022, as the thermometer dipped below freezing, Neuty was apparently happy to swim around the couple’s pool, seemingly unaffected by the temperature. But Myra couldn’t stand the notion that the animal might somehow be discomforted by the cold, so she told Denny to “make him come inside.”

“He’s spoiled rotten,” she said. 

Myra said that some people raise an eyebrow at the idea of harboring a nutria. “They’re no good,” she acknowledges, “always destroying the land.”