Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do, at least not that I know of—marking’s really common in males, & for some reason, they like to do it on phones (or each others’ heads). Mine are pretty good about not peeing on me, but they do pee if they smell that other rats have been out before them.

Mine don’t free range anywhere outside of the bathroom, but I used to have a solo rat named Wyatt who lived alone due to aggression issues & free-ranged in his bedroom for a few hours every evening.  He turned the space underneath the futon into a mancave. He’d take my class notes & pencils down there. I didn’t realize he was stashing food until I cleaned under there one day & found all these bits of potatoes (I was eating a lot of potatoes at the time)—I guess he was hoarding food in case I died or decided to quit feeding him. He had enough potatoes to feed a rat army & was extremely pissy when I took them away from him. After that, I no longer ate potatoes around him, though we did frequently share Cheerios, which often ended up in his Wyattcave, but were not as messy as potatoes that had been cooked in olive oil. He had several forks, & many, many newspapers…entire sheets of newspapers. He’d tear them into equal-sized pieces in his cage, but he’d leave the ones underneath the futon completely whole & just sleep on the entire sheet.

He never took anything into his cage…I’m pretty sure he thought that his real home was underneath the futon & that his cage was just a hotel he slept in during the day. I wish I had compiled a list of all the things he kept under there, because he really had quite the collection. It was my (now ex) boyfriend’s room & he was pretty messy & had a habit of just throwing things on the floor, so Wyatt would dig through his pants pockets to find treasures.