The Smell!!!

[marylyn101]

i keep rats in my room. i clean it out every day!!! I own 12+5+1=........19 rats. the house are excellant and boys and girls are seperate. i'll probably have homes for a few. i raise mice and the smell ain't so bad. any advice on the smell and keepin it down would be really great. i resorted to using viniger but i think that upsets them so i stopped :medgrimac

[Zoe]

Buy a tru-air air filter from canadian tire or walmart for 25$ and a pet filter for 6$.

Zoe

[chamitch]

or at peavy mart. they have idustrial deodarant. or go to simplyboss.com but its teh same stuff.

[marisa]

Get rid of most of the males. That's your biggest problem. They smell far worse than females I think.

Marisa

[ohh_kristina]

Marisa is right, I believe. Some male rats have this thing called "buck grease" that collects on their backs. It smells really musky and gross. I keep one male as a pet and that is enough smell for me!

[Zoe]

Yeah, the males do smell more. But I keep many (because they grow bigger, i tend to keep them to grow to larges and kill the females to use at rat pups/small rats) and the truair filter eliminates the smell.

Zoe

[mykee]

If they smell really bad after only one day, somethin' aint right. I clean my colonies of 1.3 every 4 days and they never really stink all that bad.

[AlexPan]

Hey Guys. I have 3 King snakes and i feed them with Dwarf Hamsters. They give me around 7 babyes every 3-4 weeks. I clean for them ones a week and they do not smell even a bit.

If you cant find any Dwarf hamster near youre house or need some insects or snakes plz visite my website at
http://www.geocities.com/alex_panassov2003/SnakesAndInsects

[Frithrah82]

I keep 7 male rats and have no smell issues, I bathe them about once a month (they're strictly pets, i never use rats to feed, not that i'm looking down on those who do, you gotta do whatcha gotta do) and keep them on alfalfa pellets for bedding. In my experience a lot of the odor problem is a result of environment. When i began keeping pet rats i used pine or cedar shavings, now, for the health of my pets and for my nose I give both of these products a wide berth in the supply store. Aspen is a little better but I have found that all wood shavings react very poorly with urine and also with "buck grease" which doesnt always build up on their backs, but is always kinda there on their flanks (they typically wipe it off on vertical surfaces, so it only builds up in a poorly conditioned rat) Consider also that males pee more than females because most females do not urine mark, males tinkle most of the time that they're walking, greatly adding to the urine + wood shavings = nasty odor thing. The reason I use rabbit alfalfa pellets (and no they do not eat it) is because its cheap ($10 american for 50 lbs at livestock feed stores like Southern States or Agway) it comes with included odor control, and it lasts forever. I pick poop out every few days and dont do a full litter change more than every 2 or 3 weeks, if the boys are being particularly good I can go for up to a month without changing it (still picking out poops) and no offensive odor builds up. Let me remind you I keep only males and seven of them at that. If that doesn't sell you on alfalfa pellets, I don't know what will...
My 2 cents...

~fuzzy

[Linds]

I agree with mykee, something isn't right if they stink after one day. I only have two pet rats (both males) in my bedroom and they are housed on Carefresh. They are at the foot of my bed and it never gets to the point where I can smell them unless I stick my head in the cage. I clean them out every 3 weeks or so. My feeders (about 200 of them in the basement) get cleaned out every 4 days and are kept in close quarters (11 gallon rubbermaids and giant kitty litter pans with colonies of 1.3 to 1.5, and in the raising up tubs up to 25 rats per tub, excluding the giant blue tub which has about 40 males). I keep them on pine shavings. It isn't great for dampening odour however, it never gets overpoweringly stinky.

I also have a tru-air filter in my bedroom and like Zoe said, it works great for keeping down any odours :)