Finally female rats

akane · 03-05-17, 12:44 AM

No one will sell female rats around here. There's a few pet/show breeders that have waiting lists and of course the chain pet stores with $20+ prices. The people who breed for themselves don't have enough. The big feeder supplier won't sell live. The pet store that supplies live feeders puts down or keeps the females for themselves as soon as they can tell gender and only put males for sale. No one wants competition when that wasn't my plan. I was unable to get enough of the sizes I wanted. I even asked around when we drove to Des Moines and no one answered me in time to pick up female rats and the guy I just saw had sold his last batch. My route took me past there to get geckos anyway so I sent him a message last minute and I've got 5 females to go with my 3 males and 1 I hunted out of the pet store small feeder bin. I'd kind of actually prefer to breed out the pink eyed whites but oh well. I have 2 brown and 1 black male and now 3 pink eyed white total, 2 darker grey, and one more what we'd call lilac in a lot of small animal species for females. Problem.... I did not get another rat bin yet because I was too busy and didn't think of it on top of the rest of the plans.

I have to go be creative with materials....

**Tsubaki** · 03-05-17, 03:22 AM

Congrats on getting females! Also you can see what gender babies are from day 1

makes it easy if you need females later on but also need some pups to feed.

akane · 03-06-17, 06:23 PM

Little rats

It's going to be awhile before they can produce anything with these guys

GyGbeetle · 03-07-17, 01:07 PM

This is one part of being a snake keeper that I absolutely hate, because those are really cute rats, that will eventually be eaten by snakes, and breed babies that will be eaten by snakes

TRD · 03-07-17, 04:23 PM

I have 17 rodents over 4 different species, none of them are snake food.. actually (and this may be weird) we are breeding some rarer rodents, selling them, and buying frozen rodents to feed to the snakes. It's a bit odd

akane · 03-07-17, 11:46 PM

Have you had duprasi? I loved mine but I absolutely can't find them again and I only found more people looking for them with no leads. I always wanted jirds and meant to get to a rodent show to find some. This isn't the best state for rodents. Even the bigger ones we don't generally equate with rodents. We raise chinchillas but after gathering quality animals from out of state we can barely sell them for half what the same does elsewhere. Since they have so few offspring (usually 2-4 a year) most of them we just end up keeping until someone comes along asking but we had a litter of 3 in our colony breeding cage so we have to start listing some for space. Unfortunately I seem to be developing some rodent allergy and I'm dispersing my giant peruvian cuy (the 5-8lb imports). I am working with the silver/grey gene in gerbils which never really made it to this area when gerbils were more popular and trying to establish burmese but 2 of 3 males died shortly after arriving here. They pee so little I just have to wear a mask to clean their cage. The culls have been going to the snakes in place of using mice. The rats don't bother me if they are kept clean, dry, and spaciously housed since they like to stay clean. I just have a contact allergy with itching where they scratch me. We'll see long term. It was the very short mouse breeding attempt with them spreading pee everywhere that bothered me and if we buy live mice from certain places that really pack their feeders I will have an asthma attack opening the box. Mice stink. All the other rodents if you just bed them clean I don't smell much but even when you keep them clean enough the mice don't smell individually I could smell the cage walking in the room and I only had a trio.