Is it ok to

[ryanisgothic]

Put food on the floor or would a food dish be better

[Oxylepy]

I use hoppers. Putting it on their bedding means they will search for it and probably enjoy themselves. Putting them in a dish means you can concentrate their food so they can pee and poo all over it

Personally I like hoppers, I dont have much food scattered around and it's nice.

[Shortandfat]

I used to use a dish and then they would consequently just scatter it as the pleased, which worked fine, but i found some food would go wasted so now i use a hopper made out of 1/2 in hardware wire. Although since i have switched to this i am not sure if they are eating/growing as much due to the fact that they cant access the food as easily. Has anyone else noticed this?

[bokuza]

For a while I put in heavy glass food bowls. It works fine if you have rats that are neat and don't hoard. However they may urinate, poo on or scatter the feed. You don't want baby rats to eat dirty feed. It's an easy way to get bacterial infections going.

You can make hoppers with ease and there is a link somewhere in the stickies of the feeder board on learning how to make them.

[Oxylepy]

I used to use a dish and then they would consequently just scatter it as the pleased, which worked fine, but i found some food would go wasted so now i use a hopper made out of 1/2 in hardware wire. Although since i have switched to this i am not sure if they are eating/growing as much due to the fact that they cant access the food as easily. Has anyone else noticed this?

I gave mine a hopper and the amount of food is clearly going down, thus they are definitely eating it. In order to actually test this you would need to measure the amount of food going in to their enclosure and out of it. However with the hopper they know where to get food, how to get it, and are more likely to eat due to hunger. Compare this to them finding food and just eating it and you are looking at the possibility that they would get fatter from this practice.

[Animals As Leaders]

Sure you can.

But do you really want to waste all that food?

[Stewart_Reptiles]

Put food on the floor or would a food dish be better

Depends how much food you want to be wasted and how much money you want to spend.

Whether you use a dish or put it on the floor they will waste a lot of food the best thing to do is to use a food hopper it helps prevent waste and saves money overall.

[SlitherinSisters]

I don't put the food in the cage at all. They waste too much of it that way. If you can figure out a way to keep the food in a 'netting' of sorts that's the best option. I made food cages out of 1/2 inch hardwired cloth that I can pour food into, but they can't get into. My nursing tubs have hardwired cloth as a lid so I don't have to worry about making a food cage for them. Also, make sure you don't just set the food cage on the floor, it needs to hang in a way they can't crawl on top and pee on everything.

[suzuki4life]

what cage are you using?