Betsy Buttpatch Did It Again!

[frankykeno]

Well who would have thought this little rat that only ended up as a breeder rather than a feeder, due to her funny butt markings would have turned into one of my top breeding females.



Betsy Buttpatch popped out 18 healthy pinks on her very first litter and today she did it again! Another 18 for Betsy! This time around the little runt didn't make it but she's got 17 happy squeeking pinks in with her and every one of them with a visible milkband already (she birthed earlier today).

Guess it was smart to not feed off Betsy! LOL

[rabernet]

Yaaayyyy, BPP! She's such a cute girlie, and so glad she's turned into such a great breeder for you!

[thehoofbite]

just curious. how often can you breed rats?

[Kagez28]

sorry to hear she didn't make it....

sounds like she helped ya out for not feeding her in the first place

[McAdry]

At this point we are cycling in a male with at least two to three females every week. I think jo is planning on adding 6 or more new breeding females in the near future as we try and get ahead of the voracious apettites of our snakes.At this point we have 7 feamles with pups of differnt ages that haven't been weaned yet and three more in with a male breeding.As to how often you breed would really just depend on how many snakes you are feeding or if your breeding for pets.

[littleindiangirl]

I went through and made a quick excel sheet for me to reference off of who goes where and when. Because I would forget

[cassandra]

just curious. how often can you breed rats?

Or were you asking how quickly can a breeder female be bred again after having a litter? =)

Jo will have to answer that...every feeder breeder kinda goes by their own time line. I breed mice, not rats (currently have 1.1, but working on getting another good female to join the cycle - I don't need much) and I try to give my girlie at least a week if not two weeks off from removing her babies and putting her in with the main man. =)

[frankykeno]

We practise our own ways of breeding rats, not the "only" way so I'm not saying ours is best...it's just what we do. We rest each female after her pups are weaned at 4 weeks of age. That rest is dependent on the size of the litter she ended up raising. It's always a week minimum but days are added to that to reflect the physical stress of raising a big litter compared to a much smaller litter. Basically our rule of thumb is....

7 or under: a week off

8 - 15: two weeks off

15+: one extra day for every pup over 15

Basically one day of rest for every pup raised as long as that rest is never more than at least a week. Since the vast majority of our females tend to birth 10 plus (most are around 15 per litter) the normal resting period is two weeks.

We also buddy breed all our females so at least 2, if not 3 females, go into the breeding tub with whichever male is up for rotation or best suits those females genetically. This allows us to have similar age litters going in case we need to foster some pups or have an unexpected maternal loss.

We currently have 4 males in full rotation, 1 male that is pretty much semi-retired and 1 male that is only allowed to breed with very select females due to his genetics so he's pretty much got a part-time job LOL.

It does mean that we have a lot of females to manage at different stages....in for breeding, awaiting birthing, nursing litters, resting after weaning, etc. I can get complicated LOL. I do believe strongly that resting them well between litters serves a few purposes. It allows the female to fully regain her strength and a strong mother makes for bigger, stronger litters and healthier birthings. It avoids immediate re-impregnating so a female will not both be nursing a litter and developing a new group in her body at the same time. It seems, for us anyway, to extend the viable breeding life of our females by about 2 to 3 months (which is pretty decent really). Also once they are finished breeding they are not all worn out and used up but remain a healthy, albeit older rat that still has a job in our busy colony (they babysit the weanlings, keep the resting rats company, etc.) They are also still healthy enough to be considered a good, large feeder rat or even be adopted out as pets.

[frankykeno]

Oh and speaking of Betsy, her buddy breeding companion Jet gave birth a few hours after Betsy did. Jet had a much smaller litter so she's content to foster 5 of Betsy's huge litter. Dropping back to 12 to raise is a much easier time on Betsy and what we did with her first litter of 18. It should help the pups get more access to teats so they can all end up nice chubbo feeders.

[tweets_4611]

Do you have the breeding companions in the same tub when they have their litters? Like are Betsy and Jet still in the same tub? And when you say Jet is fostering some of Betsy's babies, do they do that on their own, or do you have to take some on Betsy's babies and place them with Jet?

Haha, sorry for all the questions, but I'll be breeding rats eventually, and I'm trying to get an idea of how all the little things like that work out ^_^