Good Bedding?

[AdamJB]

Hey All! Right now I am using pine pellets for my two lil future breeders. So far I am really liking them, no smell at all!

Well I was curious if Pine Pellets were a good choice health wise, because I was talking to my buddy who also owns the local herp shop and he was hesitant about using them aswell because of the phenols the pine caries.

So are pellets safe to stick with or should I switch over to yesterdays news or carefresh?

[littleindiangirl]

(totally unsure moment coming up)I think the pellets are kiln dried, and carry much less oils and phenols then the chips.

I use pine pellets, and no one is having an adverse reaction or sinus problems. I've tried different kinds of pellets, hard wood, soft wood, and they were either too sweetly aromatic, or they stunk bad when wet. I have found that equine fresh works the best for me.

On that note, I do have ONE rat that has allergies, so he is kept on cellsorb. (like yesterdays news)
I dont like using it for all the rats because for one, its expensive! (why is recycled product so dang expensive?) and two, it does not do a good job of odor control. When wet, its smells like rat pee on wet newspaper.

It gets mushy, and instead of sucking the moisture out of poo, it sort of sits on top, and the poop will smell a lot more than on wood pellets. (The wood pellets suck them dry, and really cuts down on the smell)

Just my experience with the wood pellets. If there were aspen pellets around that cost as much as the pine, I would definitely pick them up and try them out.

[AdamJB]

Yeah I work at petsmart and I saw a 20 lb bag of yesterdays new for 14.99 and a 6lb bag of aspen pellets for 8.99. So if pine pellets are safe I'd like to stick with them

[MarkS]

I've used pine chips or shredded aspen in the past and recently tried some pine pellets that were marketed for horse bedding. I really didn't like them all that much. They were really good at keeping the smell down, but they seemed to turn into powder really fast and didn't keep their pellet shape for very long. When that happened they got dusty and when the rats would scratch through their litter the dust would fly up and settle on everything. It was particularly bad when I dumped the tubs on cleaning day. Dust would fly everywhere. Also, the rat pinkies didn't seem to do very well on it, they were always coated with dust and I did seem to lose more then usual. I don't think the rats liked it as much either because they couldn't tunnel through it. They seemed to play more when they were on shredded aspen. It was more expensive then the bales of shredded aspen I usually buy which usually cost me about $3.99 for a 50lb bale. The pellets were about 7-8 bucks for a 30 lb bag and didn't cover as many tubs. Perhaps I just got the wrong kind of pellets, but I'll be going back to shredded aspen again.

Mark

[MATT FISHER REPTILES]

as far as the best bedding goes. pine is the only way to go from rodents. aspen is just as good but costs more. i dont like pine dust as it can cause RI problems with the rodents but the chips work great.