my hairless female is such a bad mom i should call child-rat services

[nevohraalnavnoj]

6 months ago I picked up a hairless rat female from the pet store to incorporate in my colony. She's nice enough and she has good weight. I made sure to take my time getting her to weight before her first litter.

But out of 2 litters she has had about 28 babies...and only 7 have survived their first few minutes. I don't know if they're coming out dead or what, as I don't get all up in there and watch.

From what I've heard from others, this sounds like this is pretty much on par for hairless rat moms. Anyone else had similar experiences with hairless?

JonV

[OhBalls]

No experience (sorry wish I could help) but I had to say, the title of this thread made me crack up laughing

[Michelle.C]

Hairless Rats make horrible mothers, unfortunately. They are in no way an ideal breeder, especially for feeders. Most breeders who want to incorporate a hairless into their feeder breeder stock will acquire a male.

The first reason females make horrible mothers is because of their lack of fur. They can not keep their brood warm enough. Most breeders will tell you a remedy to this is placing a heating pad under the cage, but this can also lead to dehydration, burns, and death.

Second reason is; most lines of Recessive Hairless have a difficult time producing milk. They require a very high protein diet at the time of pregnancy and throughout the offspring's dependency. Issue with this is, feeder breeders keeping the females pregnant too often, on such a high protein diet, well this can cause liver and skin issues.

Final reasoning, and most important to me; often Recessive Hairless lines have "bleeding issues", leaving them at risk before and after birth. They have a much higher mortality rate than most rodents.

Hope this cleared a few things up.

[nevohraalnavnoj]

Thanks for the input, everyone.

I think this hairless mom actually has still-born litters....so she's not even failing on the raising of her rats, she didn't even got that far with this last litter.

I went to separate the dead babies from her and she picked one up and ran around with it, panicking. Apparently she was intent on raising dead babies, lol.


JonV

[SlitherinSisters]

I'm not sure what it is about hairless rats, but they seem to be awful at everything but being pets. My little sister has one and it started getting tumors at just 6 months old. My suggestion would be to not waist your money on hairless. Perhaps that's why they are "rare", they are terrible mothers and don't live very long to breed.

[Stewart_Reptiles]

Hairless rats make poor mothers, I would never use a hairless as a breeder.

[nova2door]

years ago i had a hairless that didn't produce milk. worst thing was she would have 15 to 18 babies everytime. i only bred her a couple times then she was a pet for awhile.
i had a male or 2 and keep back a couple het females so a couple hairless would pop out sometimes. did you see one with 1/2 hair and 1/2 hairless yet?
a guy i have been getting rodents from has some and he said all of his produce milk, hes never had any problems with them and has quite a few females he uses for breeders.

[littleindiangirl]

Double everything Michelle C said. Hairless rats are higher maintenance and just dont make good feeder breeders.

[Bruce Whitehead]

I once made a comment on another forum about using a hairless as a breeder (because I really love hairless rats) and fury reigned down upon me.

The only way I would breed would be het to het for hairless. As noted they really are not equipped to be breeders, especially the females. I sincerely hope you retire her immediately.

Bruce

[nova2door]

if you want to breed hairless rats just breed a hairless male to a couple het females and you shouldn't have any problems.