Placing moms together?

I have a 7 bin rack that I built with one empty bin. One of my females was having babies and the male and other female were running around acting crazy so I took them out and placed them in the empty bin. The next day another female in a different bin had babies. Can I place these two mothers together with their babies in the same bin or will with two moms fight?

You should be able to put them together. They will most likely share the mothering duties of all of the babies.

That's what I'm hoping. The first one had 3 huge babies and the second one had 13 normal sized babies

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Originally Posted by Inknsteel

You should be able to put them together. They will most likely share the mothering duties of all of the babies.

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X2

I've had thousands of rats and mother rats none the less are better than humans. ;) lol. But they should divide the work I've only had maybe 4-6 bad mothers who I had to cull who eithee gave up duties or were killibg babies.

I will say I had a HUGE female, biggest rat I've had and she was the alpha. She killed other rata, BUT only males. Shes was in my opinion the best mother I had she would kill males who were younger so eventually I put her in a bin of 3.1 and she had ko problems.

Overall, you should be fine. :)

Thanks a lot for the info

I wait at least 4-5 days before putting moms together. I've found that until the babies have fur, any stress risks mom killing the babies. But when you do put them together, start with a clean cage that doesn't smell like either of them, put each group of babies in the two farthest corners from each other, and put the moms in at the same time. I'd watch them close for the first 30 minutes or until they settle down with the kids. If they're good moms, eventually they'll probably just pile everybody into one group and take turns laying with them. :)

I normally would say it is ok to put mamas and babies together, but for this situation I would advise against it.
You mentioned that one of the mothers had 3 larger babies and the other mother had normal sized litters.
Usually what happens when you put mamas and babies together is that the mothers make one giant nest and combine the litters. I'm a little concerned that the larger pups will push the smaller ones away.

I've put together a litter that had larger pups with one that had smaller pups before. The entire litter of smaller pups except for 2 starved to death because the larger ones always pushed them out of the way when they were nursing.

We have 12 female producing for us right now and we keep 2 in each bin. We have had no problems with any of the babies and no deaths. But your experience may differ. In general they are very good mothers. I've seem one mother steal a rat and the other mom steal a different one back, but in the end they all get taken care of and fed

I cleaned everything out and placed the babies in different corners then placed the moms. At first they ran around and grabbed their babies and moved them to different corners. Then they started stealing each others babies, then they made one big pile, then back to stealing babies. It seems different every time I look but no one is hurt and everyone seems to be getting fed. The large ones are never all together unless its a big pile and the smaller ones are almost as big as the bigger ones now. It seems to all be working out for them with whatever system they have created.