Anyone else end up with pet rodents?

Also keep in mind that rats don't live much longer than one year and they have up to 20 babies every three weeks if kept with males!!!

We aren't entirely sure of the sex, yet. My wife says they're a bit fragrant haha From what I've read online, it seems that females don't give off an odor.

It could just be the odors from being crammed in a large drawer with all the other rats, though. I think we are going to try to give them tiny little sponge baths tonight to clean them up.


We have an old unused bookcase in the garage that I'm going to convert into a multi-storied enclosure for them. Cover the front of the bookcase with a hinged plexiglass door or something like that, then keep the bookcase in the living room where they get to see all the action during the day :D

Well I have a couple dozen rats and I can tell you from experience that they don't smell at all, even the males. One adult male mouse smells a million times worse than all my rats together. I keep my rodents in critter cages, basically glass aquariums with screen tops. I used to put carbon filter pads on all my screen lids but now only keep them on the mouse tanks. I change their pine bedding weekly and bleach everything monthly.

You should lift up the rats and take a few photos of their private parts and post them here, there's a lot of people that can sex young rats. If you end up with a male and a female you better watch out... They say that baby rats are sexually mature very young, in fact if you keep a male and female and babies all together all the time you will end up with over one million rats in about 18 months!!!

It's best to control the breeding, you would need one more male and one more female and keep them in pairs. I have only one male in my whole setup and rotate the females in and out. I also keep lone females to raise their young and let them raise at least two babies to weanling age so they don't freak out from me feeding off all their babies. And it's way easier to feed a hairless pinky than to feed off a cuddly weanling, especially if you have family watching LOL. And I also found out that females with babies can get really aggressive if you introduce a male while the babies are still pinkys. It's fine when they reach weanling age though. And females about to give birth get a bit nasty too... Also, if you let the female raise all 16 or so babies she will get really worn out. It's best to feed off all but a max of 6 at a time.

I have a boa. All the left overs go to her. So no pet rats for me.