rat cleaning

You can use the recycled paper pellets(Yesterday's News) but clay cat litter will mess up their respiratory tracts. You ever held your head in a cat box and breathed deeply while the dust is everywhere? It's not fun and you can't breathe afterwards.

I would use aspen(or a mix of aspen and yesterday's news) and increase ventilation. It should help immensely, both the smell and the rats' breathing. Ammonia is one of the major causes of respiratory distress in rats.

thx iv already moved them to a cage that is about the same size but ill get a biger one this weekend and i have 8 snakes and i plane to only get 2 of the 3 into breeding the 3rd is just a pet shes to old have had her for a while going on like 3 yrs almost

I've got Gentle Touch litter (it's an aspen-based pelleted litter) in my tubs right now, but I'm not very happy with it, so I'm going to be switching to aspen chips or sani-chips once it runs out.
The stuff looks like rabbit pellets. It does work very well for controlling odor and keeping the cage clean and dry, but because it's nothing but small hard pellets, it seems very wasteful when you have to dump it all at the end of the week. I want something fluffier that I don't have to use so much of to get good coverage. Plus, while the Gentle Touch also works for the snakes, there's the same problem--you have to use quite a bit of it to get decent coverage, and it keeps the cage conditions a bit drier than I would like unless you put in some damp paper toweling or spray it down. It turns into sawdust when dampened, and is pretty easy to clean up, at least.

I wouldn't recommend the Sani-Chips for the rats. It gets everywhere and you'll find it in your carpet 4 years later ;) I think I used it once and when that bad was empty, I said FORGET IT. The cost is very prohibitive and I definitely won't use it for my snakes(hemipenal abscesses don't sound like a great thing to have).