I Hate Mice!

We never had that problem when we bred mice. We did use fancy colored mice though, not sure if that makes a difference or not. Personally, we found all the albino mice to be kinda tweaked and they were the ones we had problems with when it came to getting along with their cage mates. Just my 2 cents ...

Robin

No, feeding raw meat and whole prey does not make your ferret more aggressive. Our ferret actually gets mostly whole prey items and occasionally if I have some young mice (hoppers or smaller) she gets those live and gets to 'hunt' for her prey. Very stimulating for her and she loves it.

I feel for you. I'm down to a pair of mice that are great breeders and great parents. Nothing bothers them. All other groups I've tried breeding either won't produce, kill off other females, or kill the babies. I decided to keep 2 females and 1 male from the good pair and I am hoping to raise them up and see if they take after their parents. Hopefully they do.

Good luck with whatever you decide with the mice and hope you get your rats soon. :)

I think you will go through a few males before you find one that will breed for you. What i did was pick out a male that was breeding with a female already so then i knew it was a stud. For some reason the rest did not feed like being the Alpha male over the females.

Jay_Bunny I do understand your frustration it took me a good 3 months before getting started real good with mice, I had to find the proper enclosure that work for me and experiment around with their diet and a few other things.

I could have give up but I didn’t and for the past year now it has been a smooth ride they are breeding well 13 to 17 babies per litters, and the females are good mothers (they even foster babies from other mothers :O), I really cannot complain.

Now my next challenge will be breeding ASF

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I know people like Deb (GA) have great success with their mouse colonies.

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I do and right now I am being taken over by mice ;)

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Originally Posted by Jay_Bunny

No, feeding raw meat and whole prey does not make your ferret more aggressive. Our ferret actually gets mostly whole prey items and occasionally if I have some young mice (hoppers or smaller) she gets those live and gets to 'hunt' for her prey. Very stimulating for her and she loves it.

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Thats the first I've heard of that. Very interesting!:gj:

I didn't know ferrets ate raw either until I joined an online forum (wow these things really do help you out. :D) and I switched her over to raw and whole prey. She takes rat pups no problem now so I think we are going to be breeding rats exclusively. Our ferret is helping us get rid of the breeder mice (all except 2 breeder mice and our deer mouse, the only 3 we are keeping).

So now I'm going to be really hauling butt trying to get the rat rack built so we can add more rats to the colony and get it up and going. We have two females right now that are of breeding age and size and they are currently in with a male. Then we have two females that will be breedable by the end of May. So I'm still on the hunt for more rats.

The Richmond show is coming up. I bet you could find some breeders there to get rats from. Either make arrangements with someone from bp.net who has rats and is going to meet them and a couple of their rats there. Or make a contact at the show and arrange to meet up with them later (assuming they don't have any live rats with them).