Temptation!

I had an experience today that was a real challenge. I had to clean out the kids' gerbil tank (they piled up bedding against the water stub and emptied the bottle into the bedding).

Well as I was moving gerbils and cleaning, I couldn't help but notice how fat and healthy they looked. They are the perfect size between adult mice and small rats. I found myself thinking about how much my BP would love to have them.

Does that mean I'm a bad dad? Am I loosing my herpin' mind? Can someone do an intervention or something.

This is officially my cry for help.

I'd like to state for the record that all gerbils are alive and accounted for at the present time, and that no rodents were harmed in the making of this post.

:wink:

Ken

LOL! Yep, my older daughter periodically checks to make sure no one is planning to feed her rat to a snake. I keep telling her, "Don't worry! Punkin is much too big for me to feed her to a little ball python!" Heh heh.

yes thats hard, I breed my own mice and rats for my snakes, my 10 year old son keeps picking out ones that I am not suppose to feed because they are too cute. He even names them. I told him to stop playing with the snakes food but he just doesn't get it. I try not to feed them but eventually they gota go. Then when he goes to get them and they are missing he gets mad at me. I tell him that the snakes have to eat too, but he's 10 what are you going to do.

We dealt with that when we bred mice for snake food before by giving them all food names so you couldn't talk about them without being reminded why they were there. "Mom! Look at Fajita! He's standing on Burrito's back! It's so cute!" "Sure is cute, hon, which one do you think Timba wants first?" :)

Yes currently my sons adopted Rats are peaches, and milk shake.
Hockeymom

Great minds think alike. :)

My youngest son is currently keeping 4 mice that were supposed to be food and may yet be at some point in the future. I can't stand the smell, and now that we have 48 frozen mice in our freezer, the chances of the live ones getting eaten are slim. Nevertheless, I still have those thoughts. Worse still, I daydream about the day when Neph is big enough to eat our cat (especially when she pees all over a basket of clean laundry).

Mice do stink, a lot worse than rats. If I breed food again, it will most likely be rats this time. I can't ever see voluntarily feeding a cat to another animal, though, especially since I had a cat get eaten by pit bulls that lived next door to us. Now, if I could have found a good afrock to feed them to, that would be a different story.

Oh, I don't think I could ever actually do it. If I haven't killed the cat by now, I never will. I even feel a little bad about the frozen mice in my freezer, and they're never peed on my clean laundry.

LOL, yeah, peeing on clean laundry is definitely a big strike against you. I had a cat who'd pee on the pillow of whoever made her mad ... that was ugly!

I also had a cat that was always peeing on my bed and pillow. I kept blamming it on the dog's until I actually caught the booger. She had a litter box and would use it, well she would use it until I would leave my room. Needless to say she is now an outside cat.

And on the kid's wanting to keep the mice that are suppose to be food, whenever I hear my youngest daughter say "Awww...that's a cute mouse" it is allways the first to become BP food.

Tuman would have been an outside cat a long time ago if we hadn't had her declawed as a kitten (She's 9 years old now).

First the cat . . . . then the 13 year old . . . then my boss(s)

My sis got a hampster once. It took alot to see it as a pet and not another food item. I told her if she got out of line her pet would become food.

In the end I did kill it, but accidently. I put the hampster in it's ball, and put the ball on top of a plate so it floated. Me and my friends were laughing so hard, it was real funny. Then the phone rang and we went and got it for a minute. So anyhoo, we hung up and went to get the hampster, it knocked the ball off the plate... So the ball slowly filled with water and sank. It happened real fast tho, the ball was just going under as we caught it. It musta breathed water or something in a panic.

Ken, breed the gerbils and feed em to the bp.

lol...sad...but funny.
i bred mice. i had like 4or five and changed the cage everyday. well im down to 2 females now cuz i got sick of the smell. they are both pregnant and lemme tell you.....males smell like 50000 times worse then females. i only have to clean their cages every few days. each female has her own. im thinking about keeping the females and just buying males. then leeting the males do their thing and feed them off.
i bred rats too. not too stinky at all. until you have 20 in one cage.
ken...feed the gerbils to the snake! muahahaha. jk...i say make a deal with the kids...breed the gerbils and the deal is you wont feed theirs off...but you get to keep the babies!

Lol. I've been thinking about breeding gerbils as feeders, but the kids' pets are both females, and since this isn't Mass. or Cali. they can't get married. I may get a breeding pair and start the "Cheap Feeder Gerbils Ranch".

peace.

Adult female mice generally don't tolerate a new male (you usually have to set up mice colonies when they are young just weaned). It's been years ago but I remember reading an article (National Geographic maybe) about mice and as I remember it the new males release a chemical in their urine to make all the females abort so that they can get rid of the old male's babies and re-breed the females sooner. Knowing this the adult females try to kill or castrate any new male.

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Adult female mice generally don't tolerate a new male (you usually have to set up mice colonies when they are young just weaned). It's been years ago but I remember reading an article (National Geographic maybe) about mice and as I remember it the new males release a chemical in their urine to make all the females abort so that they can get rid of the old male's babies and re-breed the females sooner. Knowing this the adult females try to kill or castrate any new male.

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Interesting....Then that may just explain the death of the last male I added a couple of week's ago. I noticed they were fighting him almost immidiately when he was added, and two day's later I found him half eaten. He must have been attacked by all of the females at once because he was much bigger than they were and he was pretty much mutilated.

No pet gerbils or such things in the house, but I'm guessing the chihuahua will start to get a bit worried when the snakes start getting closer to full grown....