Live Feeders & Side Effects

As posted elsewhere, my husband has a BP who spent her first 40-some-odd days with us not eating, until I offered her a live mouse.

We're thinking she isn't likely to make the switch to f/t given trials so far. PetCo is on the way home for me but . . . PetCo. There's is an independent store not too far away that I'm inclined to trust, but it isn't in a direction we often go. So Saturday morning we went to that store, got a half-dozen mice, and set them up in a 20-gallon long tank:

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Of course they decided to all go try out the hide when I thought of taking pictures. And here's a close-up of the tank label, to help us remember they are food, not pets:

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I didn't realize, though, that we were setting up an entertainment center for the dogs. This was taken while we were setting up and the mice were in a temporary holding cell.

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I think the black and white dog whined this morning when the mice went into hiding.

The store couldn't guarantee the mice were all the same sex when I asked for them, so hopefully we haven't created a breeding colony. With only one snake insisting on live, that would be a bit much. :). We debated rats vs. mice, and decided to stay with mice until we have Kiyo into a good eating routine and growing (she's about a year old, 240 grams), then we'll see about making the transition to rats.


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With that many mice, you probably do have both sexes. But with weekly feeding, you may still be okay.

Good luck with the mice TV for the dogs!

The couple Petcos close to me have them separated.
If she is happy with mice, keep her happy. :gj:

Just give in. 1) You want more snakes 2) Breeding your own feeders if fun. :P

Breeding your own feeders is not fun. Double the work and they are super messy creatures. But, to each his own.

It really would not surprise me if you had all males. Feeder breeders <---haha that rhymes, tend to keep the females for future breeding while selling the males as feeders. Not all do that but I do and I know many others who do this. If they are male or females, you could easily tell. Males do not exactly hide their... male parts. Right below the tail would be a pink or black bulge (depending on the color of the mouse itself). This would indicate male. Females will not have this bulge.

When I first started my breeding of feeders it was really hard. Mice are cute but the babies.... cuter. It is easier now that I have been doing it for so long.

And your dogs... free entertainment... animal kingdom TV. Too cute. And they will never get bored watching them.

The store I got the mice from said each batch they get in is supposed to be single-sex, but they don't check and they've ended up with litters. If we do get a litter, I'll start checking for naughty bits and feed off appropriately - while I'd rather not go in for breeding feeders (and I'm more likely to do rats than mice if I change my mind), I can think of worse things to have happen than additions to the larder.

That's also why I decided on a glass tank: reduced escape concerns. I just have to get some bungee cords to replace the temporary top weights, since the screen-top latches we got won't work with this tank.


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I would love to breed my own feeders.

Actually, we already sort of do. The chicken/rabbit/goat area outside has an on-again/off-again terrible mice problem. I can catch half a dozen a day (or, none - even when there are plenty running around). I dump the live traps in to a barrel, bludgeon the mice (sounds mean, but it is very quick) and feed them to the chickens.

However, everything I read says domesticated feeder mice/rats need more climate control. I don't want them in the house! Our house is very small, and we don't have a basement either. I would actually be open to a pet rat or two, but a breeding colony would be too many.

The two new baby BPs are both insisting on live (well, one of them, still haven't gotten mine to eat at all, but she was more interested in live than f/t), so I decided to bite the bullet and start small-scale breeding. Husband thought it would make more sense to breed rats than mice, since the girls (all BPs) will need rats when they grow up, so we got two females and a male.

We'd started calling the mouse colony Mouse TV, so now we have Rat TV. I keep telling the dogs that the big male rat would not be fun to play with, but they don't listen.

The bigger problem is that rats have more personality than the mice. Just got them yesterday, and already this morning I was chirping to the rats and seeing if they'd eat food from my hand - they obviously haven't been handled much, but the male was braver than the females and took a couple Cheerios. AAARGH! NO! NOT PETS! BREEDERS FOR FEEDERS! Ahem.

And either I got used to the mice really fast, or my nose likes mice better than the rats. I find the rats to have more of a funk. I think both channels of Rodent TV will be moving to the spare bedroom. (which might help with the not-pets thing).


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Geee?? I wonder what gender this rat was? :P


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Snicker


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Not-Pet Fail. Fail fail fail. (headdesk, headdesk)

The rat girls are Fawn (or maybe Faun, forgot to ask Dracos which way we were spelling it) and Cheesecake, and last I knew he was debating between Watson or Pickering for the male.

But babies *will* be feeders!

Tonight's projects: hopper feeder for the rats, drilling a water bottle nozzle hole in the mouse tub, and giving the rats the additional chew toys I got them yesterday.


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Rats are great and make very good pets. Hold back any babies that are very friendly / tame and less aggressive (don't bite) and you will end up breeding friendlier calmer rats. If you have them in a glass tank, i'd switch to a large bin cage made from a steralite tub.. rats need more ventilation than mice. You can cut large holes in the tops / sides of plastic tubs then cover them with hardware cloth (I solder holes around the large windows, then weave metal wire through them and the hardware cloth to attach it). This will allow you to put a water bottle on the side, hang chews / toys, etc. Bin cages are also easier to clean because they are light weight.
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I'd also suggest getting a CO2 chamber setup.. The rats will quickly breed and grow and you will have to euthanize some of the babies and freeze unless you have enough snakes to eat them each week. You will also need a second or third bin to separate males from females as they can reproduce at 5-6 weeks of age. Rats can have litters of upper teens to even 20, so you need to be prepared for that.

We've got a tank topper in transit for the rats, which will triple their floor space and have good ventilation. And we can give them more toys, hammock, etc. [emoji3]

I suspect the topper may make it easier to socialize with them too, since it has front doors, so we can come in level (with treats), rather than from above.

And today we picked up another half-dozen episodes of Mice TV - the little BPs fed quite nicely on mice yesterday (one took a live rat crawler on Sunday, the other refused). They have definite lumps, but I don't think the mice were too big.


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I made the current mouse bin out of a tub, and I think it came out pretty well, but I'm not sure I want to repeat the process. Attaching the mesh onto the lid was tedious. Debating what I want to do for grow-out bins. No sign of pregnancy in the rats, the decision may wait until we get pups.

I expect we'll set a CO2 chamber in the long run; to get rid of just one rat (see below) we used a small piece of dry ice in a 5-gallon bucket.

More drama and a new actor on Rat TV. Our first male turned out to be a bitey jerk, so he was euthanized and is now living in the freezer. Got a new male, Falstaff, who is soooo much nicer, but doesn't seem to have any concept of treats. The girls are cheerfully running up and down the now 3-level cage, hopefully Falstaff figures out the ramps and soon (he's on the level with the food and water).

No sign of pregnancy yet in the rats, and I'm not going to complain if jerk-rat was unsuccessful at breeding.

Faun is an escape artists, she's 2/2 for escapes on cage-cleaning days. If it goes to three, she may also have to move to the freezer.

Introducing Falstaff to Cheesecake was uneventful, she even seemed to be mothering him at first. Either that, or grooming vanilla off of each other got them drunk. :) (Cheesecake was off being escaped at the time) Faun doesn't pay much attention to him good or bad, which is better than relations with the first male, who tried to bully the girls.

Saturday I discovered that Mouse TV had run a snuff film - went to clean the bin and found one of the mice dead and being snacked on. I suspect it was the mouse that had looked a little . . . off. Fur slightly shaggy, eyes not quite wide open, etc. I sent the body out to the wheelie-bin, cleaned the cage thoroughly with F10, and will again before re-stocking after the current occupants are fed off.


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Watch for signs of illness in the other rodents.. RIs and other issues can spread and kill fast.

I used bin cages for my grow outs.. I just bought the largest bin I could find and used hardware cloth mesh over the "windows" on the sides and top. I "wove" the mesh on with aluminum wire through soldered holes around the windows. As long as the mesh overlaps the plastic edge (you put it on the inside and I like at least 1/2" larger hardware cloth on all sides) it keeps them from chewing out. If you use zip ties to attach the cloth, you have greater risk of them chewing out.

Rats take ~21 days to gestate and don't show until well into the 2nd -3rd week IME, so give it time. if they are pregnant by the aggressive male, you will want to use all babies as feeders and not hold any back as temperament is genetic.