Frozen rats

Hey everyone!
I have a question for those of you who feed F/T rats and have a larger collection to feed. I have around 100+ snakes of varying species and size, primarily ball pythons though, and seem to have the hardest time warming my rats up in a reasonable amount of time. I always let my rats thaw in the fridge overnight, but still, I feel like it takes me forever to warm up a few at a time, then feed them off, then warm up the next batch, and repeat. I feel like there has to be a better way, there just has to be!

How do you warm up your rats? How many snakes do you have and how long does it take you to get through everyone?

I had been feeding live because I breed them, but we keep having disasters with the heat spiking here and taking out our AC units in our shed and warehouse. It's just easier to keep the colony small until things cool back down and feed F/T.

Thank you in advance!

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Originally Posted by Emily_Doughty

Hey everyone!
I have a question for those of you who feed F/T rats and have a larger collection to feed. I have around 100+ snakes of varying species and size, primarily ball pythons though, and seem to have the hardest time warming my rats up in a reasonable amount of time. I always let my rats thaw in the fridge overnight, but still, I feel like it takes me forever to warm up a few at a time, then feed them off, then warm up the next batch, and repeat. I feel like there has to be a better way, there just has to be!

How do you warm up your rats? How many snakes do you have and how long does it take you to get through everyone?

I had been feeding live because I breed them, but we keep having disasters with the heat spiking here and taking out our AC units in our shed and warehouse. It's just easier to keep the colony small until things cool back down and feed F/T.

Thank you in advance!

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

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Hey Emily,
I have only had a collection as large as about 45 snakes, so you have a bit more to feed. However, the way I do it is I take the rats out frozen and set them out to thaw for three to 4 hours in the vicinity of the snakes. This scents the room well and gets them fired up to eat. I then take a tub of the hottest water I can get from my tap and submerge 5 at a time in a large ziploc bag for about 5 minutes. This warms the rats but keeps them dry. If you get multiple tubs going you can probably get through it in an hour or so. Just remember you need to put something on top the rats to keep them submerged or they will float and don't zip the bags closed or the air will hold the water away from the rats. Don't use so much weight you squish them. Oh, one other thing. Make sure you have reasonably long tongs because when you've scented the room like that, some will come flying out of the tub ready to eat and if you have short tongs, they may hit your hand instead of the rat. I know this from experience.

Good luck!

If you want to do a lot of rats at once, get a styrofoam beer cooler, put the rats in it, and pour in warm water. You may have to do a water change after about 15 minutes because a lot of rats = lots to heat. Rinse out the beer cooler when you're done, and I wouldn't advise using it for beer afterward.

That's how I heat rabbits for the retics, but it can take a few hours to bring them fully to temperature even after being thawed in the refrigerator for a few days. Bunny fur is a great insulator.