Raising Rats

[steelsack]

Quick question for those of you raising your own rats or mice. What are you using for substrate? Is it dangerous to keep the food living on pine shavings? I know pine is not the best for bp's, so is there any concern of pine dust or traces of oil on your rodents? Maybe I'm being overly concerned, but I definitely DONT want to give my snake a big poison sandwich.......................



thanks

[Marla]

User recycled paper bedding or plain old newspaper. Pine or cedar oils on the rodents can cause a snake to get mighty sickly. We don't allow it in our house even though the two rats we have now aren't food.

[bollingers4]

Good thought on that one!! I am going to have to pay more attention to what they use at the store where I buy my mice.

[steelsack]

Yeah, what fun......a whole new worry!
Just got home with a pregnant rat (she's really nice, I'll probably never use her as food-have already named her Amnesty!), set up a nice little rat condo, and put her in. I used this stuff called "Alphapet chlorophyll litter" that I keep around for the guinea pig. It's a "blend of wood chips" with occasional pellets that are edible to boot.
Soon as I put Amnesty in she ran around picking out the little pellets and eating them. So apparently they are quite the treat. Not after they've been peed on I would assume :shock:
The company has no website and searching comes up with nothing. So I suppose I'll scrap it and start over. Of course all the rats and mice I've fed Xaero I saw removed from a tank with wood shavings in it. Forgot to ask, but I'm sure it's pine as pine's one of the cheapest. Most of us have been feeding our snakes food from pet stores like this for a long time......

[Marla]

Amnesty, eh? LOL. Yes, chances are that your snake will survive it, but if it's a particularly oily batch or something you could have results you aren't happy with. CareFresh really isn't that expensive and newspaper is cheap, too. Better safe than sorry. It's a lot easier than bathing the rodents. :wink:

[steelsack]

Better safe than sorry

Yup

[Jeanne]

I bred rats for the pet and show trade for many years. I do not reccommend using newspaper.. the inks can cause problems for the rats/mice. I reccommned using carefresh. Pine is OK, and there have very few reports of problems associated with pine, however, do not use anything with clorophyl. Clorophyl is dangerous. Also do not use ceder. Ther are also many other types of bedding reccommended commercialy for rodents, some look like pellets... they work OK, but, they do not absorb urine well, and that leads to a problems of its own.

[Andariel]

I've got my feeders on Aspen Pellets (available at ur local pet store or feed store). My petstore had a 10 lb bag for like $8 or so, but after I bought that I called around and one of my local feed stores has Aspen Pellets for $.25 a lb And they carry it all year long around here (surpise to me cause this is a SMALL town, heck it took me 8 hours to find a place that carried cypress mulch around here this time of year, and he only had 4 bags left lol).

Anyone live near western maryland and wants some feeders, if u drive u can have them free in a couple weeks after they're born and weened off momma mouse.

-Chris