breeding rats for food.

[kontron]

does anyone know anything about breeding rats??? i want to start a rat colony in the 55 gal tank when we move roo to as better sized 30 or 40 tank. i know nothing about breeding them. i would figure just let them do their thing, and some day maybe they would pop out tons of babies. i know i would have to seperate the babies from the adult males as not to get killed, but other then that i thought rats and stuff bred really fast???? any advice or help????

[led4urhead]

Check out this thread here: http://www.ball-pythons.net/index.ph...ewtopic&t=2336 . Jonah posted a great link about halfway down the first page. There's good info on all three pages tho.

[SatanicIntention]

I think I just need to write something about this in Notepad, and use it when needed.

Breeding rats is easy. In such a big tank, you could probably keep 3 females. ONLY females. Keep the male in a separate 10-20 gal. Since one female will have so much space, she probably won't get stressed by the other females in the tank. The male has to be separated because he will be constantly wanting to breed, and they won't. He will stress them out, resulting in eaten babies.

For bedding, use ASPEN. It doesn't seem to carry as much dust as pine. And well... It's NOT pine. You definately don't want to make the snake go neurological. For feeding, feed a high quality lab block, NOT Nutri-Phase or other seedy rat food. The key word here is SEEDY. It just is not nutritionally correct and makes for alot of mess with all the hulls. Mazuri makes a great lab block. It comes in a 25-30lb bag for $11 at the feed store. You can also add some dog food to their diet because the need the animal protein. It gives them healthy teeth and soft, healthy coats. I would reccomend you buy Ol'Roy Puppy food. The puppy food is good for pregnant and nursing mothers because of the higher calorie and fat content, making for fat, healthy babies. The occasional veggies are great too. A little bit of lettuce is ok, but not alot, as it will cause diarrhea, eeww. Broccoli is the same. BUt any no-sugar cereals such as puffed rice, Cheerios. Never buy anything will alfalfa in it. They cannot digest it.

Now for water. They drink an ungodly amount of water. In such a big tank, I would keep a minimum of 2 or 3 water bottles. The metal hangy down ones work great. Our rats have found the joy of jumping on top of the water bottle and trying to push the lid up. We solved this problem by wrapping tape with the sticky side out and sprinkling Cayenne Pepper on the tape(not the rat, mind you). They WILL NOT bother that anymore. It's hilarious.

Well, that seems to about cover it. I jsut hope I have emphasized the not keeping the males with the females thing. It's just not good. As for how many per litter to expect, I have seen from around 8 to as many as 20 in a single litter. They mature sexually at 5 weeks old. So be sure to remove or separate at or before this age. Gestation period is between 21 and 23 days after mating. The females go through menopause also, and usually become infertile at around 15 months of age and should not be bred. By 4 weeks, they should be weaned and at a good size to be knocked against the wall and frozen or fed.

Good luck. Oh, and Marla, maybe this should be made into a sticky or something. It sure is alot to type each time someone wants to know how to breed rats. :-D

[led4urhead]

Thanks for the info Becky! You definitely know your stuff when it comes to rats

[DragonSun02]

Hi Kontron,

I've been breeding rats for a while. I'm sure it's a great idea to separate the males from the females but i haven't with no problems that I have noticed. My rat males seem to get along with my females since the babies that were born remain alive and uneaten by the mothers. I am interested to know if it is really necessary to separate the males from the females. Anyone else do this practice?

Someone already wrote some amazing information on rat breeding so I can't really say much more. I actually use bins to keep my rats as a 1.2 trio. Although the space isn't tremendous, they seem to do fine in their limited space.

I feed them a breeding block that costs around 20 dollars for 50 pounds. The breeding blocks contain a lot of fat which is supposed to help the females maintain their weight do to the toil incurred by giving birth continually. If you're interested in this particular food source i can look up the brand that I order from a neighboring feed store.

Good luck and PM me and I'll be glad to go into specific details if you'd like.

DragonSun02

[Marla]

Becky, that's great! Thanks, and we will add it to FAQs for sure.

[kontron]

thanks. i think i may use a sterilite setup for the rats. may help keep their stink in. you dont suppose they could chew through that do you? or would may be the proper word? i have heard of the females eating the babies. lol.
my g/f has a bumper sticker that says, " i like baboes, but cant eat a whole one."