Hey all,
So I have been buying F/T rats for all my snakes for a few months now and am starting to notice how costly it is.
I will give you an example. Today I spent $30 on 2 small adults,8 pups and a live mouse hopper. When I paid $9 at the one store for the adults I couldnt believe it! 2 smalls for $9!!! and 8 pups for $20 at the other store!
Now youre probably wondering why I have to buy at 2 different stores. Well thats where the next problem comes in. SUPPLY! The 2 pet stores in my town that are not petsmarts or pet values sell live or frozen rats. But they never ever have the right sizes in stock. I have actually had to miss feeding because they wont have stock in for me to feed my snakes! I usually buy 1 month or 2 stock at a time and most of the times I cant because they wont have enough or any at all. And I REALLY hate buying F/T from the one store because they have a bad rep on their F/T.
The next is price. I pay $2.50 PER rat pup. Qt's over 10 are 2.25 each. Small adults are $3.99 each. Qt's over 10 are $3.50. This is way way way too much.
So I have a buddy up 2 1/2 hours away from me that has THE best prices for F/T rats my only problem is that he lives so far away and its $50 of gas just to get their and 5 hours out of my day.
So I start doing my research.
I start making charts on how much it will cost for me to buy a 4 months supply of F/T from A) Pet store B) Buddy C) Breeding.
So :
A) The pet store will cost me an insane amount of money for 4 months.
B) My friend costs me $40 cheaper than the pet store for 4 months
C) Breeding is $20 more than the friend and $20 cheaper than the pet store.
But Buying from my friend I also have to factor in $50 for gas money.
So with breeding I have been doing a ton of research. I have found that this thread here :
http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...-Many-to-Breed
is the most helpful in how many I should breed and when and all that jazz.
So I want to start a 2.12 breeding colony like it says in that thread. I have 6 snakes right now but plan on having 3 or 4 more in the near future.
What ever I do not feed to snakes I will just sell off to the pet stores or freeze for later.
I plan on have 6 10 gallon tanks with 4 females in each tank with a total of 3 of the tanks having females in them.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot to add it will probably cost me about $200-250 to get the rat breeding colony set up.
Now this is all still a thought it my head.
Do you think that it would be easier and less hassle to put the extra money into just buying the cheaper F/T from my friend?
Will it be easier to just breed the rats?
What do all you rat breeders out there think?
All help is appreciated!
Thanks so so much!
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