We've started doing things a bit different recently with our rat breeding. Instead of growing up our males and female rats for future breeding and trying to keep track of who goes with who, we are creating breeder groups with a male assigned to a group of 4 females basically from birth to death (or feeding off). At weaning he'll be seperated just until it's his females are breeding weight then go back to living with them in the big colony enclosures we have.

We're going to experiment with leaving the male in with his females through breeding and raising their young and see how that goes. If the females bred too often and show ill effects then of course I'll be re-assessing this. Male rats however make excellent parents so it will be interesting to watch how keeping them in permanent family groups (like we do with our ASF's) works out over the long haul.

Here's a group of holdbacks Mike and I choose from various litters. The female Dumbo you see with them is actually not their natural mother but is fostering them. Dee (the Dumbo female) is reaching the end of her highly productive cycles so is retiring to basically help finish raising and socializing future breeders. She's a fanastic female and very nice tempered so does a great job of being our "rat finishing school" for future breeder groups. This group is still nursing but Dee has milk available as her last group of only 4 young was moved to another female to allow her to foster the holdbacks.

Blue male.....



Blue & White female.....



Dee & the Blue male.....



The holdback females - two blues, one albino, one dumbo albino....



Dee and her foster babies.....



The holdback litter, some of the nicest looking rats we've ever produced. Two of the blues in particular have the nicest coats, almost blue mixed with a white undercoat so that there's layers of shading. Not important of course for the purposes of breeding feeder rats but I enjoy nice looking rats and we do occasionally have request for pet rats.....