i completely disagree about inbreeding. i mean, i agree that for one generation its fine. but apart from that, i differ with much of what sorraya says.

these are not BPs but mammals.


for mice or rats with quite a natural gene pool, and maybe some morphs, inbreeding is always bad. it gets worse if it continues. disabilities and deleterious recessive traits will pop up at much higher rates than in ball pythons, or reptiles. ok you did it for one generation, babies look healthy, its fine, dont continue.

then there are the old pure thoroughbred lab mice / lab rat lines. since they are being kept completely seperate from any natural rats/mice, and from other lines, they are basically subspecies. some of these lines are up to 100 years old. their genome is completely different: they are all almost completely genetically identical. a natural mouse is homozygous for some genes and heterozygous for others, and some genes are present only in some individuals. a lab mouse or rat is homozygous for virtually all of the genes present in the genome. here inbreeding does not matter, its meaningless, because differences in the genome between individuals are close to zero and the inbreeding factor / homozygousness is already close to 100%.

lab rats are bred that way to get rid of any randomness, and so that you can just download the full genome online and know that your individual lab rat is a close to perfect copy of the genome you just downloaded.


so you have 2 options: get a pure line of lab rats from a professional lab animal breeder, you should pick a line that is used in so many scientific studies that its all over the scientific literature. keep the line pure, they will all be identical, inbreeding will not matter. absolute purity, but also no morphs, no variation.

or, if you want variety and morphs and stuff, avoid inbreeding, i mean it. they are mammals, and you dont know the genetics but they are obviously diverse, and mammals are very vulnerable to inbreeding.

if you just inbreed a sample of a naturally diverse gene pool, and try to eliminate recessive issues, you are in over your head in a gigantic project that requires dozens of generations, several parralel lines, years of work, and maybe genetic testing. also along the way there will be several setbacks due to serious genetic issues, forcing you to scrap entire lines and to split other lines to replace them. Dont go there. buy a line that some other person purified decades ago and that is proven by full genome sequencing.