Selling Pet Rat?

[j94712]

I often feel like it is easier for us as feeder breeders to produce friendly, healthy pet rats. If we happen to get a rat who is aggressive, bites, antisocial, unhealthy, etc; we do not have to house it forever or find it a forever home in which someone may be unnecessarily burdened because of poor genetics. We are able to cull those that do not make the cut, and quickly get to breeding the best of the best.

I agree. We all have the ultimate punishment for bad rats. Sounds pretty cruel but that's how you keep your feeder colony in good condition

[iamratpimp]

Word dude. I dont even mess with snakes man. I just post here because the rat community is insufferable.

In fact, I primarily breed rats as pets, as well as hamsters, etc.

[rascal_rascal_99]

I guess my question is...why shouldn't you be able to sell rats off as pets? I do occasionally although I don't really try to, but if someone is looking for a pet I can usually find one they like. I don't worry about how socialized they have been because rats are very social by nature anyways. I can go into any cage and do anything I want with the rats or their babies and not be concerned about being bitten, if I do on rare occasion have an agressive rat, it usually gets put down right away...usually this is a new mom on babies and she may or may not get to raise the litter. If she really being highly agressive (charging across the cage in attack mode) she's going down right away and the litter gets scattered through other cages to be raised. This is very rare for me though and out of about 30-40 colonies at any given time, I probably run across a rat like this only once every 2-3 years at most.

All my rats get treated the same and it doesn't matter if it's a standard brown or hooded, or a pew dumbo rex, a blue berkshire dumbo rex, or a hairless dumbo, etc... they all get the same food and live in the same cages and I don't doubt that any of them could make a great pet if someone wanted it just as well as the others next to it.

[aldebono]

They would most likely all make good pets because you have high standards for your rats and cull heavily. That is the recipe for good rats in your colony.

[angllady2]

Want to know how I handle that situation?

I tell the truth. Yes, I raise rats as feeders and as pets. I do sometimes get the questions about breeding rats to be food. For example, if someone is interested in getting a rat from me as a pet, and I get the inevitable "Are the parents pets?" or whatever, I say yes they are. It is the truth. Even if the majority of the babies are intended as food, I still clean, care for, talk to and love on the parents, so yes they are pets.

Now, as to the person who presses the matter, I tell them the truth. I raise my own food for my snakes. Period. When I get the shocked stare and the mumbling, I ask them if they have a pet. Dog, cat, ferret, bird, whatever. I ask if they don't want the best for their pet. So I ask, if you knew that pet store and grocery store food was making your pet sick, wouldn't you change what you fed? Wouldn't you want to give them only the best possible food? The answer is almost always yes. Then I ask, so why is what I do any different? By raising my own food, I make sure my pets get only the very best quality. That ends the arguments every time.

Gale

[MonkeyShuttle]

I would rather buy a pet rat/mouse from a feeder breeder any day. It just makes more sense. Herpers usually pay way to much attention to detail (temps, substrate, enclosure space, genetics, weight, diet, background, etc) which is what everyone should want from a seller.


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[j94712]

Great response guys!!
Now the next question usually follow up after "are their parents pets?" or "Are they pets?" is "Do you handle them a lot?"
i usually answer that i handle them once in while, which is at least once a week (I need to take them out of the tubs when i handle them.).
And another thing that really piss me off is that some other people (NOT ALL OF THEM), so called the true "rat breeder", said in their ad about how people who raise feeder rats do not treat rats well and the rats are living in those small "tubs." By saying this, they can conclude that our rats are generally not friendly and have no history.
I respect what these people do for rats because this is pretty much the same as us breeding snakes, but saying our rats are no good for pets in their ads just doesn't seem right to me. Again, i'm not saying every rat breeder does this, but i have seen some.

[MonkeyShuttle]

Great response guys!!
Now the next question usually follow up after "are their parents pets?" or "Are they pets?" is "Do you handle them a lot?"
i usually answer that i handle them once in while, which is at least once a week (I need to take them out of the tubs when i handle them.).
And another thing that really piss me off is that some other people (NOT ALL OF THEM), so called the true "rat breeder", said in their ad about how people who raise feeder rats do not treat rats well and the rats are living in those small "tubs." By saying this, they can conclude that our rats are generally not friendly and have no history.
I respect what these people do for rats because this is pretty much the same as us breeding snakes, but saying our rats are no good for pets in their ads just doesn't seem right to me. Again, i'm not saying every rat breeder does this, but i have seen some.

i would think the parents would be pets because you know them better then there offspring which wont be with you as long and they've experienced a lot of interaction with you through cleaning and what not. I say my breeders are my pets cause i take such good care of them and strangely enough they keep me company sometimes which according to Wikipedia "A pet (or companion animal) is an animal kept primarily for a person's company or protection" but what does wiki know

[j94712]

Here are some pics of my rats!

[sorraia]

I think the people asking those questions are more concerned about getting a rat from a hobby breeder than from a pet store. They are trying to determine if you are breeding healthy, happy, friendly rats, or if you are essentially doing the same thing as a pet store (breeding any rat to every rat, in a nutshell).

There is a the belief that feeder breeders don't care about their rats and don't take good care of them. This is of course a false generalization. There may be some who don't care for their rats well, but many do in fact care for them well. Many feeder breeders in fact love their rats. There is also a common belief that rats "shouldn't" be food for another animal. This is undoubtedly false. Rats are food. So are chickens. So are pigs, sheep, cows, horses, snakes, lizards, etc. Pretty much every animal can become food for another animal. Even the top predators can become food (scavengers may eat them when they die, and fungi and bacteria certainly eat them when they die). We aren't exempt to these rules either, we are food for other animals, our society and fear and avoidance of nature are the only things saving us from our natural fate.

For those people concerned about finding the best pet, they want to avoid feeder breeders, regardless how well we care for our rats, because the records aren't there that *might* be available from a hobby breeder. Because we feed off a good number of our rats, we don't know what their full complete health history is. If we feed off breeders instead of keeping them as pets (I know that varies from one breeder to the next) after retirement, we don't even have a direct family health history of our rat. As such, we can only vouch for the health we see at the time, but we may not be able to vouch for end of life health. We may not be able to say our rats live an average of 2 years, 3 years, or however many years, if the majority of our rats are dead before they reach a year of age. We can't vouch for their respiratory health as they age, or the fact they won't be prone to developed HED, CHF, or tumors. We simply don't know if we don't have those long term records. Even if we did keep our breeding rats as pets after their retirement, we would only be able to vouch for that direct familial line (which does carry more weight than distant or indirect relatives), we couldn't vouch for the full health of everything we've produced. We can definitely say our rats are friendly and happy and well cared for, because that's what we can see every single day. We just won't have the full and complete health records that a hobby breeder *might* have. This is what many of the pet people are concerned about.

Now I wanted to specify, I keep emphasizing a hobby breeder *might* have these records, because a majority of them don't. Most hobby breeders don't keep detailed track records on all of their rats. Many of them don't even keep in touch with the people who buy ("adopt") their rats. So in reality, they have as much in the way of long-term familial health records as we do, and in some cases we might even have better! It all depends on the individual breeder and his or her practices The pet rat hobby doesn't fully understand these technicalities though, and feed largely on rumor and myth.