Selling Pet Rat?

[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.