Good points!
Sorraia- I kinda see my rats that way. I want to breed them mainly to improve on their health and temperament and make them better "pets" for my own enjoyment and possibly to sell as such, if there's a market for them here, but while doing so, I will also be using the ones that don't "make the cut" so to speak, to feed my snakes. I am going slow at first to see how things go, but would ideally like to have a colony that will sustain my reptile hobby (I only have 6 snakes, so it wouldn't need to be a large number of rats) and also produce consistently good pet animals with few or no health issues. I think rats make excellent small pets, but have also seen first hand the results of bad temperament and unsocialized animals... I consider myself lucky to have gotten two males with passable temperaments that weren't socialized (from the feeder bin at petco). I am planning on not placing any of the rats I produce as pets until at least the second or third generation so that I can be sure of their temperament as adults.