Quote Originally Posted by Mike41793 View Post
Interesting! Well, even more evidence to back up my point then. They don't need the big mediums and large rats. Like I said, three meals a month for my females is considered good for me.

And as you said, if males aren't busy searching for food and just sitting in tubs, they certainly don't need excess haha.

I think this raises another debate that people love to have.... Breeding females need to be at least 1500g before you start pairing... Wrong! 6% of 1200g means the female would only lose 72g throughout the breeding process. Not a huge deal. Even if they were losing 10%, it wouldn't be a significant amount of body weight. Because what they lose is probably just fat or water weight anyways lol. I stopped eating dairy less than six months ago and have lost 15% of my body weight, without changing anything else about my diet or lifestyle. Does that mean you won't pair me to any of the hot mom's with tattoos and piercings like you did last year, uncle skippy?!?!
Postulation from anecdata (that is, I'm not being very scientific about this, just putting together stuff I've heard): could the 1500 grams rule have come from people wanting to breed their females early? I see a lot of threads about "power feeding" and trying to get females up to "breeding size" within one or two years instead of waiting the full three. From what I've gathered reading stories from breeders that have been in the hobby for a while, putting the females in too young tends to ruin the clutch anyway. They tend to slug out, and you just wasted your time and energy on a long shot project. I don't think I've seen anything relating to the long term health of the animal, but I wouldn't be surprised if it affected that as well