Buy rats or breed rats?

[Daigga]

The only thing about rat breeding is that you will very quickly find yourself spending more time with your rats than snakes, just because rats require much more hands on keeping. I kept a rodent rack for a while, and appreciated not having to buy feeders all the time, but raising them myself came with different frustrations. A few examples;

The chewing. The tubs I used were cement mixing tubs from lowes, which for some reason have this stupid little keyhole in the front lip. My first male and several of his offspring ended up gnawing huge holes out of these slots, which led to me chasing down escapees, buying new tubs (6 dollars every time!) and having to find someone to take in my male rat, who was way too big to feed off to any of my snakes.

Health problems. Slightly more rare, but one of my first females and the second male I bought developed some weird equilibrium problem. This male, again, was too big to feed off and had to be rehomed (his wibble-wobbly thing was much less severe than the female, who couldn't stand without falling over and screeched when she was touched), and I ended up culling and tossing the female since I wasn't sure if it was anything I should worry about feeding my snakes.

Smell... They weren't nearly as bad as the mice I tried for all of a month, but the tubs still had to be cleaned every 3 to 5 days to keep the room smelling aspen-y fresh.

Unforgiving of husbandry problems. Lesson learned the hard way; never assume anything is working fine unless you check it. I had a malfunction with my watering system that went unnoticed for maybe 3 days tops, and in that time I had 3 of my 5 tubs chewed through, and one of my females decided to eat all her babies. I checked every valve every morning and afternoon every day after that, but that was still terrible.

You have to cull them yourself. Between snakes not eating and general production, you tend to either have not enough or too many, and when you have too many you get to kill and freeze the extra. I ended up going with a dry ice chamber, since cervical dislocation is way too hands on for my taste.

If you don't mind the time and energy required and you have enough snakes to warrant rat breeding (I had 6 snakes when I started and I maxed out at 12, with 10 female rats to feed those 12 snakes) then go for it.