Raising Rats, Mice, and African Soft Fur Rats...

[cchardwick]

I have bred all those at some point now I only breed rats and mice. I hate ASF, first because they never did the trick even with picky feeder so not all what they were cracked up to be, and second they are the spawns of evil, they jump 3 feet in the air, escape, bites.

It's interesting you had problems with your ASFs. I put a running wheel in with my ASFs and they make it their duty in life to run that wheel non-stop all night long, sometimes all seven of them get on the wheel and it's crazy funny. Good thing they are in the basement where we can't hear them LOL. Occasionally I'll stick my hand in there and pet them on the back to tame them down, so far they have never tried to bite, they just freeze like a deer in headlights. Maybe a glass tank helps me out since they can see me and get used to me working down in the snake room. I haven't bred them yet and I hear they can get mean with their young, time will tell. Is there any reason you keep mice with all the rats? Why not feed baby rats instead of mice? The only reason I can see to keep the mice would be if I were to raise other snakes besides ball pythons where I constantly need smaller food items. Seems like even a hatchling ball python can take a pretty good sized baby mouse (just weaned). I bet if you got rid of your mice you would get rid of 99% of your smell... Using glass tanks sealed up with carbon filters showed me real quick which ones were the stinky ones. I opened up my tanks the other day to change the food, previously cleaned them all at the same time and sanitized all the tanks. The rats weren't bad at all, and the mice almost made me throw up YUCK. But to be honest, with the carbon filters it only smells bad when I'm opening the cages up. I could wear a carbon filtered respirator to work on the mice and I wouldn't smell them at all.