I've been breeding mice for about a month or so now, I started with two colonies of one male to several females. For the very first litters there was cannibalism of the babies so I started moving the females to separate cages when they are so big they are about to pop, usually just a few days before birth. This has been working wonderfully, I have some very large litters of up to 13 babies with zero cannibalism. Now I'm down to two pairs of just a male and female in two separate cages, I'm guessing these last two females were probably too young to breed and are coming up to be next in line. Then I will have two cages with just the males. I was thinking of moving all of my baby mice to a 40 gallon breeder once they are weaned to grow them out a bit before I feed them off, perhaps feed off the young males first and keep the females until they are a bit bigger since the males tend to fight more.
So I have at least one female that has a litter of four that are almost weaned. Should I put her back in with the male and for how long? How do you manage your males and females without cannibalism of the babies and without too much fighting? I was thinking that if I kept the male alone or with just one female at a time for just a few days at a time I could cut down on fighting and cannibalism. Thoughts? Right now it seems like I have quite a bit of fighting with one of my male / female pairs, I was thinking of feeding off one male and just keeping the one male as a breeder.