Timing it would be hard and especially given that you do not like the smell of rats makes this a bit more difficult because even a 1.2 will start to smell, at least in my experience.
Personally what I would do is get a 1.1 of asfs due to smaller size, comprable nutritional profile, and they tend to stay in a somewhat manageable size for hatchlings for a long time. For example, my litter of 12 is around 4 weeks old and are smaller than the size of a rat pup but opened their eyes yesterday. Smell is still there but not as bad as mice or rats imo. It takes them about a month and a half after being weaned to hit, what i believe, the size of a weaned rat.
It's completely understandable why you wouldn't want to use asfs though. The main problem people have when breeding their own rats is having the right size of rat when you need it which is why there is always a huge amount of rats in operations to cover all their bases of size.
Another thing you can do with the rat route is feeding off/freezing the offspring once they open their eyes. That way you have weaned sized rats to feed off when you don't have hatchlings to feed, control population, and cut down on costs because it takes much more financially to raise rats past weanling/small size.
Reply With Quote