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  1. #4
    BPnet Senior Member cchardwick's Avatar
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    Personally I don't worry about inbreeding at all. Your population is big enough that it shouldn't matter.

    For your retics I would use your older breeder males and females and replace them with the younger rats to keep your production up. Don't forget to keep replacing your breeder rats otherwise in a couple years your production will go to zero and you'll have to wait for young rats to grow up. It happened to me when I first started LOL.

    I've found that the more tubs you have the more you can get organized. I have 50 tubs and it always seems like I could use more. It's best to separate females when they give birth, but I've had tubs of six females that all gave birth at once. I couldn't believe how many rats were in the tub! There was some fighting at first but my production went through the roof and I had a tough time finding tubs for all those babies.

    It takes some time to figure out your production and get a system down, I've been doing this for years and still struggle with it. I find it's best to find some local snake people who will take your extra rats. Then slightly over produce for your personal use and sell the extra. You'll make a little money to help cover expenses and won't have to worry about not having enough for your own use. I sell to a pet store and to two local snake breeders and it helps out a lot. I don't have enough for all their needs and they still have to make orders online but it uses up all my extra rats. And I can take orders and euthanize at the size people need as I go.

    I started out with 20 tubs of rats, just couldn't get a good system down until I bought another rack with 30 tubs (an ARS growout rack). Now it's much easier, but I'm almost to the point where I think I could use another rack of 30 tubs! The hard part for me is when all my female ball pythons go off of food, then I'm selling a lot of extra rats. Or when my eggs hatch and I have over 100 hatchlings and I need extra rats to feed them all. In that case having tubs of extra female rats on hold waiting to breed would be ideal, then a month before my eggs hatch I could pair up extra females.

    Another option is to ramp up production and freeze what you need at the size you need, then decrease production for a bit until you use up your frozen thawed. I've never done it that way because I like to feed pre killed or live.

    For a good supply / demand system I would concentrate on pairing up a certain number of rats per week depending on what you need. I have about 50 snakes so to feed them all I pair up six females per week, that's an average of 10 babies per rat with an extra female rat to give me a slight excess. I occasionally have small litters or have females that pass away unexpectedly and the extra female covers that as well. Sometimes I have all six females produce large litters and I have a bunch of extra rats. If you can focus on the pairings per week then the rest is just juggling the population between tubs.

    Also, watch your rats closely. If there's minor fighting it should be OK, you should only hear an occasional 'squeal' now and then and it should pass within the first day or two. If they fight like crazy, especially if there's damage or blood involved, you may have to remove or even euthanize the offender. And remember what you are pairing and what started the fight. If you drop a male in a tub with a female and babies they can fight to the death. If you remove babies from a female and put her with other females that can be severe fighting, it's best to take the babies, give the female a couple days alone, then move her to a female tub. I've been moving females with babies with eyes open to group tubs, that way I can remove all the babies and have 2-3 females alone in the tub ready to take a break for a week or two and then ready for a male to be dropped in. Breeding rats is so complicated I could almost write a book on the subject LOL. And I keep learning all the time.
    Last edited by cchardwick; 03-20-2018 at 11:08 AM.


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