Quote Originally Posted by Deborah View Post
Deending on the age I would give her another try there could be some issues which may be on her part or maybe not.

Make sure she has access to food that meets her need and fresh water, if you have a watering system make sure the valve is working properly.

If both those needs are met, you can be dealing with either a bad or inexperienced mother, a mother that culled her babies because of milk production issues, the babies could have died and she was just cleaning up.

If you house the animal communally when birthing females may have fight over the babies killing them which is why I generally recommend to have individual birthing tubs until the babies are 5 to 7 days old.
Thank you, Deborah. I will give her one more chance. I've been leaving pregnant mothers in with the other 3 females + 1 male until the babies are born then putting the mothers and babies in a tub by themselves...

Quote Originally Posted by Bogertophis View Post
I've bred LOTS of rats, & rat-mom's eating their babies is very unusual. What are you feeding her? Reproduction takes a LOT out of mom-rats & for best results,
you should feed a professional quality rodent chow. It also never hurts to supplement their diet with other things too (piece of hard-boiled egg, kale, even bones
from poultry or meat...& no, they won't choke on chicken bones. Also nuts...let them lick out your "empty" peanut butter jar before your recycle it, & bits of other
fruit & veggies...scraps that aren't bad spots or spoiled but less-than-perfect that you might not want. Example- I like kale in salads or cooked, but the stems are
perfect for rodents to chew on, not so much my thing...)

Is this her first time breeding? (I'm betting it is...they naturally eat the afterbirth as they clean up the babies, and some don't know when to quit...if they're hungry
& needing more protein & quality food, she may be unable to nurse them anyway.) Sometimes rodents give birth to babies that aren't alive or are weak from other
issues...that may be the case here, she may "know something you don't". She may or may not do this again, and presumably rats learn from each other too: I've
mostly bred rats in trios (1.2) and most females will help each other take care of babies, though some have to be separated because they fight over them. If there
are too many rats per cage (more than 3) or if it's crowded (cage too small), that also causes failures like this. They cannot take care of babies in a chaotic cage.

Just remember: garbage in, garbage out. Rats need a balanced diet much like we do...feed them well for best results.
Thank you for your reply, Bogertophis. I have been feeding my rats Doggy Bag dog food and they seem to be doing good on it. Another one of my females gave birth to 10 babies right around the same time this happened and the mother and babies are still doing great. I have been doing a 4 female to 1 male ratio, so there are only 5 rats per tub. These are both young rats and it was their first time giving birth...