Breeding Rats - small scale help

[pretends2bnormal]

Those tubs look fine to me. The edges you would be concerned about are ones that bend the other way, such as if the plastic had a wave to the shape and they could get teeth on each side to chew it. If you look at the cross section edge with the inside of the tub where the rats are as the side you measure the angle, you want to avoid anything with a greater than 180 degree angle. Less than that, they can't get teeth above and below and bite into. The tub you showed has 180 degree, flat walls, and roughly 90 degree edges, for example.

The true benefit to less sharp corners isn't to stop chewing and is instead easier to get soiled bedding to come loose while cleaning and not get stuck into corners.

For the top, there are different types of weld, but I'm not sure which are strong enough. In the US, chicken wire is too large of holes and the weld itself can be popped apart too easily by the rats, then bent and escaped from. For baby rats, maximum hole size is 1/2" or 12-13mm.

Also, not sure I'd pick melamine. It's pretty heavy for its size and my racks out of 2x2 or 2x3 boards all work perfectly without the coating you'd want for a snake rack to protect against humidity.




To bogertophis and OP, rats are a bit different from some other rodent species and don't require anything to chew on for physical wellness. Physically, short of deformities and medical issues like malocclusion, their teeth line up and rats can grind them down via bruxing and grinding against themselves (or as they chew on the lab blocks they often eat as a breeding diet as their teeth are intended to grind down as they eat over time).

With malocclusion, rats cannot grind their teeth or chew to grind them down due to misalignment and this typically requires intervention akin to trimming dog nails on a every couple weeks basis. For a feeder breeder, this is generally culled as it is beyond the worth of your time and you do not want to propogate the genes that caused it by breeding more of its offspring in case it was a genetic case. (Cull could mean euthanize or rehome as a pet with a known medical need, up to you. Just not being bred for feeders anymore is key there.)

Chews are good for their mental health and enrichment, and are good to have, but not the end of the world if they don't have one at all times. Many rats will also chew and shred bedding for nests if given large chip aspen or kiln dried pine.

Aside from occasional toilet role cores of thin cardboard which rarely get chewed apart when given and need to be tossed at cleaning each week due to snell, my rats mostly do not have dedicated chews. When I gave chunks of 2x4 early on, they largely ignored them, maybe 2 or 3 marks on the very corners (over 2+ months) and they peed on them and made them stink like crazy.

Learned originally from quite a few long-time rat breeders for feeders and pets alike when I was getting started, but here's a source to look at regarding the teeth grinding info:
http://ratfanclub.org/teeth.html

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