I like to buy my males and females on the young side and raise them to up a bit myself, especially the females. I like my females to be old enough to breed but not too old. Apparently an unbred female rat over 9 months of age will have a fused pelvis if she's never had a litter and then there's nothing but trouble there. Loss of litter or loss of female breeder or just the most gawd awful hard deliveries (I suspect this to be the case with my recent rescued rat with the bad delivery...not sure...but am wondering).

Look for the things we talked about in a healthy rat and in a short order if you have more than one male and keep your colonies seperated....you can just raise females from one colony to be your future females for the other colony and won't have to deal with this blech pet store experience except rarely if you want or need to bring in new blood.

Too dang bad I'm way up in northern Michigan. I've a ton of lovely young females sitting around, munching rat food, hanging out with other nice females and pretty much living the high life (for an eventual feeder that is...I feed off male weans first).

~~Jo~~