First time for baby rats!

[Gloryhound]

Well we had our first litter of rats. We are trying to get a rat colony going and at first before reading all about breeding rats we started with 3 lab type females and a fancy male. We left them together for almost 3 weeks and had just took the male out a couple of days ago and moved him in with 3 fancy females we had as we have been having trouble finding breeder type rats. Tomorrow we are supposed to pick up 12 weaned females rats for breeding and 8 others for food with the hopes of getting a male in the food bunch at a local expo. By my time table of figuring things by the end of the 8 weeks the mother who just gave birth gets to wean her pups and then vacation we should be able to start a rotation with the lab rats then fancy and the breeder type rats will be 4 months old at least so we should be able to get them going. 2 weeks for the males then they move on to the next tub. We have 6 tubs, so that should give us the full 12 week cycle.

Just have one question. Can you cycle 2 males together into the female cages?

We want to get one of our weanlings into breeding so we actually have some idea as to age where as we have no way of knowing how old our existing male is since he is a pet store fancy, but he is pretty big! Once we get this colony going we are hoping to use some hold backs from the better producing and more maternal females to start our second colony that we hope to cycle one week off of this one.

I can now say I am a proud rat Grampa!

[frankykeno]

Well congrats on your first rat litter. I hope you'll find producing your own feeders as satisfying as I have.

I put only one male in with a group of females (usually 2 to 4 females). Male rats that normally get along quite well, can fight and severely injure each other when there's breeding females around.

[Gloryhound]

OK scratch the idea of two males together with breeding females! Thank you for making sure I didn't make a rookie mistake like that.

Well mom moved long enough to get a rough count this morning and it looks like 9 or 10 pups! Not the 12 or so everyone talks about, but not bad for a lab rat. We are building putting 3 females per tub. If we get 20 rats every other week that would be just enough to handle our live feeder snakes. Two of our snakes eat Frozen Thawd, so we plan on buying those and then using any hold overs to start the second colony.

[frankykeno]

Nothing at all wrong with first time rattie moms doing 9 or 10 babies. I've had some that only delivered 6 or 7 the first time up, but then consistently produced much bigger litters thereafter. I always like to give a female rat at least two or three runs through the breeder tubs before I decide if she's really not producing up to expectations. I had one produce 2 pinks for me yesterday...2! She's had a litter before so I'm not sure what's up but I fostered them off to a nursing mother and put that female back in the female tubs to rest. If she produces low again for me...she's a cull.