Personally I dont' see a problem with an adult rat or young adult rat costing $3. The prices up where I am are actually about that or more for a normal rat. Heck, the local petstores charge $2.99 CDN for a single pinky mouse and $5.99 for a small adult rat. Even bulk is not always great (either poor quality rodents, looking half starved, filthy, mashed together so its almost impossible to separate without loosing limbs and tails and alot of cursing and chizelling)



I can deffinitely understand how frustrating it is for you to go to all this trouble to make available a rodent from areas where ball pythons occur natually and is a common food source for them. I did a bit of research online over the last couple days to see just what these African rats are all about. Now I can see why you are keeping the females. It's not so others can start breeding and selling them and cut into your customer base, but because these rats don't have very large litters, averaging about 3-4 babies. When compared to the average of 8-10 for domestic rats, you need two female African rats to put out the equivalant yield of one domestic rat. Also the gestation is longer, up to 30 days with average about 27 days. domestic rats gestation is 19-22 days. African rats also are not very social, pretty much limited to mating pairs.



So knowing the care requirements, it makes perfect sense to keep all the females and sell excess males. You don't need as many males to breed alot of females, just a matter of moving male from cage to cage.
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PHLdyPayne

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