The few times I bought feeder mice at petstores, I have been very unsatisfied. Frozen pinkies were all lumped together making it difficult to pry apart the few I needed to thaw without losing arms, legs and tails in the process. The 2-4 adult mice I bought stunk to high heaven so I wound up spending 20 minutes given them a nice bath to get the reek off them. (I was going to use them as breeders, which is why I bothered with the cleaning). They were so unsocialized they turned out to be horrid mothers, so they were turned into food, even though my snake at the time was not old enough for adult mice. WOund up selling them to somebody else who had larger snakes.



Breeding mice, despite the strong smell from male mice, has proven to be fun. Been breeding black foxes lately, black bodies with white/cream underbellies in one group and in the second, I am starting to come out with nearly completely white mice with black eyes. Going to keep a couple of the nearly white ones and see if I can breed out the rest of the dark colours, leaving just white with black eyes. It makes breeding interesting, even though the majority will be fed to my snake or sold to other snake keepers.



Rats are also interesting to breed but lately, I have found them more frustrating. My first female is a great mom but she never has litters more than 5, tends to bleed alot during labour, to the point I am really worried she will bleed to death or die so stopped breeding her altogether. I don't have any need to feed off adult rats yet so will keep her alive. Her three daughters I kept from her first litter, produce 8-9 babies per litter but are not the best mothers. One just leaves the pinkies scattered about the cage, to die unless I round them up and put them somewhere warm in the cage and hope she does decide to nurse them, or one of the other females is lactating. Lost 8 pups from her last batch because she was the only lactating female, and she didn't care for her pups. I may just get rid of the entire rat colony and get more later on.

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