Reptile & Amphibian Forums

There is a disease that I call "skinny disease" where the mice get skinny and hunch backed and stop producing. Well, this disease is making a return to my colonies. I am not saying that newspaper was the cause, but I figured that it would behoove me to try as hard as possible to make the cage conditions as clean and conducive to good health as possible.

I will sterilize all my cages with bleach and start over with new colonies and this time, I will use rabbit pellets or other type of good bedding (petco recommends care-fresh) to see if I can ward off the epidemic of skinny disease.

I am some what discouraged that I am running into so many problems with my rodents. But gosh darn it. There has to be a way that i can get good productions out of my rodents without having to start over every few weeks.

Heck, the professional breeders do it and they do it in mass. Do you guys know if places like rodent pro ever run into problems with their breeding stocks? How do they do it so well?

Anybody know? I am not saying that I want to be rodent-pro. I jsut want their secret for always producing such large numbers of quality rodents for such low prices. I want to learn from them so I can just have some successful litters!

signed: frustrated.
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Longtang. I like snakes and rats.

Don't get too discouraged. It happens to all of us. What I would do, since this is the second time for this trouble, is cull any sickys and any in contact with them and get new. You could try to keep ones that aren't sick but have been in contact with sickys but my experience has been that their production will not come back to what it was. You will waste time either way unfortunately.
Definitely bleach everything and all around the area and anything that might be in contact with stuff.
Good luck.
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Sonya

Where are you purchasing your stock? Has it been the same place everytime? I'm not sure that this "skinny disease" is as much contagious as it is genetic, I had some that I bought from a pet store that didn't even make it through the first litter, and some that I bought from a breeder that are still going strong 8 months later. I have mice all over the place and I am feeding 14 snakes. I don't have any mice left that came from the pet store though, they all sort of wasted away like you are talking about. See if you can find a breeder in your area that has good healthy stock and buy from them. If you lived close to me I would *give* you some of mine