on Sunday morning I went and bought a live weaned rat. Later on in the afternoon I thawed out my food for my snakes. Not wanting to give up on converting my pinstripe I thawed a frozen weaned for her.
If you couldn't imagine yet what happened... The pinstripe slammed the frozen rat like she was gonna get a big league contract for doing so. This made me super happy because I'm big on wanting to feed f/t. Both times she went three times between feedings before eating the f/t rat which tells me she will eat them it's just either she has to get hungry enough or maybe she's just not an in season feeder. I guess only time will tell, but my believ is to watch her weight, but not feed her live unless it becomes a serious problem and hopefully she'll learn to be happy with her instant dinners. I'd like to here thoughts on this.
Now back to the other issue at hand. I have a live rat that I paid $5 for and I have options. I could freeze it, try to return it, or keep it. Now I in no way want to become a large scale rodent breeder, but from what I've read on a small scale could be a fairly simple task. I have a 55 gallon aquarium sitting around my house that isn't getting used. And with just one female rat I could easily supplement my feeding greatly and with two or three could completely drop the cost of feeding.
Luckily I've read that for breeding purposes an aquarium is the best housing for rats and since at this point I would not be raising the rats past 5 to 6 weeks. Being over run would be theoretically impossible since rat pregnancy lasts 21 days and pregnancy isn't possible before 4 weeks of age. And even when they get older separation seems to be easy enough to severely limit an accident. Also in my favor I have liquid co2 on hand because I have a draft beer system at my house and I've seen instructional videos on how to create a gas chamber out of rubbermaid tubs. I would like to hear opinions on if this is a good idea not.
