Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I picked up a bag of Nutriphase Mouse/Rat Formula . I was wondering do they need more like Vitamins or minerals? I was also wondering what types of toys are best for pet rats?

For toys you don't need any expensive pet store toys, Cardboard boxes are great toys, and they will both play and sleep in them.

Paper towel or TP tubes are good as well.

3" PVC corners and Ts from the hardware store are great tunnels for rats to hide or sleep in. I hang them from the ceilings to give them multiple new levels to crawl through. They're $2-$3 at Home Depot or Menards in the plumbing section.

At the dollar stores like Dollar Tree you can get plastic baskets to hang in the cage, plastic bowls of various sizes can be made into igloos with doors cut out. Fleece baby blankets can be cut into 4 good sized fleece hammocks and hung with safety pins or shower curtain rings.

Also at Dollar Tree for $1 can get a bag of 12 whiffle-ball type golf balls that rats love to play with.

Bells and marbles are also great toys. My staple rat food is Mazuri rodent chow. It has everything they need.

I feed my rats Reggie Rat Food combined with nutro ultra dog food. They get veggies, fruit, pasta, and chicken a few times a week too. I use energel as a treat for my old or pregnant or baby rats. I used to feed various labblocks, but after noticing a decrease in health and longevity, I am back at what I feed now. Others will probably disagree with me, but labblocks weren't produced to keep rats healthy for long term. They were made for feeder rats (which get fed off before their natural lifespan) and laboratory rats (which usually get dissected before they die naturally). On my reggie rat food/nutro ultra (although I used to use science diet) diet, I've had rats healthy in their 4th year of life. The longest my rats ever lived on labblocks was 2 1/2.

I will say that nutriphase hardly ever gets completely eaten. I think it is more designed for mice than rats, as some of the pieces are just too small for rats to even bother with.

Mazuri is made by Purina and Purina is the #1 used brand of food for research animals. Lab animal food is actually the best "formulated staple diet" for animals. The food that goes into a research animal does effect the outcome of a study and the human population. Lab Diet rodent is better then Mazuri rodent but they are both by Purina. Lab Diet is harder to find and more expensive. Lab Diet comes in all different types of rodent feed. Formulated for different ages, species, and research purposes, breeding, pregnant animals, ect. Rats do eat meat but they are more likely to eat insects, eggs, birds rather then livestock. Thats why I stay away from dog food. Dog food can make their coats greasy and is for dogs. I do agree that not all rodent chow are of high quality or are formulated for longevity but I trust Mazuri.

What Freedomedove said

The reason why lab blocks were invented was to give rats a completely nutritional food because when they eat a mix they tend to not eat all of it. When they don't eat all of it they don't get a balanced diet.
I use the PMI Lab Diet myself because I can easily get it.
PMI is Purina Mills Inc. They do own both PMI & Mazuri.. both are good foods.
Harlen Teklad brand is another lab diet made for lab animals & is a good one too but for most people not as easy to get as a Purina product.

Aside from the lab blocks mine get a plate of cooked mixed veggies every day & a few treats. They love Cheerios for treats, I use Gerber's Finger Foods puffs for treats too because they are human food. So many rodent treat foods are really just junk food full of sugars, fats, dyes & stuff they don't need.
I like the Gerber's because they're actually cheaper than rodent treats, better for them, and have zero fat in them.
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PHRatz

LoL about the Gerber puffs! I thought I was the only one that used those as rat treats. Very economical for me since the baby eats them, too.

I gave up on lab blocks with my last rat. She just refused them and was on a diet of mostly people food for a majority of her life. She had a seed mix in the cage at all times and twice a day, would get a plate of whatever we were eating. We're pretty healthy eaters here, so I'm sure she was getting most of what she needed. She also had a few pieces of my dogs' food here and there (human quality ingredients) and a fatty acid supplement. If we were eating junk (like pizza or something) I'd make her something else. I tried to always have some cooked brown rice in the freezer so I could make up something really quick if I needed to.
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~Rachel~

Oh naaa you're not alone. I love Gerbers products LOL.

Hey if you fed a rat your way I don't see anything wrong with that. You knew what you were doing after all.
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PHRatz

and if not, I can pretend, right?
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~Rachel~

>>and if not, I can pretend, right?

Of course!
LOL
If you cook them the right balance of food items then just like people they should be fine.
It's just that most people don't go to that much trouble but if you're willing to do it, there's nothing wrong with it.

I had a dog I had to cook for years ago because he was so old there wasn't much of anything made for dogs that he could eat anymore.
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PHRatz

The meat ingredients in mazuri are fish meal, porcine meat meal, and porcine animal fat. The second ingredient of mazuri is ground corn. None of the ingredients are expensive at all, in fact, most are things that dog food companies use as fillers. Then they add a bunch of additives to make it an acceptable feed. I don't think that pig fat, pig meat, and fish meal are meats that rats would naturally encounter in the wild. Mazuri certaintly doesn't use insects and stuff, which is something I think you used as a supporting statement for the use of labblocks. They use one of the cheapest to buy meats instead. Also, one of the least healthy meat options (the pork).

Nutro Ultra contains NO chemical additives, unlike Mazuri which is FILLED with them.
Nutro still has the ingredients that Mazuri has that I agree with: dried beet pulp, suncured alfalfa meal, and oats. But it also has great ingredients that Mazuri does not, like flaxseed, tomato pomace, cranberry powder, dried kelp, egg, and sunflower oil. Also, their meat ingredients are much healthier: chicken, lamb, and salmon. Mazuri says "fish meal", but that could be any kind of fish, or any part of fish. Most likey it would be the cheapest.

I will definately be sticking with Nutro Ultra along with Reggie Rat food and veggies, because it just seems like a much much much better diet.

I think my mice would rather die than eat that stuff. Nutriphase is made for theoretical rats and mice. Technically it has everything they need in it, but it's all in artificial supplements. There's nothing nutritionally valuable in the actual food, which is why they put so many supplements.
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Kadee Sedtal

home of old lady Lucy (boxer/lab/garbage disposal), pretty girl Fancy (beagle), Crusher (yorkie), the rats-Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Pachebel, Fillmore, and Franz, the mice- Vivaldi, Schubert, Bartok, Johann, Giordi LaForge, Dorothy, Glenda, Em, and Rosa, and the wonderful winter white dwarf hamster- Feather
"I wish I had a dollar for every time I spent a dollar, because then, yahoo! I'd have all my money back." -Jack Handey

Petsmart will give you a refund, so take that Nutriphase back!!! It's way too much corn and sunflower seeds and artificial supplements. Try Reggie Rat or Mazuri, or a combination of different things. You can even add in your own things like rolled oats or barley or rice or breakfast cereal or pasta. I make my own rat food and all my boys are doing extremely well on it. The only reason Petsmart recommends Nutriphase is because that's their store brand. It's not a high quality food. Kaytee Forti-Diet is just as bad. Go for the Reggie Rat or Mazuri and some homemade stuff, or just make your own.
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Kadee Sedtal

home of old lady Lucy (boxer/lab/garbage disposal), pretty girl Fancy (beagle), Crusher (yorkie), the rats-Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Pachebel, Fillmore, and Franz, the mice- Vivaldi, Schubert, Bartok, Johann, Giordi LaForge, Dorothy, Glenda, Em, and Rosa, and the wonderful winter white dwarf hamster- Feather
"I wish I had a dollar for every time I spent a dollar, because then, yahoo! I'd have all my money back." -Jack Handey