Just wanted to see if anyone else has had this happen. Had a female start to give birth to her litter this morning, she got as far as 6 pups, and stopped, was easy to tell she still had quite a few young in her, was still just as big as when she started with the first one, and still having contractions, but nothing else was coming out. About 10 hours later, she still hadnt given birth to any more pups, and was visibly getting extremely weak, lacking even enough strength to go over to where the young that she already had were, to let them nurse. Just checked on her a little while ago, and she was flat on her back, stone dead. I found this extremely odd for a rat, never heard of them having that much trouble during birth, and was wondering if anyone else has heard of, or had anything similar to this happen to them, or any ideas on what could have gone wrong.
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Female rat killed giving birth
Replies (3)
Rats can have trouble giving birth either because they are too young, or too old. Sometimes a baby just gets stuck in the birth canal and the mother can't get it out. The only thing you could have done to save her was pack her in a box and take her to a vet for a C-section. Or, if you had another nursing female rat, you could have carefully cut out the unborn babies before they sufferecated within their mother. Too late now but something to keep in mind for the next time.
I have a female rat that has small litters though she gets very huge but she has a real hard time giving birth, often bleeding quite a bit, so much so that I was worried she would die. I don't breed her anymore because I grown too attached to her to just feed her off and get another female.
yup, rats die giving birth all the time.
The baby will get stuck in the birth canal and block all the other babies from coming out, and it will kill the mother rat.
It has happened to one of my rats.
If it takes more than 2 hours for the rat to give birth, either take the rat to a vet, or kill it, because she is not going to live.
If you take her to the vet, she will probably end up being sterile, which is pointless for a breeder rat.
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1.1 Ball Python, 0.1 motley amel corn, 1.0 western hognose
just like human females long ago, death during child birth happens. I see it in older females mostly.
