Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello everyone, I was wondering if anyone makes their own mice diet. I can get whole corn, cracked corn, milo, wheat, barley from the local grain mill. It varies in price from $6-8 per 100lbs. So you could make alot of food pretty cheap. Lab block would work better in a rack type system so something would have to be done there if you used grains. Anyone have any ideas on how much food would it takes to raise a mouse to adult size? If you got .55-70 for mice, would it be worth it to sell a few? I haven't checked on the prices for lab block yet. Also dog food isn't the greatest for mice is it? I thought I read that mice are more grain eaters unlike rats. And doesn't dog food have alot of meat meal in it? Thanks for your comments.

Mark

I use a mix of wild bird seed with dog food (one without perservatives or dyes) and nutri-bloc.

Do you use bowls for the feeder dishes? Do you have some sort of rack system?

I use a grain mixture for my mice and rats. It consists of corn chops, oats, wheat, wild bird seed, rabbit pellets, and some dog food (for proteins). If you use too much dog food, the smell will be pretty strong. Sometimes I will throw in a little Omalene type-3. It's sweet (molasses) and helps to put a little extra on in the winter. I always get great compliments on how healthy my mice and rats look when compared to others. I don't use bowls either, just spread it around in the tubs and let them forage for it themselves. It's more work than buying lab blocks but it's not terribly expensive and well worth it for me.

Scott

I only have two colonies of mice right now so don't really need a rack system. The groups I have is 1:3 and 1:4 which produce pretty well. If I can just get the females to give birth in the same week, I won't keep losing pinkes being pushed away from their mothers by larger babies. You'll think having 3 or 4 lactating mothers, there would be enough milk to go around...oh well. I now just take out the 3 week old babies before the next batch of pinkies arrive, this seems to work better.

In my larger colony I have 32 babies and 23 in the smaller one (took out a litter of 13 that was weaned from the smaller colony).

I put the food in small ceramic dishes, maybe two inches in diameter. I chance it twice a day and it hardly ever gets soiled by the adults. The near to weaned babies can still fit right into the dish so this hasn't worked as well as I liked. I have another ideal to try but haven't gotten around to buying the equipment I need to build it.

If I had access to a grain mill with those prices (and I probably do, just haven't looked around) I would buy wheat and barley, and whole or cracked corn. They don't eat much of the milo I've given them, so I wouldn't bother to buy that. That would be a lot less expensive than the $8.00 or so I am now paying for 50# of Corn/Oats/Barley. For twice the normal price, I could get four times the volume. As far as how much food, it's cost, etc, to raise a mouse up to full sized, I have never computed that. One trip to the petstore with excess mice and rats usually nets me between $30 and $100, and I would say that I make that kind of trip every six weeks or so. Since this works out equitably, with the mice paying the cost of the food and bedding I use, I consider that it's FREE to raise a mouse or a rat to adult size. Mice are omnivores, and I use a dogfood to get the protein and fat content of their food up to a decent level for lactating and pregnant mom mice. The grains alone are far too low in protein and fat to sustain a colony of feeder mice. The dog food I buy has no dyes, don't know about preservatives etc, but it's cheap, so it has less extra ingredients. Being cheap it has more grain meal than meat meal. The mice love it and flourish. Since they are outdoors in their own air conditioned building, I don't really care too much about the smell. It's not obvious outside the building (so no neighbor would complain) and even inside it's not that bad. I tend to put the dog food and the grain on the substrate itself. Any grains they don't eat goes with the bedding to the compost heap. Any extra whole kernels of dog food go into the "weanling bin" of mice. My typical colony of 1.4 mice, with 20 babies receives 3/4 cup of dog food (Grreat Choice Adult Dog Food from Petsmart) and 3/4 cup of mixed grains and black oil sunflower seeds. That lasts 3 to 4 days until I clean cages and start all over again.
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~Sasheena

My rats are fed slightly differently, since they are all in wire cages. I took old metal wheels the mice used to run on when I had them housed differently, and I tied them sideways on the top of the rat cages with wire. Then I filled them with dog food. When the food supply runs low, I add more. Once or twice a week I give them half a scoop (half a cup) of my grain mixture. They go through a LOT of dog food. But they seem to like it. Whenever I have chicken I put the chicken bones in with the rats, who love to gnaw on the bones
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~Sasheena

Yeah I used to feed my rats Ole Roy from walmart. I used to go through a 50lb bag within a week or so. I was feeding alot of rats though. They did seem to eat alot of dog food though. I also feed them pig feed for awhile but that didn't work once I had my rat system and food hoppers. I compared the ingredients and it had mostly the same as lab blocks but besides some of the vitimans were a little different. I just thought grain would be cheap compared to buying lab blocks for the mice. Thanks for the comments.