Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I dont wanna go off on a rant, but I stopped by a few local petstores today to buy some mice for my snakes. Ideally, the best size food for them is gonna be a large mouse. The prices for these guys here are $1.89 each. This is a tolerable price for me since Im only buying about 4 at a time, when they are full grown size. But lately, all the mice have been tiny, and tonite really pi$$ed me off because they were BARELY hopper size, and I was still expected to pay full price. I know why full grown mice dont get supplied from stores becuase of the demand, and crowding at the breeding facility. I refuse to raise my own mice sinze first off, the population numbers dont work out with my 5 snakes, and second the ammonia. I've tried gerbils before, but the numbers were all off anyway, so I was still buying to supplement.
Rat pups are non-existant in my area. I could ask for a special order of frozen ones, but that only takes care of 2 of my snakes. All my venomous need live, and I'm VERY frustrated about having to buy 3 times the amount of mice that I should have to buy, if they were fairly priced for size. Does anyone have any feedback on my dilemma?

If they can all eat large mice, then they can all eat rat pups. Raise rats. They smell less, are easier, rarely bite (never, in my case), and are the size you want in less than a month.

DeMak

How about buying a few of the small mice now and grow them out. You'll be surprised at how quickly they grow. The day you feed your snakes you could buy another batch which can grow to the appropriate size by the next feeding.

First of all, check with your local herp club. Usually they know of somebody who breeds mice or where they can get them.

I breed a bunch of mice, mainly because I have a large collection of herps and it makes sense for me to do. I also have a large outdoor shed which works very well because of the smell, but I clean my tubs every week regardless and that helps. The mice at pet stores usually are quite small. I was having the same problem when I was buying rats. Now I raise my own, mainly for the quantity needed though. I had an opportunity to supply both a feed store and a local pet shop, but I did not. Instead, I offer to the pet owner, herp breeder, and fellow herpers themselves. I charge half of what a pet or feed store would and they are bigger. I really didn't do this as a profit center just so long as it pays for the food, I'm happy. Any hobby that can help pay for itself is a good hobby, I say. I put a lot of work into what I do, but I still enjoy it.

The few times I bought feeder mice at petstores, I have been very unsatisfied. Frozen pinkies were all lumped together making it difficult to pry apart the few I needed to thaw without losing arms, legs and tails in the process. The 2-4 adult mice I bought stunk to high heaven so I wound up spending 20 minutes given them a nice bath to get the reek off them. (I was going to use them as breeders, which is why I bothered with the cleaning). They were so unsocialized they turned out to be horrid mothers, so they were turned into food, even though my snake at the time was not old enough for adult mice. WOund up selling them to somebody else who had larger snakes.

Breeding mice, despite the strong smell from male mice, has proven to be fun. Been breeding black foxes lately, black bodies with white/cream underbellies in one group and in the second, I am starting to come out with nearly completely white mice with black eyes. Going to keep a couple of the nearly white ones and see if I can breed out the rest of the dark colours, leaving just white with black eyes. It makes breeding interesting, even though the majority will be fed to my snake or sold to other snake keepers.

Rats are also interesting to breed but lately, I have found them more frustrating. My first female is a great mom but she never has litters more than 5, tends to bleed alot during labour, to the point I am really worried she will bleed to death or die so stopped breeding her altogether. I don't have any need to feed off adult rats yet so will keep her alive. Her three daughters I kept from her first litter, produce 8-9 babies per litter but are not the best mothers. One just leaves the pinkies scattered about the cage, to die unless I round them up and put them somewhere warm in the cage and hope she does decide to nurse them, or one of the other females is lactating. Lost 8 pups from her last batch because she was the only lactating female, and she didn't care for her pups. I may just get rid of the entire rat colony and get more later on.

just curious why do your venomous "need live.?"