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I have been rasing feeder mice almost as long as I have had snakes now but I have some questions for the experts. My first problem is not having a constant supply of live feeder mice, but I am starting to slowly increase my number of breeding females and alternate their litters...hopefully. A big question I have is about feeding. I have read don't feed to much...keep food available all the time... It seems like it takes a long time for my mice to grow. I have only been feeding them once a day and mainly a gerbil food mixture. I have recently started also feeding some dog food. Is there a specific brand of "cheap" dogfood that is a good stable food for mice, I of course will keeping feeding them other things as I want healthy animals. Also how often should they have food, all the time or keep doing what I'm doing like once or twice a day?

thanks in advance!

I feed a seed and kibble mix and therefore tend to feed daily. My rule is to try to have enough food available that they aren't leaving/wasting any, but also so it is there most or all the time. If you use a feeder/hopper and kibble or lab blocks then you can have food all the time without the wasted food. With my tubs of about 10 adult mice I try to feed about 15-20grams of cat kibble every other day and 100-125grams of seed every day (seed mix is a by feel thing for me and is 1pt sunflower seed, 2pts whole oats and 2-3 parts whole corn....along with all the leftover seed from the birds (parrot mix and millet) with dry cereal/oatmeal/stale chips added. Not very scientific, but I seem to have luck with it.
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Sonya

Haven't we warned you about tampering with the structure of a chaotic system?
Mrs. Neutron

Thanks for the fast reply Sonya. I have been incorporating a little bit of dog food in with the seed foods lately and they seem to like it. I've also been looking at alot of plastic tub setups for breeding mice. I have been using 10gal glass tanks which are a real pain to clean just because of the wait...and I have cracked more than one in my time. I bought some 12qt containers yesterday and made a breeding tub from ideas I've gotten from different pictures I've seen online. It seems to working out pretty well, I just have 1.1 in the 12qt although I have read that some do more females. I may do 2-3 tubs see how they work out and then build two more larger tubs for raising seperated males and females. For the raising tubs i'd like to build a hopper to keep food available, I'm sure its fairly simple but are there any plans online or anywhere I can reference? I'm using 1/2" hardware cloth for part of the breeding tub enclosure which seems to be the choice material. But for a hopper this size mesh would not hold the smaller stuff like the seeds and what not...unless I were to just use it for the dog food and larger foods. I still haven't really found a dog food that I'm sure about feeding my mice either.