So in my previous post I mentioned how dumpster diving gets me the food and bedding I need to keep my rats healthy and happy, well today I will be showing off my rat colony, now I don't have many rats yet so this is the beginning of it. I could easily house 200 rats with the setup I have and although I have around 100 at the time, i'm only halfway to my goal. It will take between 4 and 6 months to get where I want to be, and the end goal is to not only feed my snakes, but also provide feeders to others in the area and occasionally to sell them as pets.
So lets get started!
I will start off with my maternity rack because who doesn't love baby rats right? My maternity rack is a basic 4 tier rack system with water bottles. nothing too great. but it raises babies well.
In the first rack I have a litter of 8 born on the 8th of July.
They are accompanied by their mother and another female who is yet to have her litter. both females are albinos, however their the fathers are different colors. one is a grey hooded named Dexter, the other is a black berkshire named Onyx. These two males father every baby and even the XX large males I have.
In the second bin I have 5 pups and 11 fuzzies. The pups were born on June 28th to a grey female, she had a litter of 7 but 2 babies were sold. The 11 fuzzies were born July 4th to a black female and 11 is her original litter number, meaning no babies died.
Finally my last bin, bin 3 houses 27 weaned. There are 3 litters here, all 3 moms are albino. 2 litters were born on the 25th of June, the other was the 28th. They had 2 litters of 8, and the other mom had a litter of 11.
Most of them are albino from their mothers but I also get a few sandy, gray, brown, and black colors. Also, I said it was a 4 tier rack, I have no females in the 4th bin yet.
Next we move on to my storage rack, it is a 16 tier rack with a watering system, I also call it the feeder bins. I do sell pinkys to XXX Large, but since pinkies-weaned need to be with their moms, I cant house them in the big rack. Other than the 2 tubs that house my breeders, whatever goes into these tubs if fair game for someone to buy either as a pet or feeder.
Gorgeous I know, anyway, don't get too too excited, I only have 5 bins in use so far. One is my male bin, they are fed to my snakes first and then whatever is left can be sold or kept for the next feeding. I have 4 XX large in that bin. The other two are Male and Female bins. The weaned babies go in here and are separated because they can and will breed after 6 weeks of age. My male bin houses 7 mediums that were born on June 2nd. The female bin has 13 in it that were all one litter but just grow differently so I have 10 mediums and 3 smalls.
I normally clean the bins out twice a week, depending on the number of rats. So today I cleaned out bin 2 and 3 in the maternity rack and bin F (female) in the feeder rack. The rest will be cleaned out on Saturday. The other cleaning day is Wednesday.
Well that is all for this post, if you enjoyed it and want to see more let me know by either up-voting or tell me in the comments, If you would like to see more, I could do a video where I sit down and show off every single rat and the colors I have.
Have a great day!
