Breeding Rodents as Pet Feeders

When you own reptiles that feed off rodents, it might be a good idea to breed the rodents yourself. If you have less then five reptiles, then you’ll probably be better off buying them frozen from the internet, but otherwise you’ll save a great deal on making your own breeding farm.

The first that needs to be established is a game plan. Are the breeders going to supply all the food necessary, or will you still buy the occassional frozen/thawed? Do you have the room necessary for the feeders, and time for their care? What type of rodents do you need?

Breeding rodents is usually pretty straight forward. However, there is a great deal of time involved in changing their bedding, inspecting their health and providing food and water. This of course depends on how big a supply you will need, but make sure you really want to commit to this before getting started.

The most common feeder is usually mice. Mice are good breeders, they are very temperature tolerant, and if you follow a couple of guidelines most things should go smoothly. The downside to mice is that they grow very slow. For mice to reach maturity it takes six weeks, and this is about the time you would feed it as an adult mouse. They are weaned from their mothers at three weeks of age, which means that you have to provide food for three weeks (assuming you feed them at six weeks).

Rats on the other hand get bigger much faster. For our adult corn snakes we use rats that are a maximum of 3 weeks, right before they are weaned. This means that there’s a lot of money saved in both food and time, and one rat adds up to about two mice. Rats are easy to breed, they breed even faster then the
mice and have easy care. There are some down sides here too though. Rats have a high percent of fat, so the reptile might get overweight unless you watch carefully, and for baby reptiles even a new born rat (called rat pinkie) might be too big. The solution could be to breed both. In addition to this, rats are more sensitive to temperature changes, and since they are so attentive and love contact with humans, we always keep our rats indoors. The breeding parents quickly turn into pets.

Once you decided on whether it’s rats/mice or both, you need to try to calculate how many breeders you will need. Here there is one important thing to remember, nothing will go exactly how it’s planned. You should sit down and do the calculations for how many rodents you need every month. (All though they can get babies every three weeks, using once a month would be more accurate).

Assume that rats have around 13 babies, and mice 10. Once again, the numbers will probably be alittle higher, but too many is better then too few.

So if you have ten reptiles, each consuming 2 mice, or 1 rat every 10 day, you would need 60 mice or 30 rats born every month. To be on the safe side here you should either make two colonies with 4 female mice and one male in each, or make one colony with two female and one male rats. Alternately, you could combine them and have both mice and rats.

Assuming the starter breeders come from the pet store they might still be young. Do not expect there to be babies three weeks later, or you will most likely be disappointed. Give them at least a couple of months, and there should be pinkies popping out. Also, take into account that the first litter
might get cannibalized with the mice. This is however just one of those things that happens sometimes.

Get the basic stuff such as a tank/cage/rubber maid for them to live in, some bedding (just no cedar or pine!), a wheel, food bowl and water bottle. Most of this you can get at a thrift store for a total of around 15 dollars, excluding the bedding. Remember that the rodents don’t care if it’s a fancy cage from petco, or a used sterilite container from good will.

The rodents don’t need any introduction, put them together, and as long as they are young it will be fine. Once a colony has been established however, you should not introduce new members. Feed them blocks or rodent food from the store, add some cheese, eggs, veggies, meat, just anything left over from
dinner, and they will be happy. There are a couple of things that’s dangerous for them to eat, such as citrus fruits, chocolate, candy etc, but otherwise they will eat almost anything.

When the babies reaches three weeks old take them away from the mother, as she probably will have a new litter again pretty soon. Make sure that all the rodents are healthy and thriving, kill the feeders humanely (co2 chamber is best), and enjoy becoming a rodent breeder!