Uploaded on March 13, 2008 by flydime

Hi, I breed natal rats and have a question about them. When the pups are 3 weeks old they start licking the parents mouth, why do they do this? Is it to learn what is safe to eat?
 
My original 2 breeding pairs I got when they were 5 days old, I hand feed them with an eyedropper every 3 hours for over 2 weeks. I not sure if I just lucked out on having friendly ones or if me raising them made them so nice. I have not had any bad behavior from any of my natals, I sell them as pets and everyone who gets them are so happy with them. Mine are just little sweeties.

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 For babies!!! Here are a few pics of our clutches from last year.

by wwarby via Flickr.com

Alright, I probably won't use that name for this new segment, but I thought it might be useful to post up a Q&A segment using real questions we've received.

Today's subject:

Unexplained ASF rat litter loss

I have a 1.5 group of ASFs that have started to breed. There are 2 females that are large enough, and have been breeding. As of yesterday, one female had a litter of 8 3-day-old babies. The other had a litter of 9 3-WEEK-old babies. I started to notice the female with the older babies has spent less time with her babies and hardly make any effort to "protect" them when I am around. This left the other mom to take care of the bad mom's babies.

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And we get to cut some eggs!!!!!

Cross all crossables for at least ONE pastel! *crossing fingers*

I love hatching season. If it we're up to me, I would keep every single animal we produce here, but I know that is not possible. (I can try though! hahaha, don't tell Chris that.)

We've been candling the little suckers a few times, and 2 have been very obvious. Our ugly egg we can't see in very well, but it's still hanging in there, so we'll see what it's holding.

As an update again, our very sick female rat has completely recovered and successfully birthed 12 pinks, 3 still born, and lost one since then.  

That's about it from me for now, check out Vida Preciosa's blog entry, and drool at the gorgeous little super blacks in their eggs. www.vpi.com/2009/07/12/07_12_09

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And every one is gearing up for expos and shows all around the country. We went down to the Michigan Taylor show this past weekend and we're able to meet a friend and moderator from the forum ball-pythons.net. It was a great turn out, compared to the low amount of vendors this past June. It was great to meet FrankyKeno and her family, I hope she is happy with the rats!!

This year, it doesn't look too hot for us in the hatching arena. With only 3 eggs on the ground, it was a very disappointing turn out.

But, along with the hatching season, we are already thinking about who we will be pairing up for the 2010 season. I personally believe we will be pairing up two exceptional Sumatran short-tailed pythons this year. I am giddy just thinking about it. You won't believe your eyes when you see this pair, we haven't posted any pictures of them yet, but if you're really determined, the clues are around the web.

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...Since my last post here. Work has had me swamped lately and I'm not really willing to jump right back online at the end of the busy day. So, I've been out of touch with the online world lately except to answer emails and a few PM's from forums. It's all good, Chris and I had a nice long weekend, and I even took an extra day for just myself to recoup. It was good!

We recently had a middle aged norway rat here get quite ill. I checked on her Thursday of last week, she was scheduled to have a litter. Instead, she was cool to the touch, wobbly, thin, it makes me feel so terrible to find them like this. It always seems to happen on weeks that I skip checking everyone individually. Her water nozzle worked, she had loads of food, I don't know how she got sick.

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The vast majority of snakes kept as pets in this country and around the world are completely harmless. The vast majority of pythons kept as pets are small species that never exceed 6 foot in length and rarely even that much. There has never been a single recorded or anecdotal incident of a ball python killing someone, despite the millions of them kept as pets. Contrast that with dogs who injure and kill people every year. And even cats sometimes inflict serious injury or kill an infant. Should we ban all dog or cat ownership because of a relative few irresponsible people and some unavoidable accidents?

Also, the vast majority of pet snakes kept across the country could never survive if released into their local environment, much less breed and successfully multiply. What has happened in Florida should be dealt with in Florida. Creating national legislation that treats all snakes and exotic pets as equally dangerous and equally capable of "invading" our environments is preposterous.

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