# Male Rats



## Matt (Jun 14, 2007)

I thought That Male Rats Could Not live together? But People are talking about selling them in pairs of males or females or male and female.


----------



## lilspaz68 (Feb 24, 2007)

Male _mice_ cannot live together, male rats MUST live with another male or a spayed female. The more the better as rats are very sociable. 

I caught my neutered boys lying on the level with their arms over each other...awwwww. I could never separate these 2!


----------



## Strike2 (Apr 26, 2007)

lilspaz68 said:


> Male _mice_ cannot live together, male rats MUST live with another male or a spayed female. The more the better as rats are very sociable.
> 
> I caught my neutered boys lying on the level with their arms over each other...awwwww. I could never separate these 2!


100% correct.


----------



## Matt (Jun 14, 2007)

I Have Rats For Pets But My Parents Breed Rats For


....Snake Food....Wahhhh....
*Dont kick me off the forum for saying that anyone Please.!*

We put 2 males together and 1 ate the other.


----------



## Forensic (Apr 12, 2007)

You put two male rats together and one ate the other?

Did you do any sort of intro or did you just throw them in together? Rats are territorial. You have to introduce them to each other slowly. But in general they do not due well as singles (though there are rare exceptions). Neutered males also make great friends for females.


----------



## Matt (Jun 14, 2007)

They had a Little Play time together and then e put them together along with the 5 females. Next day I checked and He was Nothing but Bone Laying on the Floor. And The other Male had Blood on his Mouth.


----------



## renay (May 30, 2007)

ummm... i've had two male mice coexist.... i'm confused :s


----------



## Poppyseed (Feb 1, 2007)

That sounds very unlikely Matt. Were they STARVED? Still rats don't eat eachother, even in competition for females. Unless they were starved to death :/ Even my dad who also breeds rats for snake food (*stab stab stab, stupid parents*) Keeps his males together and even when he is breeding, they don't ever EAT eachother cause he keeps them on harlan lab blocks D:


----------



## Matt (Jun 14, 2007)

They werent hungry or thirsty they all have plenty of food and water. we also use lab blocks. I think it was just that they werent introduced properly.

owell. thanks you guys.


----------



## trish (May 30, 2007)

i know in some animals if one dies the others will eat it to get rid of the body. do you think that is what happened?


----------



## Forensic (Apr 12, 2007)

Happens on occasion, but using with babies or very, very young rats, and more is usually left, unless for some reason all the rats were hungry for dead rat (ick).


----------



## renay (May 30, 2007)

I wouldn't totally rule out the assumption that rats do infact eat each other... maybe in domesticated rats it doesn't happen but i know for a fact that wild rats eat everything including each other. The smell of blood attracts all wild rats living in close range of each other, I've seen it happen, a friend of mine has a barn infested with wild rats, two rats got into a fight in the chicken coop one had its ear partially torn off and it was bleeding quite a bit, within 10 minutes the rest of the rats picked up on the idea that it was a quick meal... i left, i couldn't stomach it... sad but true, it happens in the wild :s


----------



## bubsybob (Apr 1, 2007)

actually rats DO eat eachother sometimes ... my uncle works for a university in the lab (you arent gunna likethis) they have their lab rats for experimentation, and on occasion there will be one that is cannibalised. no reason why, they just are.. maybe its something we dont understand because we arent rats!


----------



## Forensic (Apr 12, 2007)

Perhaps the rats sense that they're ill or something. :?


----------



## Kimmiekins (Apr 14, 2007)

I have 5 boys together, another group of 6 boys together and other then occasional fights (and who doesn't occasionally fight with their roommates?), they certainly wouldn't EAT each other alive.

I've never heard of a case where a rat would eat a LIVE rat. I know that rodents in general do "rodent burials" where they will eat the body of DEAD rodents. This is because in the wild, the body would attract predators.

Now, Syrian hamsters WILL kill others and I suppose maybe they could eat another Syrian alive in the process.

But I'm almost sure that if a rat were to eat another rat, that rat was probably already dead.

Except in cases with mothers eating their young, but as has been mentioned, the babies are ill or had something wrong with them, or culling so the litter is smaller and more manageable.


----------



## camel24j (Feb 27, 2007)

when i was (breeding for snake food) not any more thou i had 2 females who would eat any other rats alive i put the rats in the cage left for a sec and when i came back the female had already killed 2 other rats and was eating one so we took her out of the cage wont say any more than that and than a few yrs later i ended up with another female who did the same thing. and out of thousands of rats i breed and raised these were the only two who did this i will say that my males if they had there group of females could never be together but if no females were present the males got along fine. and at this point and time i have no rats sad to say all my pet rats are gone to. but i still like coming here to read what everyone else's rats do and all the cool info.


----------



## mink (Jun 24, 2007)

I heard this story from my fiance. He grew up with having pet rats. One time he had a female rat and his brother had a male rat... they were both very good rats, so the family decided to breed them and to keep some or most of the babies. So my fiance's rat momma shared a cage with her babies and when they were around 5 or so weeks old one morning my fiance says they found that the young ones had ate their mother. My fiance said he was very upset. 

He didn't want anything to do with rats for a long time. His mother and brother continued to keep pet rats and when my fiance and I started dating, he finally got himself another pet rat since I loved mine so much.


----------



## Ikamuni (Feb 11, 2007)

"ate their mother"

Scary...


----------



## renay (May 30, 2007)

i think it happens, its just not typical of all rats. like my two girls would never dream of eating each other, and maybe with my story about the two wild rats fighting the other rats came to "finish it off" as they figured it would die anyway, it was pretty sick though


----------



## d00mg1rl (Jun 27, 2007)

I only have male rats and they live fine together
yeah there is the occational spat but
nothing major


----------

