# Where do pet shops get their feeder rats?



## Mattsrats (Feb 24, 2014)

I was just curious because I have lost to 4 or 5 rats in less than a year and all of them came from the same petstore.

I also found out the dumbos ive been getting and paying more for come from the same suppliers and are shipped in the same crates as the feeders.

Sophie (dumbo) & zoe are the only rats I have from the petshop that made it to 1 year old so far.

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## LeStan82 (Dec 31, 2013)

They basically come from rat mills. Breeders that breed in mass quantities. They do not breed for good health or temperament. They breed for money. There are some videos on you tube about rat breeder/rat mills. That will pretty much show you where your rats come from. Mine are feeders and petstore rats too. All pet stores will tell you they get them from breeders but they are not reputable breeders they are rat mill breeders. Its quite sad.


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## Lesti (Jun 25, 2013)

Yep. Rat mills. They just mass produce, and the pretty babies are labeled as pets and the 'plain' ones are feeders. 


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## thenightgoddess (Apr 2, 2014)

Yes rat mills I would try to find a rescue or good breeder in your area to get anymore rats from. At the very least try to find a store that only sells there rats as pets and gets them from a different supplier then the current one your are getting them from. The place is obviously bad if they didn't last a year I have had five rats from the same petstore and all but one other then my adult that I still have that is over one have made it past two.


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## Mattsrats (Feb 24, 2014)

That basically confirms what I was already thinking about the rat mills.... my mom works with the humane society out in Tucson Arizona and they have issues with puppy mills out there.

%90 of the reputable pet shops in central Iowa do NOT sell males because they don't want people breeding rats irresponsibly. 

Petshop:

Feeders: $4.80
Dumbos: $10.00

I have lost 4 males that I bought from there and all dumbo's so makes you wonder what the extra $5 is for when they all come from the same source. What is even more ironic is my 3 standard eared feeders (Zoe, Skidz, & Ricochet) are all very healthy and almost a year old.

It's either coincidence that the feeders are outliving the dumbo's or there is an issue with the source.

Quinn my 5 month old boy lost his brother Riley today from a lung issue so he is all alone now and I cannot cage him with Rico and Skidz because they are VERY aggressive and would probably kill him..... he is kinda runty. Both dumbos, both from the aformentioned petshop.

Both Quinn and Riley were VERY tame from the moment I brought them home....grooming me all over, boggling, hand wrestling, sleeping in my lap, cuddling around my neck while in my recliner ... you name it. When I put my hand in the cage Quinn was usually the first to come greet me and climb into my hand to be held. I got home from work around midnight tonight and Quinn was already showing signs of depression. He was in his house and refused to come out and acted like he didn't even know me. When I tried to coax him out with a treat he acted scared and ran from me. When I finally just scooped him up, he proceeded to fear poop and pee all over me..... something neither he nor his brother did even on their first day home. 

I don't want to get another rat from that pet shop for obvious reasons but the nearest rescue or pet shop that sells males is over an hr away in Des Moines. I don't have another day off for over a week because I picked up some extra shifts at work and I don't want Quinn to suffer that long if he is already acting like this after a mere 9hrs without Riley.

The pet store is getting a shipment of 4 week old standard eared babies in on monday. Depending on how Quinn is doing by monday, I will decide whether to hold out for a rescue or get a local feeder friend. Personally I don't care about my feelings.... I just don't want him to suffer in loneliness because he doesn't understand.

I spoil my rats so whether they live 2-4 years or 2-4 months, they are living quite well being my rats and I feel good knowing they were favored pets and not snake food ;D!


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## Keaiom (May 19, 2014)

Rats are much cheaper where you live than here. I live on a island in the uk and we only have one pet shop that sells rats. She had a ton from the uk and breeds them on island now, all of them we buy from her are £18 and must be sold in pairs. Unfortunately all are timid and skittish.


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## LeStan82 (Dec 31, 2013)

Unfortunately thats the risk we take when buying feeders or petstore rats.but there are not many breeders where I live and adoption processes are difficult. There is only one rescue thats remotley close to me. So I buy feeders and petstore rats. Atleast they get a good home and arent snake food like you said. But I have had both healthy and sickly ones. You never know what your going to get.They probably sell the dumbos a little higher b/c they are more appealing.


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## Rat Daddy (Sep 25, 2011)

Rat breeding for profit is one of those insane business models that should be taught in business school. Unlike dog mills, you don't have many $900.00 rat varieties. It quickly becomes a numbers game involving thousands of rats and cramped quarters and very low profit margins to pay staff and upgrade facilities with. 

My local pet shop bought rats from two large breeders, culls from fancy rat breeders and even accidental litters. They moved over 100 rats per week. They were paying as little as $2.00 for a rat pup, if not less and not too much more for larger rats. 

The best commercial breeders breed for labs, colleges and the food industry and do pet rats as a sideline. To be honest the pet rat trade is the weakest profit center for breeders as the demand just isn't there to provide the necessary volume for the business to be self supporting. One commercial snake importer I know of buys frozen rats by the truckload. When you have hundreds of snakes you feed thousand of rats. That's a business model that has profit potential. But in all reality a store may only sell a half dozen fancy rats a month as pets and that is no way to support your breeding business.

The potential for a smart volume breeder to work with good stock is there. The potential that he can provide a decent environment for his inventory is low. So if you do buy commercial rats, only buy pups.

Lastly, pet shops usually develop a relationship with a single or a couple of breeders. So one pet shop might be selling very healthy rats while another sells inferior animals. And because rats don't ship well, or cheaply the issues become regional. A single breeder is likely to supply rats to all of the pet shops in a certain county or city. Six hours away the rats are more likely to come from a different breeder with different standards. 

Certain chain pet shops have regional distribution which can affect the distribution of rats from a particular breeder and give you an option.

To be honest a commercial breeder that produces stock that doesn't make a year is highly uncommon. Most breeders try to work with healthy stock. But breeders keep pretty tight quarantine and rarely import new stock, so if they are working with a particularly bad line they are likely to keep doing it. So somewhere there is the worst breeder with the worst stock and someone is buying their rats. 

The real problem is that pet shops usually won't disclose their sources. If rats came with brands like cereal boxes do you could at least know what you are buying. To make matters worse pet shops often lie about where they get their animals from. So basically if you got a sickly or short lived rat from a certain pet shop, you are best off never buying another one there. You should also report the problems you have had with your rats to the pet shop owner so perhaps he can source his rats elsewhere. 

As to getting your rats from a local rescue, if there is only one commercial breeder in your area, chances are good that those are the same rats showing up at the rescue. 

If you can't find a reputable pet rat breeder in your area.... Some reptile breeders also breed rats, some are very good at it and are working with superior stock. If all else fails try to contact people in the reptile hobby, they may have sources for really good rats you won't otherwise find. 

Best luck


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## Zabora (Jun 8, 2014)

A local shop here breeds their own. I put in an application to the store and the person I was handing it into was in the back. She said " just a sec I got to pull out this pregnant female first." I asked if males and females were kept together? She told me "oh yes we go through them so fast that we only seperat the females out when they get pregnant. We have 3 moms right now." They were all in plastic bins set up like a snake breeding rack. Almost no air holes let alone ventalation. I chose not to work there. I do know you can only get male rats from my petco. Probably they don't want you breeding your own snake food. Gotta buy from them...


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## Mattsrats (Feb 24, 2014)

I guess it comes down to one irrefutable fact when come to rats in Iowa....being a rat owner is VERY hard. Very few shops sell males and the ones that do are questionable at best. No vet in a 100 mile radius will operate on rats due to them being to fragile so poor Gwen has to live with a mammary tumor. I found one vet up by the minnesota border that quoted me well over $900-$1000+ for tumor removal, spay, & hospital stay. My cat was $75 so if some a-hole thinks he can charge me $1k for a rat then he is either stupid, delusional, or both!

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## LeStan82 (Dec 31, 2013)

I would have to say(even me being a vet assistant) that is absolutely ridiculous! Your talking about a $10 rat atmost.that vet is crazy.


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## Rat Daddy (Sep 25, 2011)

Same here, vets that treat rats charge extra because they are exotic animals.... One vet explained it in that the vet has to stock special medical equipment to operate on small animals and that it can actually take longer to do a surgery on a rat than on a dog. Still a thousand dollar surgery on a $10.00 rat is a logical conundrum. For every old sickly rat you are spending a fortune on, a dozen healthy young babies are being fed to snakes.... Also, most vets realize people aren't going to pay $1000.00 for a rat surgery so why bother to set up to do it. If someone really insists a grand covers the additional medical supplies they will need and the extra time to do the surgery. 

The high dog retail prices have really increased the amount vets can charge. I've seen dogs for over $1000.00, so vets can charge a few hundred for a minor surgery. They basically set their prices based on the time they take. $10.00 rats and other inexpensive small animals just don't fit their current business model.

I actually found and called the foremost small animal and exotic specialist in the area and had a nice chat with the office manager on the phone. She basically told me unless I was stupid rich bringing in Fuzzy Rat was a bad idea... Her synopsis went something like this.... $250.00 for the initial consult, $1000.00 for the surgery plus perhaps another $1000.00 in aftercare and meds. They absolutely promised the best possible chance for a recovery anywhere in several states around and the surgery would be done by one of the worlds best vets in a state of the art facility with an after care clinic second to none... Then Fuzzy Rat would most likely start growing new tumors and as she was already two years old die in a few weeks to a few month's anyway.... When I explained I wasn't stupid rich, she pretty much told me then I'd just have to be plain stupid to set up a consultation. Grudgingly, but appreciatively, I took her advise.

Pregnant rats and rat babies are a real problem for chain pet shops that sell pet rats. It takes up space they don't have, ties up inventory and makes for bad public relations. Petsmart has about 4 stores near me, two sell females only and two sell males only. Basically they know their employees can't be trusted to take proper care of the animals and this way they don't wind up with a dozen pregnant rats and a host of pups. I'll bet money they learned from bitter experience.

I only have girl rats now, I actually like the idea that they might not be pregnant when I adopt them. The pet shop I bought most of my rats from kept the sexes together and the oldest rat I ever bought there was about 3 weeks old and the youngest around two weeks old. My friend recently adopted a couple of girl rats from another place and wound up with an accidental litter a few weeks after she brought her new girls home. Those of us with girls, adopt our rats young, or appreciate the benefits that a single sex store offers. As the father of girls both rats and human there are things I worry about that the parents of boys don't have to...


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## Biku (Mar 12, 2014)

My local pet shop takes donated rats from people who have accidental litters. If they don't get them from donations, they come from a breeder who is close friends with the shop owner. I've never had problems with the rats from that particular pet shop, but others in the area are less reputable. I had a neighbor come to me the other day with some rats she got from a pet shop just down the street. I never liked that one to begin with because the rats I saw when I went in were already showing signs of URIs and some even had tumors forming.

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## Zabora (Jun 8, 2014)

That's just hortible Biku! And yeah I like the idea of inly having males or females. Delilahs pregnant butt is a lesson to me.


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## Biku (Mar 12, 2014)

I refuse to shop at that particular store and take all my business to the good one. The good one is 45 minutes away, but worth it to get the better stuff. I get all my food, toys, rats, and supplies there. I love that store and it's owner. They make sure all the rats are socialized before even putting them up for sale, then play with them daily to make sure they don't get nippy.

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## Hey-Fay (Jul 8, 2013)

My two youngest were feeders. Once upon a time the store I brought them home from used to get their rats from all over. Now they just breed their own in the store. It's sick and I'm thoroughly horrified with them. males and females all in the same tanks, several pregnant and nursing mamas in tanks with large males. Babies taken away from mum too early, the list goes on. They took the unique looking ones and threw them in a tank marked "pet" but it was mixed genders too. Sadly this is how many feeder stores are.


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## LeStan82 (Dec 31, 2013)

I wish there was still mom and pop stores around. They took pride in their business, and quality was usually better.chain stores ran them out of buisness, could care less about the quality of products and are all about money. Mom and pop shops are pretty much non existent here.


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## Hey-Fay (Jul 8, 2013)

The store I got my youngest two is a mom and pop store of sorts. It specializes in exotic fish, reptiles and arachnids. They have a whole wall of feeder rats though. They had one employee a while back that actually cared about the rats and he kept them all in order. When he worked there he had everyone separated by gender, mummies had their own tanks and everyone had food and fresh water. I got my oldest girl there, she was the only 'pet' rat there and she had come from an actual breeder and not been bred there. When I got her everyone was healthy too. But he doesn't work there anymore and the rats are in horrible conditions now. Makes me mad and sick at the same time.


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## Rat Daddy (Sep 25, 2011)

If people were willing to spend around $200.00 on really high quality rats that would create a business model that would actually work. That would allow a breeder to acquire the right kind of breeding stock, and set up the right kind of enriched raising environment rats need. It would justify the proper air conditioned and heated facilities and provide for a caring professional staff. But that isn't going to happen. 

I used to be a commercial banker, just for the fun of it I worked up several pet rat breeding models. Just about all of them lose money hand over fist. The few that break even or better involve either breeding the rats in China or raising thousands of rats in awful conditions or both given current rat prices.


Fast math at $4.00 wholesale rat price avg a family needing to make $80,000.00 per year would need to breed 20,000 Rats per year. That would require a reasonable size commercial building or a small farm, which would cost at least $300,000.00 which would put another 40,000.00 per year load on the enterprise and would increase the number of rats required to 30,000 rats per year. This would require a staff of at least 3 additional people which would put another $80,000.00 per year load on the business and another 20,000 rats. Which in turn requires more staff, larger facilities, more food etc... 

At $100.00 wholesale per rat and $200.00 retail... the numbers can be made to work and scale, but it's still not as profitable as nearly anything else a person can do with their lives and the rats are only getting reasonable care. At around $200.00 per rat direct to the consumer, the math turns around and a profitable and sustainable operation can produce almost any number of healthy and well adjusted rats at just about any size.

As to pet shops that sell rats as pets, most actually lose money on the rats they sell. The model only works if they sell cages, bedding and food they can make a profit on. I think my local pet shop was figuring on a dollar per rat profit for their feeder rats. They sold about 100 rats per week... They had the floor space and the staff on hand anyway. I'm not saying that they weren't happy to make the $5200.00 per year on rats and sell a few cages, and dry goods which may have doubled their rat income, but for the largest independent pet shop in the state, they made than money on dogs in a single week, perhaps on a good day.

If we spent 15 minutes browsing the rat pups with an employee and we bought a $2.49 feeder pup, the store actually spent about 4 times their profit margin on the employees salary and benefits than they made on the rat they sold us.

With business models like these is there any wonder pet shops sell inferior rats? Or frankly don't care about our business?


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## Biku (Mar 12, 2014)

That's why I actually bred a litter of rats myself once. Before I get attacked about ethics, let me explain. I had purchased both the mom and dad from a well known breeder in my area( he has lines he breeds specifically for pets, and lines he breeds for snake food). I made sure both mom and dad were healthy and well cared for. They both had great temperments and I even had the breeder help me with everything, kind of like it was an apprenticeship. The mom had 7 babies, by the time they were born I had homes set up for 4 of them. So far all the babies are doing great in their new homes (I like to keep in touch). And the people who adopted them have told me they have the best temperment and health of pretty much any rat they have ever owned. I'm considering breeding my current male (he's one of the babies from that litter) and my dumbo female because I have 3 people who want rats, but are worried about quality.

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## Zabora (Jun 8, 2014)

What happens when the rat births 15 pups? Do you have space for that many till you can find homes? Just be prepaired or send your friends to the breeder you got yours from...


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## Biku (Mar 12, 2014)

That's why I only bred the one litter. I don't have the resources or space to breed another one at the moment. When I bred that litter I had mom and babies on a homemade diet and bought a bunch of new supplies( heating pad, thermometer, etc). It was more for the experience and to learn something new, and because the breeder thought I'd be good at it considering my past experience with rats.

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## inod3 (Jun 13, 2014)

The best way to get the best rats is to buy them from someone who does not expect to make a profit or even break even. If it's a hobby to the breeder and they have some other source of funding to sustain the hobby you can get great rats. 

It is important to note that not all hobby breeders are the same. One of the most basic things you can ask for is the pedigree of the rats. In fact, I would say the pedigree should be made available without asking - probably posted on their website. Ideally you want to adopt from a breeder that is trying to accomplish something with their breeding, such as improved health. If they're not keeping records that would suggest they don't care about what they're breeding. Do the rats they are breeding have a terrible genetic condition that causes painful early death in some of the offspring? How would they know, they don't know the history of the rats they are breeding, they don't keep those records. Perhaps they just think babies look cute and enjoy doing it. That's their right and I'm sure they'll have some great babies - I'll still choose the breeder with records and pedigrees as the odds of healthier rats is higher. Also, what contingency plans does the hobby breeder have? Many have established relationships with good vets and know when to get a rat to an emergency vet and are able to pay for the vet care - for example, having a cesarean birth done. What if the new mom can't provide for the new babies, what's the contingency plan? Arrangements with other local breeders with nursing moms perhaps? Or no contingency plans at all? If the birth goes wrong let the mom and babies all die because it's only a rat after all?

Ultimately that means the best breeders are going to be losing lots of money in the hobby. The motive isn't profit or even breaking even and they're putting their own funds into the operation. So what is the motive? If they just liked working with cute babies they could do so much cheaper - not bother with records, not bother with expensive vet care. Perhaps not even care what happens to the babies after they are adopted, not really. I would suggest charity is a large part of the motive. Doing something nice for others in a hobby they enjoy. Who are the "others" I'm referring to? I would bet money the motive in losing money, putting ones own money into a hobby, is not to help a pet shop make money. That is to say, I don't think you'll find their rats in a pet shop.


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## cagedbirdsinging (May 28, 2012)

The discussion of intentional breeding is not allowed on this forum, as per the guidelines that were agreed to when joining. Please review them. http://www.ratforum.com/showthread....-Rules-READ-BEFORE-POSTING-Updated-12-04-2012

I would rather not have to close Matt's thread due to another user bringing home breeding into the topic.


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## Biku (Mar 12, 2014)

I'll change the subject then. You can try local shelters, too. It's rare, but I've seen rats come into the animal shelter down the street. Two males came in last year that were obviously not feeders, their temperment, health and size gave it away. They were turned in because they had some problems with food aggression.

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## Mattsrats (Feb 24, 2014)

Everyone ... Google Furry Pals Rescue in Des Moines Iowa and check out their website and let me know what you think.

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## Biku (Mar 12, 2014)

I think it looks pretty good, but I'm looking at it from my smart phone right now, not getting the full site experience. Haha

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