# Have you ever had an "oops" litter?



## ratsrdog35 (Dec 28, 2014)

I adopted 2 female rats 3 years ago and one had 7 babies! Then 2 and a half years later when the ones that I kept passed away, I adopted 2 more females and this time got another surprise of 13 babies!
Is this the normal when adopting rats or was I just "lucky"?


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## Isamurat (Jul 27, 2012)

If you get rats from petshops or poor breeders who don't know or maybe care what there doing then it's not abnormal. Saying that i had rats from petshops overt here for years with no issues but it is considered wrong to sell a pregnant animal over here. i have managed to stop a pet shop over here selling a few peg l pregnant girls after catching them housing a large adult buck with 5 young girls. i was to late for 2 of the girls though and it took me emailing head office to get them taken off sale add they ignored me in store. Thankfully the only litters I've had have been planned


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## ponderosa (Oct 13, 2014)

It's never happened in my home--I've had some close calls. However, I've seen it happen with a mouse and hamster, heard stories about it happening to people I know (usually with animals purchased at pet stores), and heard that it is common. It happened to one of my friends when he got mice at a pet store (I believe it was Petco or another one of the chain pet stores). One of them came home pregnant. Also, one of my childhood hamsters came from an oops litter but that was just from people being uneducated about animals... my daycare center was keeping a hamster in an aquarium with her son from a previous litter, and he got her pregnant. Another child was scheduled to bring the baby I had my eye on home but not for weeks after she started puberty, and my mother made a visit with a book about hamsters and had to explain to the people working there that if she was kept in the aquarium a minute longer, she'd get pregnant. The kid was very mad at me for taking that hamster home, but if he'd taken her home, he would have had more severely inbred hamsters than he intended. 

I'd read that it happens enough with rats that it was the reason I wanted only male rats!! So when we got our rats, we were told that they only had boys in the feeder bin. We even had the store employee double-check the rats' sex before bringing them home. It was just my luck that one of them was still mis-sexed repeatedly and turned out to be a girl... she has a rather confusing genital setup, and it even threw the vet off when we took her in to get the gender figured out! We were very fortunate that we separated them just in time to avoid her getting pregnant (or maybe she's infertile since she'd lived with the boys for weeks, either way... phew. I was so sure that was an oops litter waiting to happen.) 

One of my girls came from a chain pet store and they actually seemed to know what they were doing to avoid pregnancy. How careful and caring they are probably depends on the location and employees. They said, "We do not promote breeding here," and said they were careful to keep the genders separate. No babies from that one. However, I gather that many animals come home pre-impregnated from pet stores who don't know how to properly sex rodents, or just don't care and throw them in together according to the stories I see on forums. I wouldn't be surprised, after what I witnessed as a child, if much of it also comes from people simply being uneducated and not understanding just how easy it is for them to get pregnant from a young age, and then giving away pregnant animals without knowing it.


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## Grawrisher (Sep 10, 2013)

When my rat penny passed my mom got me another rat from a less than stellar pet store and I wound up with 15 babies!!!
So i think it happens a bit with less than stellar pet stores and I think it happens sometimes with rescues too


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## untidyvenus (Jan 14, 2015)

I used to work in corporate pet shops and the way the poor pets come from the vendors, they arnt great about keeping track of the less fancy pets.. ie "feeder rats" and non dumbo/rex/hairless it was super common for us to get preggers rats all the time. most stores will pull mom and keep her in their infermery until the babies are weaned then they can sell them... so your lucky and its not uncommon


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