I like to use OdorBan, it's an industrial soft cleaner you can use on pretty much everything from dishes to your floor to your laundry. I still use bleach, and I never worry about it getting it on my hands or anything. I just find other band is convenient and less harmful. Yes you can use bleach with animals but I still worry and probably spend more time removing it then I should.
You might be able to save time cleaning by having a bucket of diluted bleach water, that way the bleach will evaporate faster, then you could wipe it down with a damp cloth and that will remove enough bleach so you don't have to worry
Have you tried rice hulls? We used to use them in our horse stalls because it was cheaper in the long run because the hulls which were "clean" fell through our rake's teeth. I imagine if you use a scoop to clean out the rat rubs you could use rice hulls and it would last longer.
Hey my man ! Love all your vids .. quick question … where do you get your bedding … Ive tried to find it and I have no luck … another bedding I found is one that sells on tracktor supply premium bedding
Off the chain bro nice breeder racks!!! I just do the old school dyi wood racks but one day i want a stainless steel one. Gotta dream big ! Bout to start an asf colony too never tried them before
Do u experiment with selective breeding, I think you said something about specific colors you were removing from your racks. I wonder if you could selectively breed the nicest rats possible without too much effort.
At what age do you notice the male and female rats start slowing down production? Also how soon do you notice defects from inbreeding a colony? Thanks.
Rodents I know. Add cuttle bones to tubs to keep bigger litters coming into older rodents. The litter size is dependent on calcium levels. Moms will reabsorb babies they can't grow properly. You can clean with vinegar water, 25 / 75 mix.
Is inbreeding a problem? Do you buy new rodents, or just keep breeding from current stock? Where would you suggest buying mice to start a small (25 mice) operation? Single seller, or get from a few different sellers?
I don't know if you're still looking for a bigger type screen thing to sift your rodent food ...... But if you are check out classifiers you can get them from gold prospecting stores
What size rats do you recommend I get that will be ready to breed soon as possible? Like a large/adult? Im having hard time finding any live rats for sale. All shops arent gonna have any til late fall.
I'd probably get young rats that are just weaned. They grow up super fast and after about two years they won't breed anymore. At about three years old they die of old age...
Hey Chris... great video!. Hey I have 8 snakes 3 with 1000-1300grams and the others 5 still under 500grams I’m considering doing live feeding from now on. I’d like to breed my own rats so how many couples would you recommend to get? In order to provide the right amount of food
Most people say one female rat per snake. I actually had a rat do some damage to one of my white Lesser Bamboos, I'm starting to rethink the whole live feeding thing again.
Chris Hardwick I was watching your video from A to Z breeding ball python or something like that and I’m in the same process that you were about wanting my snakes to grow quick so I can do the whole breeding process so I thought the best way to do is live feeding
If you put 2 or 3 layers of light diffuser at the bottom of the tote before you empty the bag the fines will fall through. You can also put the dust in a dish and feed it out.
I don't know how expensive that air filter is, but if you think it's costing you a lot of electricity you could consider a air bubble powered waterfall. I've never seen anyone do this but it should take the smell and a lot of the particulate out of the air. And air pumps he's a lot less electricity, at least in a air pump to water pump ratio. You will likely have to have enough water that it will affect the humidity in the air, so you'll definitely need to keep an eye on that.
That's a tough one to make, not everyone would appreciate it. For small rat pups and small mice I usually euthanize for 10 minutes now instead of 3 minutes, seems like they can snap out of it, especially the pinky mice. For juveniles and adults 3 minutes with CO2 does the job. Then I just pop them in the freezer in zip lock bags. Pretty easy.
@@ChrisHardwickanimaladventures that is great to know. I have rats as pets and get really sad to see rats suffer being given to snakes as food while still alive. Thank you for replying.
A UA-camr called Cody's lab you can easily look up his video series on this if you're interested, I forget what it's called but it's a fermenting barrel but he puts rabbit poop in, along with some food waste. And it generates methane as a by-product. the methane produced is more than enough to heat the barrel during the winter if you heavily insulate it. and you can supplement the heat in your house with this. And I wonder if there's a way to easily remove mice and rat poop from the bedding. That way you could feed it to the barrel and generate more than half heat your snake and rat room
I'm just about to get my first set of mice, and I've already consumed about 30 hours of UA-cam videos on the subject. I pretty much learned everything I can already learn just from watching videos, but I still need to learn more about cleaning, which I believe is the last subject I need to cover. So any advice for a newbie to the hobby, and in hindsight is there anything you would do or change to speed up the cleaning of all of your mice and rats?
I wonder what makes the mice smell worse then the rats , you would think it would be the opposite. Pretty cool how they are trained like that tho and always go in same spot. This was Interesting as well.
If you have 4 females in the same container they help nurse the young, so I would have one or two extra females in every group. And at the same time you going to have a bin of retired mamas, just for extra babies, and if you have some fuzzy's mixed with some pinkies, you can separate them and give the pinkies to the retired mamas. That can help avoid some dead pinkies, and help them grow out faster. Course you have to dedicate some extra space to retired mamas, and you can just add an extra female to every bin and reduce the amount of time the male is in there, so only 88 5% of the females are pregnant. Or have a retired mama in with the younger mamas, to reduce the odds of her getting pregnant, but she can still continue your nurse.
Actually the retired females don't produce much milk any more and it's best to feed them off and replace them. For nursing mothers it's best to use mice that have had just one or two litters so they are still in their prime.
I've seen one person automatically refill the water, they used the same equipment you would see in a toilet to Auto refill it. obviously the only problem with this is if one of your water hoses gets stuck in the open position then not only will you drown that cage but you will likely flood your basement very very slowly. So I recommend putting super tiny water drains in every tub, just so it takes more than a few hours to drown the mice. And you can put water sensors on all of the racks so if it does overflow, then you can set it to notify you. Obviously this probably won't happen to you but it has happened before, so if it's worth the $100 to not kill a tub of rats and flood your basement potentially then you should look into it.
@@ChrisHardwickanimaladventures i appreciate that being I love rats....I get snakes need to eat and am I in no way bashing that, I personally just don't want nor need to see it. Maybe if I had snakes I'd feel indifferent. Appreciate the content of the video. Thx !
I either sell them live or frozen. Sometimes I'll tell them what I have and see what they want before I euthanize and freeze them, but mainly I just fill up the freezer and give them a list of what I have.
What size do they normally start breeding? I've had mine for a month and they are large rats amd have had no babies only have one snake but would like to not have to buy rats every week.
They say you can pair up rats once they reach 250 grams. I find that it's a bit early, better to wait until they are a little heavier. If you have older rats they may not breed at all. They only live about a year and a half. I have a few tubs with four really old females and one really old male, I may just get a handful of babies per month. I'm working to replace those but I'm not in a hurry as I have plenty of rodents right now. After you pair them up you should get babies in about 8 weeks or so.
I miss these type of videos
I like to use OdorBan, it's an industrial soft cleaner you can use on pretty much everything from dishes to your floor to your laundry. I still use bleach, and I never worry about it getting it on my hands or anything. I just find other band is convenient and less harmful. Yes you can use bleach with animals but I still worry and probably spend more time removing it then I should.
You might be able to save time cleaning by having a bucket of diluted bleach water, that way the bleach will evaporate faster, then you could wipe it down with a damp cloth and that will remove enough bleach so you don't have to worry
Have you tried rice hulls? We used to use them in our horse stalls because it was cheaper in the long run because the hulls which were "clean" fell through our rake's teeth. I imagine if you use a scoop to clean out the rat rubs you could use rice hulls and it would last longer.
I'll have to check that out!
wow your rodents are in a very clean environment! Bravo!
I try hard to keep them that way, if they get dirty I can smell them in the whole house LOL. Pushes me to constantly clean them all the time.
Add water to powder compress and bake to use it..
Set ups amazing man wow!!! And your videos are so educational thanks for the knowledge
Hey my man ! Love all your vids .. quick question … where do you get your bedding … Ive tried to find it and I have no luck … another bedding I found is one that sells on tracktor supply premium bedding
I cover that in this video, jump to 14:36:
ua-cam.com/video/U8meuPJuHLc/v-deo.html
Off the chain bro nice breeder racks!!! I just do the old school dyi wood racks but one day i want a stainless steel one. Gotta dream big ! Bout to start an asf colony too never tried them before
Right on! I've been thinking about doing a few ASF again...
He is so charismatic, I can't stop watching his vids.
Do u experiment with selective breeding, I think you said something about specific colors you were removing from your racks. I wonder if you could selectively breed the nicest rats possible without too much effort.
I know this is a older video, but that rat food dust is perfect for your dubia roaches
That's what I use now for my roaches and it works great!
What bedding do you use and what are the racks and bins called
Would this bedding be ok for hamsters then? We have it at the tractor supply for 5.99!
At what age do you notice the male and female rats start slowing down production? Also how soon do you notice defects from inbreeding a colony? Thanks.
Rodents I know. Add cuttle bones to tubs to keep bigger litters coming into older rodents. The litter size is dependent on calcium levels. Moms will reabsorb babies they can't grow properly. You can clean with vinegar water, 25 / 75 mix.
Thanks for the tips!
Is inbreeding a problem? Do you buy new rodents, or just keep breeding from current stock?
Where would you suggest buying mice to start a small (25 mice) operation? Single seller, or get from a few different sellers?
I don't know if you're still looking for a bigger type screen thing to sift your rodent food ...... But if you are check out classifiers you can get them from gold prospecting stores
Where do you get your rodent breeder 6f feed from
The last few bags I bought online directly from Mazuri. It's cheaper at a feed store if you can find it.
Where dobi get ur mice and rats that are alive...im needed 12 female mice to my 4. Boys...
Does the rodent feed expire
They eat it before it expires.
Everything organic/once alive expires/goes bad/rots- except sugar and honey and probably something else, but idk what.
i only have 3 ball pythons so i'm at a loss whether or not i should breed my own rats at this point
👍😎👌
i just searched about the way you clean the cages. seems pretty easy and effective but internet says that bleach need around 10 mins to work.
I've heard about that, now I use F10-SC and spray it on, wipe it down but leave a thin film on to dry, seems like that is a bit better.
What size rats do you recommend I get that will be ready to breed soon as possible? Like a large/adult? Im having hard time finding any live rats for sale. All shops arent gonna have any til late fall.
I'd probably get young rats that are just weaned. They grow up super fast and after about two years they won't breed anymore. At about three years old they die of old age...
@@ChrisHardwickanimaladventures Okay thanks so much.
Nice video man
Do you have a video of euthanizing and prepping them for the freezer?
Check it out: ua-cam.com/video/wVtAq5Wjx_E/v-deo.html
I would hope that anyone who is considering breeding snakes has calculated costs including feeding. This was informative ~Angela
Hey Chris... great video!. Hey I have 8 snakes 3 with 1000-1300grams and the others 5 still under 500grams I’m considering doing live feeding from now on. I’d like to breed my own rats so how many couples would you recommend to get? In order to provide the right amount of food
Most people say one female rat per snake. I actually had a rat do some damage to one of my white Lesser Bamboos, I'm starting to rethink the whole live feeding thing again.
Chris Hardwick I was watching your video from A to Z breeding ball python or something like that and I’m in the same process that you were about wanting my snakes to grow quick so I can do the whole breeding process so I thought the best way to do is live feeding
ERICK VALENCIA how would live feeding make the snake grow faster ?? I don’t think that’s right. If anything ASF mice are better because higher protein
Rats are so cute so are snakes! I want to have both as pets some day. Your set up is pretty cool!
If you put 2 or 3 layers of light diffuser at the bottom of the tote before you empty the bag the fines will fall through. You can also put the dust in a dish and feed it out.
I don't know how expensive that air filter is, but if you think it's costing you a lot of electricity you could consider a air bubble powered waterfall.
I've never seen anyone do this but it should take the smell and a lot of the particulate out of the air.
And air pumps he's a lot less electricity, at least in a air pump to water pump ratio.
You will likely have to have enough water that it will affect the humidity in the air, so you'll definitely need to keep an eye on that.
Can you make a video on how to freeze your rat pups.
That's a tough one to make, not everyone would appreciate it. For small rat pups and small mice I usually euthanize for 10 minutes now instead of 3 minutes, seems like they can snap out of it, especially the pinky mice. For juveniles and adults 3 minutes with CO2 does the job. Then I just pop them in the freezer in zip lock bags. Pretty easy.
Do you euthanize your rats before feeding them to the snakes?
Yes, I use CO2.
@@ChrisHardwickanimaladventures that is great to know. I have rats as pets and get really sad to see rats suffer being given to snakes as food while still alive. Thank you for replying.
A UA-camr called Cody's lab you can easily look up his video series on this if you're interested, I forget what it's called but it's a fermenting barrel but he puts rabbit poop in, along with some food waste.
And it generates methane as a by-product.
the methane produced is more than enough to heat the barrel during the winter if you heavily insulate it.
and you can supplement the heat in your house with this.
And I wonder if there's a way to easily remove mice and rat poop from the bedding.
That way you could feed it to the barrel and generate more than half heat your snake and rat room
Where did you get those racks and tubs .
I got them all from ARS Caging.
Ok Kool I like those . Are they really expensive?
Top him off
I'm just about to get my first set of mice, and I've already consumed about 30 hours of UA-cam videos on the subject.
I pretty much learned everything I can already learn just from watching videos, but I still need to learn more about cleaning, which I believe is the last subject I need to cover.
So any advice for a newbie to the hobby, and in hindsight is there anything you would do or change to speed up the cleaning of all of your mice and rats?
I actually stopped cleaning all the tubs with bleach every week, now I only do it every month or two. Speeds up cleaning a lot.
I wonder what makes the mice smell worse then the rats , you would think it would be the opposite. Pretty cool how they are trained like that tho and always go in same spot. This was Interesting as well.
If you have 4 females in the same container they help nurse the young, so I would have one or two extra females in every group.
And at the same time you going to have a bin of retired mamas, just for extra babies, and if you have some fuzzy's mixed with some pinkies, you can separate them and give the pinkies to the retired mamas.
That can help avoid some dead pinkies, and help them grow out faster.
Course you have to dedicate some extra space to retired mamas, and you can just add an extra female to every bin and reduce the amount of time the male is in there, so only 88 5% of the females are pregnant.
Or have a retired mama in with the younger mamas, to reduce the odds of her getting pregnant, but she can still continue your nurse.
Actually the retired females don't produce much milk any more and it's best to feed them off and replace them. For nursing mothers it's best to use mice that have had just one or two litters so they are still in their prime.
I've seen one person automatically refill the water, they used the same equipment you would see in a toilet to Auto refill it.
obviously the only problem with this is if one of your water hoses gets stuck in the open position then not only will you drown that cage but you will likely flood your basement very very slowly.
So I recommend putting super tiny water drains in every tub, just so it takes more than a few hours to drown the mice.
And you can put water sensors on all of the racks so if it does overflow, then you can set it to notify you.
Obviously this probably won't happen to you but it has happened before, so if it's worth the $100 to not kill a tub of rats and flood your basement potentially then you should look into it.
add water to the powder and put it in a pvc pipe woth end caps then sit in it in the sun. Then give to the pregos
Where did you get racks and boxes/tubs?
They are all made by ARS Caging.
@@ChrisHardwickanimaladventures i appreciate that being I love rats....I get snakes need to eat and am I in no way bashing that, I personally just don't want nor need to see it. Maybe if I had snakes I'd feel indifferent. Appreciate the content of the video. Thx !
Where do you get your food at
Where do you get your rat food.
At a local feed store.
How do you sell rats to your pet store.
I either sell them live or frozen. Sometimes I'll tell them what I have and see what they want before I euthanize and freeze them, but mainly I just fill up the freezer and give them a list of what I have.
That's how I do mine is dump and clean once a month depending on how the tubs is but it saves time
The dust makes great feeder insect food!!
What size do they normally start breeding? I've had mine for a month and they are large rats amd have had no babies only have one snake but would like to not have to buy rats every week.
They say you can pair up rats once they reach 250 grams. I find that it's a bit early, better to wait until they are a little heavier. If you have older rats they may not breed at all. They only live about a year and a half. I have a few tubs with four really old females and one really old male, I may just get a handful of babies per month. I'm working to replace those but I'm not in a hurry as I have plenty of rodents right now. After you pair them up you should get babies in about 8 weeks or so.
My rats ate my weed..
Hope you didn't feed it to your snake
@I_forgot_abc_999 gross
Drugs are bad.
Drugs are bath mkay
yeah it's decent money for a hobby but to actually make a living off of it you would need as many tubs of snakes as you have tubs of mice and rats.