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Temps for Rats?

mrweaw

mrweaw

Branching out into geckos
Hello,

I used to breed rabbits in the central valley of California where the temp sometimes reached 120 degrees F. My rabbits lived outside in an area that was shaded by both a tarp and our house. When it got really hot...above 90 degrees F, we would put frozen soda bottles in their cages for them to keep cool.

My question is this...are rats as heat tolerant as rabbits? Would this same setup work for them as well? I would like to have more rats...but not more in my bedroom! I am also wondering if anyone has ever used a totally wire cage with rats like the ones used for rabbits but with a smaller gauge wire? They would of course be supplied with a board or two to rest their feet.

Please let me know what you think of this idea. I know it works with rabbits (I used to breed champions) but I am not sure how it would work with rats.

Thanks much!
 
I hate to rain on your idea~ but I don't think it will work. I live in Southern Ca and my rats are NOT heat tollerant at all. If they get much above 85F they stop breeding, and above 95 they start dieing. I have to use a swamp cooler on them in the summer here.

The wire bottom cage. Would be nice if it would work wouldn't it? Unfortunatly rats will get "Bumble foot." I've not tried it myself, but I've read others accounts.
 
General rule of thumb for rats is if its to cold that you cant be comfortable naked..thats too cold. and if its to warm that you cant be comfortable in a light full length sweater, thats too warm
 
Well Boo!

I guess I will have to stay with my smaller numbers in the house. Thanks for your help!
 
Hmm... I have some alternative perspectives on these questions....

First the wire cage thing... One day I was at a petstore sellling some rats (for store credit) and noticed they had this huge wire birdcage for sale ... used, but spick and span and only $30...I bought it, then used some hardware cloth to make it into three levels, with a wheel dangling from one level (I'd been told rats don't like to run in wheels, but I had a rat sized one, so why not?). Every level in the entire cage is wire. Now it's not the healthiest thing for the rats (they enjoy having a surface to rest their little feet on, I found that it worked very well. I fill the pull out tray at the bottom with substrate, and then inside the cage put a layer of newspaper and hay. Eventually they drag the newspaper and the hay up to the second level, and leave the bottom level as just wire. I also feed them in a defunct cat litter pan, and give them a large wooden bird house to hang out in on the bottom level. They do great. And they LOVE the wheel.

HEAT.... okay, when I bought my starter rats (1 male, 3 females), I was frankly apalled at the conditions in which they were kept and obviously bred without any problems.... this is in Arizona, where the temps are frequently 120* for weeks at a time. The rats were in four cages very much like my bird cage I described above, only the woman had created levels with a multitude of old coffee cans with the bottoms cut out. They were kept OUTDOORS, with an old tarp thrown over the top of an old kennel, and the bird cage/rat cages inside the kennel. They had FILTHY water in cans (no water bottles) and she seemed to have nearly 100 rats per bird cage (same size as mine... approximately 30 inches wide, 20 inches deep, 40 inches tall). The stench was apalling ... just of rat feces and urine. I was amazed that the animals lived like that... and moreover that they seemed to survive. But they did. Now... did they breed? Well she had a good number of rats, but they could have been more from the winter/spring breeding than from any breeding over the summer. I didn't notice any baby rats. In actual fact, in spite of the conditions in which they were kept, they turned out to be very healthy animals. My current rat colonies are offspring of that first group of 1.4 rats (two females never bred) and of a single other male rat I bought at another time. They're not interesting, no special coat colors, but they are very healthy!

Personally, I wouldn't keep rats like the example above. BUT my rats are kept in an outbuilding with an AC unit. The AC unit does a mediocre job of keeping the mouse house cool. By the hottest part of summer, all my animals are suffereing and production is way down. BUT, with careful management of resources I feel that overall I get a good result. By mid-summer to fall I have reproduction rates that are good for replenishing the animals, but not for feeding the snakes. During this time I use the frozen animals to feed the snakes, and let the mice and rats replenish their own numbers. This year I've been very lucky, as I developed a more concrete system, and I pull 50 - 100 pinkies a week, and am STILL overrun with the little furry beasts.
 
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