Breeding Mice

[P. Novak]

Alright so I bought a 3-4ft Mexican Black kingsnake recently, and I was wondering would it be worth it to breed my own mice, instead of buying them, even though I only have one snake to feed them to? This girl is suppose to eat F/T mice, so I thought I'd raise them to the appropriate size and then freeze them, and so on. Of course if it is a waist to breed mice for one snake I always have my friend down the street that has a monitor, so I could just give him some. I'd like your opinions on this. Also, tips for breeding mice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

 

[vvx]

My only concern with breeding mice would be that male mice smell pretty strong and not in a pleasant way. Other than that they're easy to breed, I'd rig up some kind of CO2 system for killing them as it's more humane than freezing, I've heard of using dry ice in water in a cooler to build up enough CO2 to kill them.

 

[Flagg]

For one snake, not really worth breeding your own unless you enjoy breeding rodents. You can get a shoebox size lab cage with wire top food hopper and keep 1.2 in it.
Get a good lab block to feed them, like Mazuri or Harlan from a feed store or reptile show. Rodent food sold at pet stores is crap and it is VERY expensive. I pay about $0.40 per lb for Harlan lab blocks from my local reptile show.

Get weanlings or young adults. Mice from a feeder breeder would be best, or a non-chain pet store. Petco mice tend to be sickly. Albinos tend to produce the best wuth larger litters. Set them up and leave them. No adding new ones later or moving them around. They may take a month or 2 to get started but once they start you should get about 1 litter per month from each female. You'll need another cage as a grow out cage once they are weaned ar 3 weeks or so.

To combat the smell, use some kind of pelleted bedding and clean weekly. I use wood stove pellets, which are very cheap and break down into coarse sawdust when they get wet. $3.99 for 40 lbs.

You could also try African soft furred rats which have virtually no odor. I'm not sure how available they are in California. They need more space, 10 gal minimum, and get larger than mice but not as large as rats.

I agree with the CO2 , freezing them alive (I hope you were not going to do that) is a horrible death. I have a bunch of snakes so I breed my own and it is MUCH cheaper and more convenient than buying frozen. I use a 20 oz refillable CO2 tank used for paintball. There is an initial cost but after that it costs almost nothing for refills and a tank lasts for months. Humanely euthanize them with CO2 and then freeze for later use.

 

[David_F]

For one snake, not really worth breeding your own unless you enjoy breeding rodents.

Ditto. Tried it when I had my corn snake. I found that I do not enjoy breeding rodents. It's just too much work and much more expensive than driving to the pet shop to pick up food for the month.

To combat the smell, use some kind of pelleted bedding and clean weekly.

When I was researching mouse breeding I came along a few places that said to add a small amount of vanilla extract to the drinking water. Tried that and it worked pretty well. Along with aspen shavings to absorb the urine the odor was minimal.

 

[REAL]

Breeding mice:

I'm going to type everything I know about it because I came home from work and I'm hyper like crazy AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

My experiences in breeding mice? Not really worth it. Requirements that is needed? A fairly warm place to keep them and lots of food. The pellets they sell for mice are the cheap food source you can use to breed them, do not buy those bags that are meant for pet mice, I only had 6 or something and they raided me out clean and I lost more money keeping them than just buying them.

Unless you can get lots of food and lots of space that you don't mind being stinky, than you can breed them. They're a bit of a hassle and they sometimes eat their young, especially if you don't feed them stuff that contains proteins etc. Mice eat meat as well.


Best way if you want it to be cheaper?

Buy frozen mice or teach them to take food thats already dead. What I do is go to the supermarket and buy some meat like a chicken thigh or something and toss it in there. But then ur talking about snakes, I'm not too sure how this will work out but I did that once to a snake and it worked out pretty well.

So if you wanna breed them, keep them around room temperature. Too cold they wont breed, too hot they will die. They will start getting musty, don't forget the cost of housing as well. I say not worth it at all. Some ppl do it more successfully so go to one of those reptile forums and ask them, they know a lot about this subject.

LATERZ!!!

 

[GailC]

I started breeding mice when I got two snakes. They do smell if not kept clean but I like knowing where my snake food comes from and since I have 7 snakes now it pays for me to raise my own.

Feeding a adult snake with mice you breed can take time as the babies don't grow very fast. If you have room you might consider a pair of rats. They are friendlier, less smelly and the babies will be proper sized for your king in a week or so.

All my bigger snakes are fed rats, while the hatchlings are on mice pinks. I recently did away with my mice and have started a colony of african soft furred rats, after 9 days there cage still has no smell (yah!).

I kill all my feeders by blunt force trauma, there's no way I'm setting up a expensive CO2 chamber when I can do it for free.

 

[kingfarvito]

I kill all my feeders by blunt force trauma, there's no way I'm setting up a expensive CO2 chamber when I can do it for free.

exactly...this is quite simple actually

 

[P. Novak]

Thank you all. It really sounds like it's not worth it, especially for just one snake. I think I'm going to hold off on this until I get a couple more snakes or mouse-eating predators. My sister use to keep some mice and those things smelled horrible, even with weekly cleanings, which makes me not wanna do it at all.

I kill all my feeders by blunt force trauma, there's no way I'm setting up a expensive CO2 chamber when I can do it for free.

Are you take about grabbing the mouse's tail and hitting it on the wall, or putting it in a bag and doing it? I read stuff like this before. My Sophmore year I had a teacher that had 2 large boas(forget which kind) in his class and he'd do the tail thing and hit the mouse on a counter to knock it out.

 

[GailC]

I do it with a bag, clean and quick. Pinkies I just flick on the back of the skull.

 

[P. Novak]

I do it with a bag, clean and quick. Pinkies I just flick on the back of the skull.

Thanks Gail! Now I know exactly what to do if they have no more F/T mice.

 

[Mack&Cass]

I've kept a single pair of mice as a source of pinkies as supplemental food for my T's and havent really experienced that problems you describe. Ive actually found feeding them to be quite cheap. They will eat almost anything and commercial animal feed works well (i was using chicken feed for a while) I also gave them scraps of salmon from my work which they eagerly gobbled up. I never noticed any odour problems unless i got lazy and didnt clean out the tank for two weeks. I used compressed newspaper intented as cat litter for bedding and i find it works very well.
I agree that for one snake, breeding isnt worth the effort. Breeding your own mice does have a benefit because you control the animals, you know they arent diseased and it is easy to add nutritional supplements to them (like gut loading with crickets)

 

[Louise E. Rothstein]

White-footed mice smell considerably better than "regular" mice do.
I recommend them IF local politicos didn't ban them after hantavirus scares.

There is little danger of that from captive born animals.

Paranoid legislation is not their fault.

Or yours.

But you have to watch out.

 

[gotterdamerung]

I must admit - I disagree with most of the people. Frozen food can't be as good as it would be fresh and it's quality is so low that it's not even worth to be thrown to an animal to be eaten. If you want a healthy and happy animal, consider this factor.

Mice aren't so complicated to breed - I just love to have animals bred just for food that are any-pesticide-free. Give 'em food (big amounts), water, warm place and they'll do the rest. They explode VERY FAST. Ask yourself do you have an idea what to do with them in situations in which you have a very well fed snake and six hundred squeaky rodents awaiting to be eaten.
Cleaning the cage or wherever you have a plan to keep 'em ist selbstverstandig. Urine smells like hell

The easiest & fastest way to kill an animal like a small rodent is called "cervical dislocation"

 

[Mushroom Spore]

Frozen food can't be as good as it would be fresh and it's quality is so low that it's not even worth to be thrown to an animal to be eaten.

Do you have any actual proof in claiming that common practice in the hobby itself is wrong? Freezing a piece of meat, unless it's badly freezerburned or something, is not going to magically make it lower-quality. That's why we freeze things: to keep them fresh and edible!

To say nothing of the fact that being frozen at proper temps for the proper length of time, as most professional frozen prey distributors do, is pretty much guaranteed to wipe out any stray disease or parasite that managed to sneak in.

 

[gotterdamerung]

Look, I'm not trying to convert anybody, just bringing out some scientific proven facts. And if someone wants to know whats best for his/hers animal, why not to say something about "the other side of the medal"? You are partially right. Frozen food IS fresh and edible and free of most pathogens (bacteria, fungi etc.), but has no actual nutrition value*. There is a difference and this is like eating nothing at all. I have read many nutritionist-facts, advices and essays about frozen food and they all say the same thing. It's not magic, sadly, it's reality.

I will not only say it's wrong in this hobby, it's wrong in general. For example - ever heard for a chemical compound called "dioxin"? Very toxic, but it's all around us. In any plastic container that we keep water, juices, ice-cream, frozen food... Science proved it's toxicity and effect on liver (naturally) but no one does anything about that - I mean, if it's around us in mass-usage, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's "good". Catch my drift?





* - carbs, proteins and lipids are still there, but all the good stuff's gone or re-grouped into lo-quality chemical compounds. I believe I'm not supposed to write down all the goodies from food.

 

[Mushroom Spore]

just bringing out some scientific proven facts.

Frozen food...has no actual nutrition value*. There is a difference and this is like eating nothing at all. I have read many nutritionist-facts, advices and essays about frozen food and they all say the same thing. It's not magic, sadly, it's reality.

I am laughing so hard right now. Where's your scientific proof? I'm still waiting.

 

[Tleilaxu]

LOL@Frozen food has no nutrition value. Frozen food can be a better alternitive to most of the pellets out there.(Yes snakes don't eat pellets) As for breeding mice my issue is I get too attached to them LOL. Wild mice do smell better but are harder to get a hold of and are WAY more mobile than their domestic relatives. Also some snakes may like them better over domestic mice that they wont eat domestic mice again.

What is an African Soft furred rat? That sounds like something I would keep and try to spread into the hobby.

 

[gotterdamerung]

Heh, I haven't seen those replies, too bad

MushroomSpore... I am not your biochemistry professor to teach you stuff on a molecular basis. Your country paid some people to do that, right
I do not have the time nor will to write all I have found about this subject - whats the purpose? Now I won't write it down even if you pay me (figure of speech, don't find yourself invited to quote me and write some supersmart line) cause you definitely know more than a scientist who devoted his life to explorations of digestion and laws of nutrition. Especially because I've seen some articles that related defrosted food and cancers. I don't think that's funny.

Tleilaxu - if you have a problem with attaching to your mice bred just for food LOL that's not my or scientific problem it's funny IMO or maybe you chose the wrong animal. Predacious animals need living food. You cannot kill the instincts hundreds of thousands years old by giving them mice-corpses. See my point?
I'm just pointing out that living mice may be a fuss to some ppl to breed, but compared to frozen-defrosted food, they are what they actually want and need. I think, if I can't/won't/.. breed living mice for my animal to treat it how it should be (out in the tropical forrest, pythons do not use microwave ovens, right?) - I won't have that certain animal. If you try to imitate i.e. snake's natural habitat by giving your animal the perfect conditions (humidity, temps, light..) why are you so selfish to give her the proper food?

EOD, for me.

 

[vvx]

I must admit - I disagree with most of the people. Frozen food can't be as good as it would be fresh and it's quality is so low that it's not even worth to be thrown to an animal to be eaten. If you want a healthy and happy animal, consider this factor.

What I find funny is that while you disagree with everyone about the health of frozen food, nobody before this post was comparing frozen to live foods or talking about that. So who were you disagreeing with?

 

[Mushroom Spore]

MushroomSpore... I am not your biochemistry professor to teach you stuff on a molecular basis blah blah I have no proof for any of the wild accusations and wacky theories I'm spouting as fact but everyone who questions me is clearly in the wrong I TOTALLY SAW IT IN AN ARTICLE IN A MAGAZINE SOMEWHERE AT SOME TIME GEEZ HOW UNEDUCATED ARE YOU

You don't even have a single article that agrees with you, do you.