A little bit about me and why I decided to breed rats.
As stated on my front page, I got my first rat when I was about 12. I had 'worked' at an animal farm/petting zoo over the school holidays which had bred and sold rats. Over the two months that I worked there I had fallen for a baby PEW girl, and when I left there at the end of the school holidays I decided to take her home, and that's how it all started. 'Kinky' as I'd named her, had a kink right at the end of her tail where one of the visiting children had accidently broken it by slamming the lid of the 'hutch' that they lived in. I had felt immediately sorry for her. She was very shy after that and I spent half of my time whilst 'working' trying to tame her and get her to trust again. She grew up to be a very loving pet and led me to get many more rats over my years as a teenager.
A few years later I got my first sting when buying rats from a pet store. We bought three sisters and two of them became very sick soon after we brought them home and passed away alarmingly quickly. This saddened me alot, but I didn't really relate it to pet-stores or bad breeding at first. I continued to buy from pet stores for some years. Some rats had relatively good health, but most have been very snuffley, and the males were also rat aggressive and fought eachother.
It was in my researching of treating sniffley rats that I first found out that 'ratteries' existed and that people were dedicated to breeding rats with Myco resistance and bettered health. Ever since then I have wanted to become a breeder myself.
In 2010 I became a member of the Australian Rat Forum, started to attend 'rat picnics' and collected my group of breeding rats. I even drove from Melbourne to the boarder of QLD and back to pick up a number of my rats from breeders (and had a nice road trip holiday along the way). Some rats proved to be better than others, and I made some noob mistakes with breeding in the beginning and probably rushed into it too fast, but it has all been a great learning experience.
A few years later I got my first sting when buying rats from a pet store. We bought three sisters and two of them became very sick soon after we brought them home and passed away alarmingly quickly. This saddened me alot, but I didn't really relate it to pet-stores or bad breeding at first. I continued to buy from pet stores for some years. Some rats had relatively good health, but most have been very snuffley, and the males were also rat aggressive and fought eachother.
It was in my researching of treating sniffley rats that I first found out that 'ratteries' existed and that people were dedicated to breeding rats with Myco resistance and bettered health. Ever since then I have wanted to become a breeder myself.
In 2010 I became a member of the Australian Rat Forum, started to attend 'rat picnics' and collected my group of breeding rats. I even drove from Melbourne to the boarder of QLD and back to pick up a number of my rats from breeders (and had a nice road trip holiday along the way). Some rats proved to be better than others, and I made some noob mistakes with breeding in the beginning and probably rushed into it too fast, but it has all been a great learning experience.