bitbyter I never thought of that! That's interesting, I've noticed that the girls do go through a lot more water when they are pregnant or nursing so maybe that is a possible cause. I'm considering in getting larger bottles for them soon since the ones I have at the moment are a little on the small side.
I appreciate everyones input when it comes to my thread.
The health and wellbeing of my animals are my top priority, so I do take all the information I can and use it if I see fit. I take extremely good care of all my animals and do all I can to ensure that "unnecessary death or suffering" does not happen. With any animal, regardless, it is a try and see thing. Each animal is different. One rodent may be fine with 10+ pups, whereas another may not. Some rodents are simply not fit for breeding either. The only way to know, is to experience and decide what is the best option for them.
Here is a run down on my incident list, and yes, I keep an incident list.
I like to keep track of what goes down with breeding so I can try and figure out what happened, and how I can improve or avoid it in the future.
As you can see, Throughout my breeding, I've had a majority of issues with
Female Mice.
In general, a majority of the issues I've had happen with
first time mothers. The mouse who killed almost her entire first litter, went on and had a successful second litter. She turned out to be a very good breeder for me.
I've actually had very few cannibalisms, I may have used the word when referring to finding dead rodents, however I've only had a few cases of rodent EATING (all/partial) rodent. A majority of the time I find the animal dead and in tact in the tub. Other times it would be when there is a sickly or frail pup also, such as the runts. Females, will kill and consume (or abandon/scatter) any sickly/frail born animals. I know and am aware this is nature. I've had a few cases of this, especially the runt. Sometimes 1-3 pups will be killed/+consumed. If the females do this because of sick young, I'm fine with it. Thats their decision and it benefits her, benefits the litter. Haven't had alot of these cases, so no big deal.
I've housed male mice with male mice and had no issues of them killing each other, apart from this once of incident. That incident if I recall, was a complete accident, in fact it was entirely my fault because I misidentified the sex of the "Male" mouse, and placed it in with another male and a few females.
That to me, was simply a once of incident because I've grown males out together and had no issues. They were also in the same room of other tubs, which contained other females and other males (even male with females). But when there were females in the tub, that is definitely what causes the issues. (no wonder..) In my experience, The mice were very finicky. I had a few issues from the first few litters. Whereas, with the rats, I've had a few litters, no problems, until this one incident.
I do cull a few from each litter, sometimes. Sometimes I prefer to avoid unnecessary early culling, unless for certain reasons, such as I know X Female cannot handle X amount of pups. Or running out of space, food, etc.
Pinkies are treats, So I prefer to grow the animals out as adults. Adults are meals, that is the sole purpose of my breeding, so I will avoid culling too many young and as much as I love to cull them early at that age, For me, I find it that it is much harder to do so since I do CD. With mice, I did cull at early ages, especially with males. But those early ages were almost always ever as
fuzzies or weaner ages. I felt more confident when doing CD at those ages. I've successfully grown out male mice together a few times, however they stank so I culled them as weaners most of the time.
I've never had issues with competition among any of my rodents. I also do not think of "the more the better." I appreciate more animals, but when it comes down to it, it's all about, can my females handle X amount of babies? Can I afford to grow out X amount of rodents? (Feed and blocks are not cheap. I also feed fresh produce to them on a weekly basis.) I only ever breed what I can handle, what my rodents can handle, and the best amount that leaves everyone stress free as much as possible.