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Post by luxuriousferret on Nov 24, 2008 20:00:23 GMT -5
Ok, so I am probably going to do whole prey. ok, so I will be breeding mice out in the garage, and I want to have the ferrrets on mice, with a few hamsters, a week. i will buy the hammys umtil I can breed my own, but I am deffiently going to be breeding mice. so, how can I breed tons of mice, and keep them healthy?? I was thinking using my 20 gallon lang, screen top, and 1-3 10 gallon tanks, wilth screen lids. but I want to use an easy to breed methood, and have enough to feed 2 female ferrets. ok, i know pine is bad, but can i use if for them, since their feerers? because all thhe other kind is too much $$$$. and I wont be allowed to bake potting soil. And also, can they live on dog food, the mid quality kind, we feed it to our dogs, best brand arund here, exculsive. a smaller campany, or what should I feed them? I was thinking, having 2 ten gallons, filling up twice a week, and fill them up with meat, or something ferrets can eat, a few days before becoming dinner?? Or will they be fine, if I put the breeder females and males in the big tank, and leave them all in there, to do their thing?? Or how can I humanely produce enough mice, plus extra to sell to our local petstore?? with my 3 cages? And how many mice a day should the ferrets eat, and how many times a day? once??- no wait, very day, when I take care of them, bring the dinner ones inside!!! in one of the extra ten gallons, then I can have them at hand if I need to feed 2 times a day!!! would that work? so I dont have to worry about every thing, like seperating at ages?? please, i need info!! Sorry, if it is confusing.
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Post by fuzzymom on Nov 24, 2008 23:36:51 GMT -5
A basic set up could be done with the 20g long tank and the 3 ten gallons. You could use the 20g long tank as a holding tank for the to-be-dinner mice as they get old enough to breed, as use the ten gallon tanks as breeding tanks. If you don't mind having the females have back to back litters, you can house 1 male with 2-3 females in each ten gallon tank. This gives you 6-9 females producing litters for you. This should be enough to keep you in quite a few mice. Mice will produce a litter every 3-4 weeks, on average, so if all the mice are having litters at the same time, you can expect 6-9 litters every month. Of course, that is a best case scenario.
Also, you can find some safe, inexpensive bedding. I use a wood pellet bedding that I get at my local farm supply store. Its about $7 for 40lbs. 40lbs will last you quite a while with only 4 running tanks. As far as food, you can feed them on dog food, but you will need to supplement with fruits and veggies since dog food is not a nutritionally complete food for them.
There is no need to feed the mice meat the day or two before feeding them to the ferrets. If you want to make sure the ferrets do not ingest plant matter, you can cut food from the mice a few hours to a day before to make their stomachs empty. (My ferret will simply ignore the stomach, so I don't have to worry about that).
You might be able to sell extras, but make sure that they don't become overcrowded. Too much stress, lack of nutrients (that's why you need to supplement the diet) or lack of water, will cause the mice to turn on each other and eat each other.
My ferret weighs 1.5lbs and will put away 2-3 mice a day if I let her. Most ferrets could eat about 3-4 a day.
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Post by animalsgetrevenge on Nov 25, 2008 0:06:21 GMT -5
I am not an experienced breeder, so I can only do my best with your questions until a breeding veteran comes by to help!
First off, it is recommended to feed your ferrets at least 3 kinds of prey or species of different ages. Only mice and hamsters won't cut it, you will need to add another prey, or feed raw as well. Buying hamster will get VERY expensive if you are buying from a pet store. If you can afford to buy or have the time to breed, great! If you don't, I would recommend feeding whole prey AND raw.
I wouldn't use pine bedding because you want the mice to be as healthy as possible. You don't want to be feeding your pet's sick prey. Aspen bedding is usually as cheap as cedar, but doesn't contain the harmful oil and is much less dusty. I wasn't able to bake my potting soil this week, so I put it in the tanks straight out of the bag. I don't THINK this will harm the mice, but I'm not an expert. I found that nonbaked soil is less dusty than baked. Hopefully a seasoned breeder can give us some feedback on this.
As for food, Dog food alone will not be a proper diet. You can make a cheap food mix at home, I made mine with things that I had sitting in my cupboard, plus about $5 at the store. Check out my mouse blog for the recipe. Besides their mix, I also feed fruit, veggies, dried leftover bones from the ferrets, and some HEALTHY and natural food scraps.
As far as I have heard, the average adult ferret will eat 2-3 adult mice each day. Your ferrets will eat more or less depending on their age, gender, and activity level. You can feed one per day because whole prey can stay in the cage for 24 hours. When I had too many rat babies, I had Didjeridu kill 6 in one sitting, let him eat one and froze the rest for another time. You can do the same thing so you don't have to deal with "hunting" every single meal.
To breed enough mice to make up the bulk of 2 ferrets diets, you would probably have to breed a crazy amount, but then again, I haven't even had one litter yet. I wouldn't plan on selling to a pet store. Here is my idea: You could probably put 3 female mice comfortably in a 10 gallon tank. If you have three 10 gallon tanks, put three females in 2 tanks (6 females total), and 2 males in the third three gallon tank. You can use to 20 gallon tank as a "holding" tank for babies until they are feeders. For a week, let the males mate with the females. Put one male in one tank and one in the other. After a week, put the males back together in the "man" tank. The females will be pregnant for approximately 3 weeks before they give birth, and the babies can be weaned at 3.5-4 weeks old. Once the babies are weaned, put them into the "holding" tank. In my opinion, you don't have to separate male and female young adults because you will feed them to your ferrets before they are old enough to have babies. Once the babies are weaned, let the males each go back into a female tank to breed for a week.
I think a few things that are important to keeping health mice are... DIET: Make sure they get a varied diet with a lot fresh and natural everything. HAPPINESS: Make sure they stay busy. Give them a wheel, tubes, things to rip up and chew on.
I hope this helps to get you started in the right direction! As I said, I'm no expert, but this is what I have heard from other members.
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Post by animalsgetrevenge on Nov 25, 2008 0:09:51 GMT -5
Dang FuzzyMom, you beat me to it! There was no responses when I clicked on here, but by the time I got it all typed up, you had already posted! Haha. I'm glad my had similar responses!
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Post by fuzzymom on Nov 25, 2008 8:59:54 GMT -5
You were more detailed though. I wrote up a quick bit since it was so late when I wrote it.
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Post by luxuriousferret on Nov 25, 2008 17:01:59 GMT -5
Ok, So wow many breeding females would I need to have enouth for 2 female ferrets??
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Post by luxuriousferret on Nov 25, 2008 17:07:52 GMT -5
And, also, I can feed hamsters and grebils, too. but not daily, only like weekly???
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Post by animalsgetrevenge on Nov 25, 2008 17:52:47 GMT -5
Yes you can feed hamsters and gerbils, but they are very expensive to buy from pet stores. You would be better off feeding mostly mice with a few days of raw each week. I did my best to calculate it out to see how many breeders you would need to feed your 2 ferrets mostly mice. I based my calculations off of this information, which aren't exact: 2 ferrets eating 2.5 mice per day Your ferrets eat 5 days per week (which might be too much) You ferrets ONLY eat mice at 11 weeks of age (which would be BAD, they need all ages, but this was easiest to calculate with only one age) Each mouse produced 10 babies per litter (which is average, sometimes more, sometimes less) Now, using that info, if you bred mice every 7 weeks, that would mean your mice would breed, be pregnant for 3 weeks, have their babies, raise babies for 4 weeks, then immediately be bred again. Using this method, you would need 27 breeding females! That's a ton! Now, if you bred your mice litters back to back, meaning they would be pregnant IMMEDIATELY after giving birth to one litter, and having a second litter right as the first was being weaned, you would need 17.5 breeding females, which is still A LOT of mice! I hope this helps
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Post by luxuriousferret on Nov 25, 2008 19:04:18 GMT -5
Wow, that is alot!! So you would only feed, about 4-5 times a week??? And about 2-3 mice at a time, depending on age??
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Post by animalsgetrevenge on Nov 25, 2008 19:08:45 GMT -5
Yes, you wouldn't want to feed mice for more than 4 or 5 days a week because your ferret need more prey/raw variety and they can't live off of mice alone. If you are feeding ADULT mice, you ferrets will probably eat 2-3 mice per day EACH. That is 4 to 6 mice a day and 16 to 30 mice per week!
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Post by fuzzymom on Nov 26, 2008 11:19:23 GMT -5
Hamsters and gerbils are very expensive to be buying as a food item. If you plan on feeding them either of these, I would suggest breeding them yourself. I already have a pair of gerbils breeding (just got a litter last week!)
You will be going through almost 100 mice a month if you feed them mice almost every day. (5 days a week) If you do harem breeding in which the females get pregnant immediately after birth of a litter, they will be having almost 1 litter per month. So by the time a new litter is being born, the previous litter is ready for feeding off (almost. They could use another 2-3 weeks to bulk up for feeding). 4 week old mice tend to weigh around 10-15g. Adults ready for breeding weigh about 25g. (I weigh mice to make sure they are the correct size for breeding or feeding).
If you plan on doing any serious breeding with your mice, then I suggest not using tanks, as they are bulky and hard to clean. On the reptile forum I belong to, they have a great section on breeding rodents and have rodent rack plans and rodent tub plans that you can follow to make your own enclosures. These racks and tubs allow you to keep more mice in the same amount of space. Example. About 6-8 mice can live in a 20g long tank. In the same amount of space you could put a rodent rack. This rack consists of 5-6 levels, and each level can house 2 females and one male, so you are housing 10-12 breeding females in the same amount of floorspace. Let me know if you are interested in the racks or tubs (tubs are the same as a tank but can be made to provide more ventilation, are light, and easy to clean.)
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Post by luxuriousferret on Nov 26, 2008 15:20:39 GMT -5
Ok, can you give me the link? thanl you soo much! where I buy my pet stuff, you can get them for a few bucks. so thats not too bad, petland has them for like 15-20!! And also, if any other people have something to say about this subject, please share!!!
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Post by Kerit on Nov 30, 2008 16:39:16 GMT -5
I'd be interested in the racks, too. The pro ones I've always priced are, well, considerable. [ Hee, I just had to edit to add that at the top of my page, the advertisement for ferret cages pulled prices from Foster and Smith and the image was the FN with my babies in it! Not that you can tell, but... I still get excited about stuff like that. ]
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Post by hopi on Nov 30, 2008 18:20:52 GMT -5
I guess im a lucky fella....i keep my ferts on a farm...which i also work...any rats n mice become a problem then i drag the ferts out and let them do thier business For u i seriously reccomend breeding as it might be a lil expensive to feed ya babies on mice n gerbils on a daily basis... I dont mind the feeding of mice to ferts (Live*) but rats im a lil againgst....a Ferret againgst a rat...the ferret usually wins but rats can do some serious damage back as i teach falconry its a must for me to have a supply of fresh quail,rats,mice and day old chicks (be warned day old chicks as an only food source for ferts is a no no) if ya feeding ya babies on a nice raw diet in the first place then maybe a mouse or a rat from time to time as a treat would be good enough.....lots of hell with breeding unless ya really serious.
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Post by fuzzymom on Dec 1, 2008 9:44:06 GMT -5
Anything larger than a rat weanling should be pre-killed before you feed it to the ferret. I would not recommend feeding a live rat to a ferret. stewartreptiles.com/Articles/Mice_Breeding_Rack.pdfThat is the link to a mouse rack. They also have a rat rack on the same site. It is very simple to build (unless you are like me and if you even pick up a power tool, the house comes crashing down)
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