Hi there from a new member.

[dewi]

Hi,

I'm the dedicated slave of 21 rats. Yup 21, which is a lot but what can I say, I'm a bit of a sucker.

Before I go on anymore I feel the need to explain why I have so many rats. Well, most of my rats are rescues or the off-spring of pregnant pet store rats. In regards to the latter, I bought 2 rats that I knew were pregnant and couldn't leave them at the truly hideous pet stores. So mum (plus a couple others) were brought home and all, including offspring, remained with me. All ratties are happy, living in nice big cages (ferret kingdoms… my favorite!), in a dedicated rat room. They get heaps of free ranging time, love & care.

As for me, I live in Brisbane with my hubby. Work as a nurse. Someone ("Wulfy One") on another rat group told me about this place so that I could read up some threads on pasteurella in rats. However since then the pasteurella question I had, has since resolved.

I'm looking forward to reading the other forum sections as soon as I get my 10 posts, posted (only 7 more to go).

Dewi

[lillian]

Wow.....21 ratties!!! You must go through a lot of yoggies

[Kim]

21 is nothing

Try 80 My current number of ratties..

My rat numbers vary between 60 and 90 and most times I will have around 80..

My highest ammount of ratties was 160 when I was rescuing and already had some rescues when a woman dumped 40 odd babies on me from 5 "accidental" litters..

[christie]

Hi there. Man 21 rattys would be so much fun, though i wouldn't want to be around on cage cleaning day.
I more so wouldn't want to be around Kim's on cage cleaning day, lol how long does it take you to clean all them cages Kim?

[wulfyskingdom]

That'd be me lol.

I hope you enjoy the forum

[Kim]

I have 6 cages so it takes me a couple of days

I think 3 cages is enough for one day's cleaning .. that in itself takes me 3 hours .. I roughly worked it out to 1 hour per cage..

Thats removing litter, cleaning trays, replacing litter, hanging hammocks and other stuff.

[dewi]

Hi and thanks for your all your welcomes & replies.

For me it takes about 2.5 hours to clean cages. So that's about half an hour per cage. The cages we use are easy to clean, but this excludes vacuuming and the copious amounts of rat laundry we do. We do about 3 loads of rat bedding laundry a week, so thank goodness for our front loading washing machine as it saves us so much water!

Kim I'm so impressed that you can handle as many rats as you do. 20-ish rats is the upper limits of what my husband and I can deal with and we don't even have kids of the human kind!

Hi there Wulfy . I'm not sure what to call you, I hope Wulfy will do.

[Kim]

I've owned rats for 19 years now so I guess I'm used to it and when you have had to deal with 160 rats at a time.. 80 isnt so bad..

Mind you at times I wish that I only had 20.

Luckily I have my husband who helps with the cleaning most of the time.

Unfortunately we can not have human children .. so its just the 2 of us ... so my pets are like substitute kids .. pity I cant get them to clean their own rooms up ...lol...

[dewi]

Yeah, I don't think I could do this with young kids and it would certainly be out of our budget if we had children. My husband (Neil) helps out heaps, thankfully. He is wonderful with the animals, not just the rats.

Well on the positive side, the rats don't demand pocket money or bring their less than savoury boyfriends home.

[abbyjas]

Wow thats a lot of rats. We have 2 in a Ferret Kingdom. lol

[christie]

Oh lucky rattys having so much space to them selves.

It can take me an hour to just clean the top half of a ferret Kingdom lol but i guess that's cause i like to decorate and sometimes move things around if i don't like how it looks.

[dewi]

With 5 ferret kingdoms to clean I've got my cage decorating down pat. Hammock or cube under here, boxes up there, litter tray in that spot. I don't vary it very much. I'm also not particularly creative either. It's function before form with me. Some people have very pretty cages which I always admire, but I'm just too lazy for that .

[christie]

Wow 5 cages for 21 rats? I'm guessing you must have some that just don't want to live together then.
Its also understandable then that you don't want to be to creative, with that many to decorate its more like a chore than something fun to do. Seeing as i just do one half after the chore of the cleaning is done its fun to decorate.

[dewi]

I have 5 groups of rats. One large group have 2 Ferret Kingdoms joined together, so it's a whopper of a cage. But they all insist on sleeping up top so the bottom of the cage is a bit of a waste. Silly rats.