anyone breed rodents for a living

[DASSIE]

just wondered if anyone on here bred rodents for a living ie to supply dealers with their frozen rodents or petshops with their live animals for the pet trade .

[damien1010]

im thinking of starting , have the rats just need requests for deals ect

[DASSIE]

i was just wondering like , how many cages would one have to have set up on order to say , make a living from it. Its more for curiosity than ought else . I just thought about it the other day and wondered how much mouse and rat cages would one require to produce enough rodents to pay the morgage etc .

[Joshuashaw]

Try youtube, I remember seeing a vid showcasing a breeders breeding room for rodents. I doubt it would make you a millionaire and would only be worth going into if your passionate about it and also have a large rep collection that munch on rodents.

[cornmorphs]

unless you find silly cheap food... then i cant see how its possible to make a living on dead rats.. i know mine cost me a lot more to get to size than what i can buy them for.
The mice, i guess its possible to make a living, but you will need to spend a bit setting up, and put a lot of work into it...
I have started recently, and after about 6/7 months i now think i am at the stage where its about breaking even for me.. in terms of what i spend on the mice, to the value i get back on the dead ones compared to a couple of the top breeding places...
if that makes sense.

[crouchy]

As a private breeder doing it your own home you wont be producing enough to make any profit never mind enough to live on.
The breeding racks arent cheap to buy in the first place and then you have food, water and cleaning costs. If your doing it in the shed then you will also have heating costs and if your selling them as frozen youve got the costs of execution and the freezers buying and running costs so you have stock.
profit wise youll get more per animal if you sell them as live animals to petshops as you sell them young so dont have much in the way of food and you dont have the culling and freezer costs but live mice are harder to sell than frozen. all snake owners need 1 mouse every week whereas mice owners only need one every few years.

I havnt been actively involved in my dads petshop for a few years now but i think we were paying about 50-75p per live mouse and even fully grown adult frozen rats cost less than £1. if you think you can feed, water, house and hygeinely(sp?) keep a rat until it gets to full adult size for less than £1 then you may be able to make a few pence per rat. even if you make 10p net profit from a rat (which is probably more than you are going to make when you take into account all costs) you are going to have to sell nearly 2500 rats a week to get the same amount of money youd get from having a full time job at minimum wage

[DASSIE]

thanks for the replies everyone .I was pretty much expecting the answers i got that its a big undertaking and needs to be thought through clearly .

cheers

Nik