Do you keep breeding mice/rats in the same room as your snakes?

Question

I recently acquired 2 rats, male and female. The cage is near our snake terrarium, but I'm wondering if they'll smell them, and attack us when we pick them up! (Smell food, see heat coming

toward them...)

The rats are pets. The previous owner was allergic. We aren't going to feed our rats to them, (too big anyway-- 1 yr old ball pythons!) but if they have babies, we may consider them!

Answer 1

As Maranda says as long as you wash your hands between them and not hold them on your clothes and arms BEFORE or going right over to the snakes then you should not have any problems. I had a 3 tier mouse breeding habitat right next to the rehab snake tanks and never had a problem.

Snakes are weird like that sometimes. I had one that would NOT eat live at all which was great but one time, one escaped and crawled in his tank and we think he was in there a few days when we found him hanging out with Dr. Phil..... it was sleeping on top his coils. I had another escapee that lived with the guinea pigs for a week we were going to take him out of there right away but it was so cute and they weren't hurting him, then we saw it was a she and she had babies in the corner and so we had to re-introduce her back to her own kind

Answer 2

i raised rodents and kept snakes but i never kept them in the same room.  rodents have a keen sense of smell and can smell the snakes and they will get stressed out and the snakes can smell/taste the rats in the air and that will stress the snakes out.  the snakes will smell rats in the air and might be likely to strike at you when you go in their cage to get them out.

Answer 3

As far as my opinion you are fine to have them in the same room. At one point in time my pet snake actually had a pet rat. It just decided not to ever eat it. I put in other rats while his pet was living with him and he ate the others just fine. This lasted for 2 years. As long as you are washing your hands in between pets I think you will be fine.