My hairless rat is pregnant should I leave her with the male??

Question

I have 3 hairless rats, they live in a very large cage, two of them are females and one male. Today I realized that one female is pregnant, should I leave her with the other rats or should I separate her?? Will the other rats attack the babies??

Answer 1

Seperate the male. I'd keep the male out permanently unless you want to keep having a bunch of babies. If you want the babies to survive, the best way to do it is to have just the mother with the babies. Other rats sometimes do fine, sometimes the males will actually be very sweet to the babies, but I'd just suggest seperating them. Oh and your second female will be pregnant pretty soon, too...

Answer 2

NO!

The female come straight back into heat once she has ha the babies, so he will mate with her again.

good luck with ur ratties!

Answer 3

You dont need to separate them but as soon as she has the babies she can get pregnant again right away. I had this experience with my rats. we ended up having 12 rats at one time! I finally put the male rats in one cage and the females in the other.

Answer 4

You "realized" one was pregnant? That must have taken a lot of thought, considering she was... IN WITH A MALE. Did you know anything about this before breeding? I'm thinking not, because you'd know then, that hairless rats often have trouble lactating. Ready to hand feed some babies? I hope so, because you might need to.

You need to separate the sexes and keep mom alone for birthing and baby raising. It's likely that your other female is pregnant as well. Way to be a backyard breeder.

Helpful information: http://www.petinfopackets.com/rats/ratin...

Edit: The male needs to be kept separate for a month after neutering or he can still get females pregnant.

Answer 5

You should separate the pregnant rat into a cage by herself, even if the male is now neutered.

If you leave all the rats together, several things could happen.

1. The pregnant mom will become very stressed out and will either re-absorb or eat the babies when they are born.

2. The pregnant mom will become aggressive and start attacking the other two rats, even if they aren't doing anything wrong. This could leave you with squished babies.

3. The other female could steal the babies and try to raise them herself, but since she is not producing milk, the babies will slowly starve.

4. The other two rats could steal and eat the babies.

5. If the male has been neutered less than 3 weeks ago, he could still get the females pregnant. BOTH your females could be pregnant now if you left him in there with them. It takes about three weeks after neutering for the male to become 100% sterile. As soon as the last baby is born, he could reimpregnate the mom and she could have babies again in three weeks. This is very bad for her. It could also cause her to abandon the first litter.

6. The other two rats could maybe help her raise the babies and live together peacefully.

So you can see, a lot of bad things can happen if you leave the mom in with the other rats. It's best to put her in her own cage and let her raise the babies herself. When the babies are about 5 weeks old, you need to take the boys and put them in their own cage.

If you don't have a plan for what you are going to do with up to 22 more rats, you need to start figuring it out now.