Purchasing feeders online

[wizeguy]

Howdy. I have a few questions for the snakey owners round these parts.

1) Do you buy or breed your feeders.

2) if buy - do you buy local or internet

3) if internet - are you happy and if not, why.

4) if internet, what is your biggest complaint (even if you are happy, there is always something)

5) how many do you buy at a time?

 

[flinters]

1) Do you buy or breed your feeders. I buy, only because I have a ball python and breeding would be a waste
2) if buy - do you buy local or internet Local because my ball only eats live

3) if internet - are you happy and if not, why. Guess I can't really answer this...

4) if internet, what is your biggest complaint (even if you are happy, there is always something) Can't answer that either...

5) how many do you buy at a time? Just 2!

Sorry if that wasn't helpful, how many snakes do you have?

 

[wizeguy]

I have 4

Wanda
Cosmo
#3
#4

that is the order I got them

 

[flinters]

Lol is #3 and #4 the actual names of the snakes? I heard rodentpro.com was good though.

 

[wizeguy]

Lol is #3 and #4 the actual names of the snakes? I heard rodentpro.com was good though.

yes that is there names

"three" and "four" they are undeserving of names.

I am not looking for a place to buy. I am just taking a general concensus

 

[uTiRambo]

I'm not sure where your located wizeguy but do you know where I can get live feeder rats/mice in Canada?

Thanks
Alex

 

[Gail]

I have 6 corns, 1 ball and soon a king. I breed all my own rodents, I started with mice but now I have one pair of rats, a few african soft fur rats and dwarf hamsters.
You could easily breed enough food for your 4 balls with a pair of rats. You would just need to kill/freeze them when they are the right size. If you set the ratties up right, they make really nice pets too and I bet your daughter would like them

 

[wizeguy]

I suppose I should better S'plain myself.

I am actually asking questions to get soem feedback from those who do buy online. This is cause in the near future, I will be having feeders availble for sale. 8)

Several months ago, myself and a partner decided to start breeding some rats. We now currently have a room for them and I actually will be begining to rebuild some new racks to replace the ghetoo one I initially built just to see if we can make a go of this. We have now begun freezing some off here and there to begin to get stock levels up. We have about 60 breedable females and last week we actually have our largest week with 7 litters being born. Our initial breeders have already been retired. Everything at this point is all of our own stock. We have a pet store that has been buying little quantities and our goal is to attend our first show with product on Oct.

 

[lacy_black]

Wow, good luck with the business. I finally gave the ok to breed mice for our snakes even tho its sad cause I have pet mice and rats. I just can't see them as future food, too warm hearted I guess I wish my snakes would take f\t but guess those days are over.

 

[zimbabwepegasus]

I don't buy online. But that's entirely because orders are freakin' enormous and I don't really have a spare freezer. If I had a bunch more snakes it would be worth my money.
As is the smallest you can order in is 100. I have two growing corns and soon a growing BRB. What in the world am I going to do with 100 freakin' hoppers?
AND shipping is over $70!
So I end up spending about $104 on 100 hoppers- might as well go to the pet store. It's not a big saving and I don't want that many frozen rodents of the same size.

Now if there was a grab bag (say 20 fuzzies, 40 hoppers, 40 small mice)... or smaller order sizes or significantly cheaper shipping...
I know you don't have mice, but I'm sure there are people with those issues with rats also.

 

[Gail]

I belong to a active corn snake forums and I frequently see people complain about online ordering. A few of the things that most are concerned with.

*Consistency in size, ie one order if fuzzies (or pinkies, hoppers, whatever) are proper size then the next order they are smaller or large then what was ordered.

* cleanliness, some suppliers are bad about packing poo or dirty bedding in with the rodents

*Large minium order. This is one thing that has also kept me from buying online.

*Broken pinkies. Of course feet or tails might break off when packaging but there is no reason for whole legs or heads to be broke off.

*Bulky packaging. Those seal a meal contraptions work great for making nice tight, compact packages.

 

[wizeguy]

well these are several things we are working through right now, before we even go "live" with this.

Consistency - We want to ofer the sizes that most folks offer, and rather than have an average size, we will have a range and what you order will fit that range. What we dont want is for people to order fuzzies and they get pinkys. By having a range listed in grams, then the products will remain consistent order after order.

All rodeants are being euthanized in small quantities so that we can manage the quality. In addition to bedding and poo, we also do not want fur that smells like urine and we are trying to not have blood but sometimes, that is unavoidabel it seems

as far as your orders and packaging - all order are hopefully being packages in vacuum sealed bags (we have a food saver actually) and we found that if you lay the rodents side by side and vacuum them in packs of say 5, that when you open the bag, you will need to rebag into a ziplock bag but you can actually break off a rat kinda like a kit kat bar while they are in the bag. We actually want to seal and vacuum them individually, but are afraid that although it will be a convenience over anyone else, it will raise our price and we wont be competitive, although I think it is a better idea to just grab a bag and toss it into warm water and then cut it open and feed your warm DRY rat. But we are planningn on sealing quanities of no more than 5. But I think what we will offer is this - a discount if you want your order back packed adn sealed in larger quantites as this reduces our materials as well as our labor. and if you want individual sealed, there will be an adder to th order. For instance, if you buy a pack of 5 but want them individually sealed, there will be an additional 1 dollar charge for this for the 5 (not 1 dollar per rat) and if you buy 25 and want them bulk packed, you save the dollar. The benefit of the bulk pack is there can be more room for more rats to maximize your order

as far as minimum order, well this is tough, as it is not cheap to overnight packages across the country. What are thinking of doing is this - figure out or box size, and max weight filled and shipped overnight across the country and then take that number, add the cost of the box and dry ice and make that our ship price, regardless of order. If you want a smaller order, the shipping will not be much cheaper cause it really wont weigh much less. This is why most places try to go with a minimum order to offest some cost but in reality, the only cost is really the shipping and you pass this on to the customer. It is actually to their benefit ot have a large order to get the best bang for the buck

also if you want to mix and match orders, go ahead.

I am hoping to get to build some new racks this weekend. I have plans for the room we have the rats in. and we are quickly outgrowing the current setup. One thing that is a pain is cleaning and disnfecting each tub once a week.

 

[wizeguy]

and thank you to all so far who have posted concerns, questions an encouragement. This is what I made this thread for. I rather try to work through these issues now.

and to the mice eaters, we are thinking of you also, but we want to nail down the most popular product before moving on. and mice stink and are a pain to keep and breed. We do have mice, but we have been fortunate enough to so have a local pet store buy them from us. This sorta help cover our costs for now and allow us to grow this thing up

 

[Gail]

Can you get african soft furred rats? They are bigger then mice but have virtualy no smell, their pinkies are comparable in size to mice. There one draw back is they are wild as heck and very jumpy.

 

[wizeguy]

Can you get african soft furred rats? They are bigger then mice but have virtualy no smell, their pinkies are comparable in size to mice. There one draw back is they are wild as heck and very jumpy.

yes we can and we have thought about it but I think we will have to go at that one gingerly. I also hear about the jumpiness and wildness but in addition to that, it is the canniballism and killing each other that concerns me. They require alot more space per animal to be healthy and they are small. The last thing we need is to have damaged product.

Like I said, we are starting with rats. if it becomes good, we may move into dumbo mice (cause they are cute)and ASF are another thing we talked about.

belive it or not, I made a carbon filter for like 17 bucks that damn near cuts out all the odor. But when you disturb the deamons to remove the bedding and clean out the tub, wooooooo weeeeee, practically knocks you out from the amonia from mice. Even with more bedding. We can not add vanilla to the water cause we add bleach to and that will just kill off the vanilla. We have a 5 gallon gatorade like cooler in the room that we fill and add 2 capfulls of bleach to and then just fill teh water bottles that way. We figure if the city can chlorinate all the water I drink to keep me healthy, I can do the same for the rats. And you can use a cheap 5 dollor pool tester from home depot to check the chlorine level just so make sure it is cool. This is how we know 2 capfulls is fine. Kills any bacteria that could be in the water and this is needed since use well water.

but then again, this could all fail and I am back where I started - which was just not much