Introducing baby rats to an older rat?

[Hello I am a rabbit]

Up until last night, I had a pair of female rats, but one died due to respiratory disease and old age. The other girl is a couple months younger and came from a much better litter, and is still very active and spunky.

Now my question is, how should I go about introducing a pair of young females to her?? She's a little on the bossy side and was the dominant rat, and although she hasn't shown signs of real aggression she did do some power grooming and such. Do adult females usually take well to younger females?

Any advice/experiences you could give me would be great! =)

 

[Nicole]

When introducing adult rats, first clean out the cage thoroughly to remove territorial scents from the resident rat. Dab both rats with perfume or vanilla essence (to disguise their smells) and introduce them on neutral territory, not in a cage which one recognises as its own. There will usually be some fighting for the first few days after they are introduced. This is not usually serious, but to avoid it you may prefer to introduce them gradually, letting them first just sniff each other and then work up to putting them in the same cage over about a week.

 

[Ashley]

my older rat *tolerated* her new much-younger cage mate.....the "new much-younger cage mate" LOVED the older rat and was "best Friends" with her older cage mate....kinda like Debbie and Pim from "phil of the future" or Harper & Alix from "wizards of waverly place". when they met though, the younger girl...."humped" the older one...a LOT but she eventually stopped. she got extremely depressed a year later when the older rat died & was VERY, VERY People-needy. & she didnt play with her other rat-friends much anymore, and started falling asleep next to me. she eventually got better, and moved to live with an awesome family, with 2 or 3 awesome children that love her very much.



i just cleaned the cage, gave them new food/water, and introduced them on a big soft chair.

 

[Nibbles]

I would have a separate cage for the babies for the first few days. Rats are social creatures, and usually get along well. As an adult, your female rat probably wont see the babies as any threat to her dominance, and would just ignore them. Have supervised visits between them, introducing the babies into the adult rats cage. Do this for a couple of hours a day for a week or so, taking the babies out at night or when you are not close by. Then you can put them in there permanently and you female will be used to them. Dont worry about power grooming or even light wrestling, as your adult will want to maintain dominance over the babies, but immediately separate them if she starts biting or scratching them. Im sure your adult will welcome your new rats into the pack, as rats hate being lonely!

 

[stienbabe]

In my experience I've never had problems with getting rats to move in together, generally they are grateful for the company. That said, you do need to take care because they are quite capable of seriously injuring or even killing each other in the rare case when it does go wrong. I would put the new rats in a cage and let the older female explore the outside of it, letting her investigate and smell them but with the bars between and with your supervision. If all seems to be going well then you can pop the door open and let them introduce themselves. I have often found that the next thing you know is that they are all snuggled up together. Keep a gardening glove handy in case you need to break up a fight, and a spray bottle full of plain water (like you use for misting plants) can be useful for issuing a quick 'reminder' of good behaviour. Make sure that none of them are hungry and that you have removed all food from the cage so that this can't become a source of friction in the preliminary stages, as some rats are protective over their 'stash'. If you hear bruxing (that teeth grinding noise) then all is going well. Good luck.