When it comes to bedding for your pet rats, you should be very careful in choosing your pet rat bedding. Some bedding can be dangerous for pet rats- such as Cedar Shavings. Why? We will discuss this below. Your bedding choice can determine how healthy your rat is now, and how healthy your pet rat is in the future. Some will even cause quickly impending death for your pet rats; So it is VERY important that you read this blog post. Hopefully, you will gain something from this entry on pet rat bedding care, and your pet rats will breathe easy (literally!) with your new bedding choices.
At the bottom of our list, we have Cedar Shavings/Bedding. Cedar shavings and rats are a very bad combination. Cedar bedding may be cheap, but cedar is very poisonous to a pet rat’s health. The oils, dust, and chemicals contained within the wood itself will cause many respiratory issues, respiratory illness, and toxic poisoning of your pet rat. In the beginning, you will see symptoms such as: a rat sneezing a lot, a rat hacking a lot, rat wheezing, labored breathing in a rat, and more tears than usual. It will progress to intensified symptoms as listed above, and will also begin to include: fatigue in the rat, rat weight loss, rats not eating, lazy behavior in the rat, and ultimately death. Cedar should ALWAYS be avoided! It will cause long term rat health problems. As a matter of fact, almost ALL wood bedding SHOULD be avoided, due to dust and oil content. They can both be very harmful to a rat’s health, even though it is not toxic like cedar is.
News paper is not anywhere near as bad as cedar, and is appropriate for occasional use. For example, if you run out of pet rat bedding. The ink on the newspaper is not a desirable thing to have around your pet rats, but is not as dangerous as cedar itself. The ink can also stain the cage and toys, if used often. Newspaper does not have the best absorbency or odor containment, so it has to be changed very frequently.
Paper towels are also good for temporary use. Paper towels can be fairly cheap, and provide great absorbency compared to newspaper. This is preferable for temporary use. It also does not contain ink like newspaper, and should your rats ingest it? It is not toxic.
The best bedding to use would be CareFresh pet bedding. This bedding is made specifically for caged animals, and is made of recycled materials. Therefore, it is a Green product. It has a low dust content, keeping your animals healthy and happy. It can be a little on the expensive side if you own many pets, but it is well worth it for a healthy pet!
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