I am one person, working with the support of my family, to maintain the only known domesticated colony of Rattus rattus in the world. This site, the colony, the breeding records and the writing here are all the product of that single arrangement. So not a research institution. Not a commercial breeder. Not a team.
Roofy was the start. She came to us in late 2018, in Southern California, the sole survivor of her own litter, found abandoned and brought to us for hand-raising. Around the same time, several other orphan baby roof rats arrived in our care from separate rescues. We took them in not because we had any breeding program in mind (we did not), but because they needed care. Roofy was outstanding from the beginning… The contrast with her contemporaries was striking, and visible from the earliest days. The rest of this site is the story of what happened from there.
I am not a research scientist by training. What I am is the kind of hobbyist who, given a project, will track it carefully. Keeping records. Weighing animals across generations. Reading enough genetics to understand what is actually being inherited. Learning the husbandry medicine I need to learn. The work has produced more than I expected when it started…
The colony moved with us from Southern California to Florida some years ago, and has continued in its new location. It has been funded entirely out of our own pocket from its first day. We do not sell rats and have not built revenue around this work. Whatever the colony has achieved, it has been achieved at our family’s own expense and on our own time.
For anyone interested in what the work looks like in motion, the YouTube channel and the subreddits r/rattusrattus and r/petroofrats have years of accumulated material: videos of the animals, conversations about specific situations, observations across the seasons. A lot of the published work of the project lives there as much as it does here.
The project has also produced a free tool I built for other keepers: Pet Freedom, which maps the legal status of keeping any pet, not just roof rats, anywhere in the world. It is free to use.
If after reading this site you have specific questions, or you are considering whether you might want to take on a colony of your own, the Contact page is the way to begin.
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