Q&A for How to Care for a Young Rat

Set your baby rats on a heating pad, which you can set to 90° F (32.2° C). Unfortunately, baby rats won't survive if they get too cold.

Ideally, it's best to let the rat's mom take care of this. If the rat is a rescue, feed it either goat's milk or puppy milk (a variety of goat's milk made for puppies). Stay away from cat milk—it has too much protein and not enough fat.

Fill a little dropper or syringe with goat or puppy milk. Then, drop the milk onto the rat's lips, watching closely to make sure the rat is drinking it. Make sure the milk doesn't touch your rat's nose, or else it could get pneumonia.

If you've got the mom, then let the rats stay with the mom. You don't want to disturb the babies until their eyes are open. Before that, the mom will take much better care of those babies than anyone else could. You also really have to fight the temptation to interfere with what the mom is doing. Sometimes, if the mom has too many babies, she'll actually separate the babies into separate piles. And she might even have some of the babies outside of the nesting area that you provided for her because she can't physically feed them all at the same time. But she knows what she's doing.