Just like the dog world small animals are being farmed too. Bred for the pet market and sold in the large pet shops all over the country. I breed and show guinea pigs and any mismarked babies I sell privately. These pet babies, as well as any Im keeping for showing are all well handled from birth, and they are very tame when they go to their new home.
The farmed animals which include rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice and all caged birds are all bred to make money, but they are never handled to make them tame, so when they go to their new owners they are wild. I have spoken to someone I know who breeds them for the pet market and they said its the new owners job to handle them and tame them.
In my experence that never works, they will never make good pets.

What other animals are being bred this way I wonder?
All replies welcome.

Small little animals (rabbit's, guinea pigs, hamsters etc) all seem very tame of those at Pet's at home.  I'm sure though all pet animals are farmed and can be brought from a shop or "back yard breeder"

Just out of interest in which area is your Pets at home?
The person Im thinking of, he travels all over the country and breeds 1000's of animals a year.

I suppose you could say babies are now being farmed with all the surrogate mothers etc etc around............

I bought a baby rabbit from my local pet shop and she was the most gorgeous bunny and I loved her to bits, extremely friendly and would run the length of the garden to see you.

I also bought a hamster from the same pet shop and a more vicious creature you couldn't meet.  No matter how you tried different ways to pick it up it would lift its head towards you with its mouth wide open.  It was like something out of a horror film and it was only a baby. We had it 48 hours but it bit my daughter so badly (looked like a scene from casualty) we took it back and we swapped it with another which was fine.

My Sis-in-law bred her corn snakes and hatched 8 live ones.  Had buyers lined up and sold them for £40 each.

I wont take offence Tohme LOL

:D  :D   :D

Very true -and the sad fact is that the large chains like Pets At Home now often REFUSE the hobby breeders animals as they say the will ONLY deal with the national wholesalers.And the good small independent pet shops are vanishing because of the comeptiton from chains.  And in hamsters, this is a HUGE huge problem because we have for a few years now been dealing with a HIGHLY contagious disease that kills hamsters, can be incubated for months -and a LOT of the wholsalers have it in ther stock and couldn't care less......... I myself had to give up breeding hamsters after more than 20 years as I simply had NO outlet for them anymore, with all the shops I tried refusing anything but wholesalers.

I didn't even know such a thing as a small animal wholesaler existed! How horrible.

Chez Swa, I can sympathise having been bitten by a vicious hamster in my youth, blood everywhere, worse than any dog bite I've had! Put me off them for life. However Guinea Pigs are gorgeous little things, had lots of those and they are very sweet.

Had Guinea pigs x 2, they are sweet, had rabbit, hamsters x 3, budgies (3 at the same time, never again) and all I ever really wanted was a dog.  Got one now :D  Have to say though of the small pets the rabbit was my favourite but I think she was one of those one in  umpteen that turns out to be a pretty special character

Having shown and bred Rabbits (surplus wnet to my local pet shop).  I can confrim that Rabbits are actually pretty bright animals ans studies ahve shown they are not far off the smarts of a Cat. :D

yep I can second that - many years ago when I first started teaching, I had a class rabbit. Bugsy was trained to go in his litter tray and would hop around the class room most afternoons and come home with me at the weekends. he was just the most loveable friendly BRIGHT animal . It's a great shame that animals in school are no longer allowed :(

Yvonne

oh they exist, it's part of the reason I left pets at Home when I worked there a few years back.  The shops aren't concerned particularly with the quality of the breeder, just that the animals come in to order - say, 6 hamsters, 4 rats and a half dozen rabbits one week - if animals go out and bite, they tend to get brought back and sent back to the breeder, where I have no doubt they are bred from or PTS.  I've had a few rats this way - two that stick in my mind were one gorgeous fawn male rat that came back for biting, and grew into a soppy, loving fluffball, and a black hooded female - she came in for biting badly, and she was an absolute nutter!  Once you had hold of her she was fine, but she used to just bite for no reason, almost like she wasn't in control of it - have finger, will bite.  Got a few scars from her, and she did it all her life - I dread to think what would have happened to her if I hadn't taken her in.  As it was, she lived with 13 other rats (females and neuetered males) and lived to over 2 yrs old.

I noticed most of the animals that came into PAH were nervy, didn't like being handled at all - I can only recall two exceptions, also both rats - Badger and Squish, couldn't keep em off me :D but everything else, be it rats, rabbits or whatever, was frightened - obviously not handled before we took the delivery.

Call me cynical, but I don't think that wholesale breeders are in any way, shape or form good, whatever the species - I even try to get fish bred by hobbyists if I can, most of my fish are ones that have either been home bred or brought back as adults.

I suppose you have to go by personal recommendation don't you?  The vicious hamster came from PAH but so did the lovely bunny.  There is a lady nearby who breeds rabbits for a hobby but I didn't buy from her because another mum had and said her rabbit was vicious

With any animal that is bred from good temperment must be the first consideration.
I have bred this super Dalmation guinea pig, and I know if I were to show her she would do a lot of winning, only trouble is she bad temperment. I would love to breed with her, but no way am I breeding bad temperment in. She is 9 months old and has had no bad experiences because Im the only one that looks after them. She comes from nice natured parents, so I dont know why she is like this, just a rogue guinea pig.
I shall keep her for life because she is my responsibility, but with all caged animals there is always a shortage of cage space. It would be so easy to sell her to give myself more space, but for the good of the breed I wont, I wouldn't want anyone else to breed her and ruin their line.
My guinea pigs often live until they are 7 years old. so she will be will me for a long time.

> just a rogue guinea pig.

That made me giggle Tricolours, I had images of a guinea pig in a scruffy outfit and a gun for some reason!!

we have a place like that near here & I ride past it 2 or 3 times a week. being nosey :) and up high on a horse, i always have a good look over the hedge & go slow enough to get a good look!!!! They have an out house about size of a double garage with wall to wall, floor to ceiling cages of guineas, hamsters, rabbits & chinchillas. they also have a transit van which i see out on the road quite a lot, presumably taking animals to pet shops. it seems a cut-throat active market with no place for the serious hoby breeder who actually cares about the poor mites. Make s me cross!!!

I've owned various small animals but for the past 8 or 9 years have only had rats, the first pairs I bought from what was PetsMart when that existed and they had great temperaments, obviously quite nervy at first but soon settled and lived on average to 2 and a half.
My third pair came from a local, in dependent pet shop and they were also fab rats, one slightly more nervous at first but both were real characters. Then I decided I would like to rescue some and got 3 from my local RSPCA, they were about 3 months old, hardly ever handled but 2 out of the 3 became very outgoing and friendly, the other was more independent but was not aggressive in any way, just didn't appreciate human contact so much! I kept 5 of her sons(pregnant when I adopted them) and they were the most amazing rats EVER, handled pretty much from the beginning, very outgoing and people orientated, and the feedback I got from the girls new owners was the same, one said ''what have you done to these rats, they're as mad as trees..in a good way''!!

I currently only have 3, 1 of the brothers, who is 2 and a 3 months and showing his age but still a lovely rat and 2 I got from the infamous PAH. I really shouldn't have got them, they are brother and sister who were the only ones left in their seperate cages and to be honest I felt sorry for them, I imagined someone buying one and keeping it on its own for the rest of its life so I came home with them. They both lived with the others I had at the time, Abbie, the female lived with the sisters and her brother Izzy lived with the remaining brothers(the girls sons and nephews) and all was well until Izzy began bullying the older boys, probably because he is much younger and higher in the pecking order I guess.

So I'm now in the awful situation of having 3 rats who all have to live alone, I obviously can't mix boys and girls and Izzy can't live with the old boy Finn  coz he bullies him, they can, however, all be let out together, supervised(unless Abbie is in heat, every 4 days ) and they get on fine and it means they have some rattie interaction.

Anyhoo, I'm rambling, my point was meant to be that I've had quite a few rats from big chain pet shops who have been great but Izzy and Abbie are the most unfriendly rats I've ever owned, and the 'best' ones are those I reared myslef with lots of handling from very early on in their lives. So the idea that ''owners can socialise them'' is rubbish really, especially when they get to say 15/16 weeks, like a pair of boys in my new local PAH, I wonder how much handling they get.

If I was to get more rats, which I'm not(!) I would go to a small hobby breeder who really cares where their babies go and in general about improving rattie health and temperament, we do it with dogs so why not with rats too!

JMO
Emily :)

I think small animals are far too easy to get hold of.
It distresses me in PAH when a young child is mad for a guinea pig or rabbit and they are sold on their own, destined to a life of never knowing another pig and probably ending up in solitary confinement at the  end of the garden when the excitement has worn off.

When I was younger, we had to search quite hard to find a good guinea pig local breeder, and we went to their house and saw all the pigs in a pen, and chose our two. We knew they were a big responsibility and they were well kept all their lives, living until age 7 out doors :)

If i had my way, pet shops would not sell small animals at all and they would be got from local hobbysists - takes a bit more effort and so may assure a better home I feel.

Lindsay
x

I have vetoed pet shops of any description after having two bad experiences.  This was many years ago, many, many years ago when my dad was breeding rabbits and guinea pigs to show.  The majority of his stock was home breed but he wanted a special rabbit.  I seem to remember it was a smokey grey, so probably a blue, and we travelled a long way to get it.  The farm type establishment we got it from also sold small monkeys, lizards and would happily get more exotic pets if you had the money.  We didn't and only wanted this special buck rabbit.

It was a nightmare.  Out of the cage it would launch itself at anyone and bite ferociously.  We just couldn't tame it and one day it managed to get free, by ripping my dads thumb to pieces and ran off back to the wild where it undoubtedly belonged.

Coming closer to the present, only 20 years now, I bought at hamster from a pet shop for one of my sons.  We felt really sorry for him as he was obliviously fully grown and was passed over in favour of the cute little fur balls in the tank next door.  When we got him home he was the angriest little creature I have ever seen.  He growled almost none stop and went into a frenzy if he was picked up.  He did live a long and well fed life in his tank but we just didn't handle him.

Friends of mine bought two baby dwarf rabbits from the petshop for their son, one day I had a phone call asking if I could have a look at the rabbits and tell them where they were going wrong.  These were the nastiest rabbits I've ever seen.  They would attack as soon as look at you.  The only way they could handle them at all was wearing welding gloves and only then in an emergency.  They built a compound around the hutch so they could block the rabbits off to clean the hutch and feed them :(  They even had them neutered to see if that would help, but nothing did.  These rabbits lived for about 10 years!! far longer than any other rabbit I've ever known.  The worst one was known as Attila the Bun ;)

I have a couple of guinea pigs one of which is totally bonkers! Also have a rabbit - they were gifts LOL
A couple of weeks ago however I visited a rodent rescue to adopt some spiny mice and was horrified at the number of littlies in rescue ... won't buy any more piggies or bunnies since there are so many in rescue.