Your oppinions pleae: Introduction/social observation cage

I revamped one of my 3 tier cages to turn into a cage where ratties can be in close proximity, but not able to bite each other.

Especially with the flux on new adoptees coming in, its sometimes hard to gauge the new rats personality and how aggressive he might be towards other rats.

Also, in researching the subject of introductions (which yielded quite a varied collection of methods on introduction) Gently getting them used to other rats seems to help in some cases.

To be honest, so far I introduced 3 times. 1X girl-girl (they hit it off after 10 minutes ) 1 Boys-boy (which ended having the older rat by himself, he was terrible! ) and the latest 1 boy to 2 boys which was settled in 30 minutes and they cohabit happily and am on the verge of introing 2 girls to each other

Here's a pic of what the setup looks like:



The cage is separated on the middle level by a double wall of grid bars with 5 mm spacing between each wall. Floors overlapping cage sections also have double floors with 10 mm spacing.

At least I think that this set up will give me an indication on the level of aggression I may expect and opt for more careful approaches when needed.

Any comments or improvement suggestions welcome!

I would think toes and tails are likely to be bitten through the bars in a cage like this (from above/below) - and I think that it may actually not help you to work out agression levels really, so much as cause more agression between rats. It might work, but personally I'm not so sure.

xx

Thanks for your thoughts, I will give it a try and keep close supervision and let you know how it goes. I can see where you are coming from with the antagonizing part, as I seen a similar thing fail completely, but mostly because it was done to a cage where the rat was already resident and didn't like the intruder and loss of territory at all.

My favorite is using the play-pen with the play castle after a good clean. This worked very well for intro-ing Steward and they got along pretty quickly, but then again, Doodles and Sunshine are a bunch of hippies