One of the most important parts of rat keeping is to provide a safe space for your rats where they feel comfortable and safe. Where they can sleep soundly, play with their friends and be entertained and happy. All this can be achieved pretty simply if you can set it up right from the start. The following guides will help you achieve all this and more. From picking the right cage, what basics you need to put in it, filling it with toys and beds and also more advanced things you can move onto later on.
Cages and Setup
Starting off the first guide to look at is Rat Habitat by Isamu Rats. This is your basics to rat housing guide. It will talk to you about basic requirements for what your cage needs to be, suggestions for the best locations to have your rats in and also tips on substrates and enrichment items to put it in.
An important thing we have to remember is this is going to be your rats house hopefully for all of their lives. It should not be treated as a show home for you to enjoy looking at and keep as tidy as possible. You need to try and set it up for what the rat likes and not what you like. A happy, stimulated and well exercised rat will not only more likely live longer and have less health issues but will also be a better pet in the long run. Furnishing a cage by the NERS looks into this much deeper. Analysing every single need a rat would have in its cage and general environment and advising what we can put in place to meet those needs perfectly. Planning what is needed first is much more beneficial when it comes time to go out and start looking for things to fill your cage with so this guide is the best place to start.
Once you get a basic idea of what you’ll need the first thing you need to pick is your cage. Choosing the right cage can make your life much easier. You want one with a good enough floor space so your rats can run around freely and also enough height for them to climb and fill with lots of items. Also one which allows you to access things inside and clean easily is a big plus. The most important thing is picking one big enough for the amount of rats you want. You can either buy small when you only have a few and upgrade when you get more or buy a bigger one from the start and gradually fill it.
You can check out The Rat Wiki page on the best Cages for a better idea. These are some of the best cages out there recommended and used by many breeders and pet homes. But what about bad cages. Well Ebonie and Phoebe of the Rat Chat Podcast bring you a great episode to listen to called Rat Cages We Would Not Recommend and Why. Here they cover the topic of shopping online for cages and also discuss some of the cages they commonly see recommended that are not suitable. There are cages out there they really wouldn’t recommend. You want to find out why? Give them a listen to find out.
So by now you’ve read the basics of what you’ll need both with cages and what to put in there. Cage Setup by Lurelin Rats will run through things we have already seen but what I like about this cage basics guide is that good and bad options are provided. Knowing what is good and bad to use for example with substrates is very important. Plus the addition of providing some options is handy as if your rats don’t take to one, you have other options to switch to. This guide also is quite unique with the very handy “ideas for homemade toys” picture guides which show you some great and cheap ideas of crafting homemade toys and enrichment items for your rats.
Sticking with the theme of providing good and bad examples of cages and what to fill them with we now look at a selection of guides provided by Isamu Rats that will take the different categories of cages and setup and provide you more in depth examples of the good and the bad ways to go about this. Detailed explanations of what is used and what should not be used and why is a great way to learn and improve the life you give your rats, so it’s very beneficial to read these in great detail. They will cover everything we have learned so far but just give you that extra few examples to broaden your knowledge of the subject. Please see
More Cage Guides by Isamu Rats:
Now you have your cage and you’ve filled it with substrate you’re probably excited to get out there and start filling it with awesome toys and items. There are a lot of great things out there you can buy and it doesn’t just have to be rat specific things. Rats are not fussy when it comes to things to play with. They love to interact with anything they can climb in, stretch up to or move around. As long as it’s made of a suitable material you can pretty much fill your rat cage with anything you like.
One thing that always bothered me was I heared a lot of the time that there are woods out there that may not be safe for rats but I could never find a good source to tell me exactly what to avoid. You will find a lot of toys out there designed for small furries and also birds are good to use for your rats but also a lot of them are made out of wood. As I was constantly checking what wood they were made out of but never knowing if they were truly safe or not I decided to do something about it and do some research. So if you ever come across a good wooden toy or item and you want to know if it’s a safe wood to use you can always come back and check The Rat Wiki’s Guide on Safe and Unsafe Woods which will make sure you pick the right ones for your rats.
If you would like to get a head start on some of the best things to put in your cage The Rat Chat Podcast share their Top Ten Rat Cage Accessories For Pet Rats guide. Here they will tell you their top cage accessories and what they love about them so much. Even if you don’t get the exact suggestions this will give you some great ideas to get started on what your rats will love the most.
As well as the best things to get there are also toys and items out there that aren’t good for rats. Sometimes there are things advertised as being safe for rats that really aren’t. This can be quite concerning but don’t worry The Rat Chat Podcast has your back on this one. They provide an episode called Things That Pet Shops Sell That Are Not Suitable And/Or Safe For Pet Rats. This will go through all the most common recommended items out there for rats that pet shops will try to get you to buy and tell you why they are not. Whether it be made out of unsafe materials or just too small for rats as well as other things that can cause health issues. Once you learn what to look out for you can make sure you only provide the safest toys for your rats to play with.
It’s not just toys that are often recommended to people that are often bad, this happens with substrate too. One common thing a lot of people are told is to use fleece as bedding in rat cages. Using Fleece in Rat Cages by Azuline Rattery will tell you exactly why this is not a good idea. Good substrates don’t just soak up urine and mask the smells, they also provide enrichment for rats to carry out their natural instincts of digging and foraging. This guide will tell you exactly why fleece isn’t a good option as a substrate and also de-bunk some common misconceptions of fleece being recommended as a good substrate.
Improvements and Maintenance
Now you have your cage setup you may be thinking “Is there anything I can do to make it better?” You may think you have covered everything but have you missed something? Zoe Lumour of Azuline Rattery asked for volunteers recently to send in pictures of their set-ups and in return she would use her knowledge and experience to provide help of ways to improve their setups. Whether new owner or even experienced. There are always ways you can look at improving your rat cage setup. This guide shows examples of cage setups, mentions the best bits so far, provides advice on how to improve, and also gives suggested additions on what to purchase to make the cage better. You can look at this and compare things in your cage to see if there is anything you may be missing. Very cool idea and great to compare your setup to other peoples. Take a look at the How to Improve Your Rat Cage Set up guide now.
If you would like some good inspiration on cage setups then please check out the Cage Setup Megathread from the Rat Care UK Facebook Page. This thread encourages members to share photos of their setups for others to browse and get ideas from.
So, by now hopefully you know all you need to about setting up your rat cage. You now have yourself a good cage and have filled it with some good toys and hammocks to keep your rats comfy and well entertained. Remember the best rat cage setups are said to not have anywhere in the entire cage that a rat can fall from top to bottom. These are what fall breakers are for. Flat hammocks, ropes, netting etc all can be used to achieve this. The way to test if you have it right is to drop a small ball from anywhere in the top of the cage and if your cage is set up right the ball will not hit the bottom of the cage without hitting anything else on the way down.
Once you have everything set up and your rats living in there you will need to make sure to keep it clean. Not cleaning it enough will result in not only your cage smelling but also your rats will too. Over cleaning can actually make your rats smell worse too so doing it too often isn’t always the best way. To explain briefly how often to clean and what to use check out Cleaning Setups guide by Lurelin Rats. This will give you a better idea of keeping your cages clean and smell down to a minimum without upsetting or making your rats feel uncomfortable because their cage doesn’t smell like them. Cleaning and day to day Care for Pet Rats by The Rat Chat Podcast will also go through the basics of cage cleaning as well as day to day general care to help you establish a suitable routine. It may be hard at the start to know how often and how much cleaning to do especially as every group is different but once you achieve a good routine you can increase/decrease cleaning to what suits you and your rats until you get a good balance.
Enrichment and DIY Items
Not only is setting up the cage correctly very important in keeping rats happy and entertained but also continually mentally stimulating them is beneficial too. Rats are extremely clever animals and love to be challenged and kept busy. It’s okay filling their cage with comfy beds and places to hide but they will get bored of that very quickly. So how do we keep them occupied when they are in their cages?
Well you fill it with things called “enrichment items” and also make sure they have plenty of activities that will encourage them to follow natural instincts like foraging, climbing and digging. So what is enrichment and how does it apply to rats? Cage Enrichment by Isamu rats will show you the different natural instincts rats have and how you can change their setups and environments to help encourage these behaviours through different enrichment activities. Providing all different scenarios this guide will also show you some great examples of how to tick all the boxes to get each base covered. Want to find out more? Join The Rat Chat Podcast where they will go through Enrichment Activities For Your Pet Rats which will hopefully teach and inspire you to come up with different ways to keep your rats mentally stimulated and entertained.
The first and most obvious way to keep your rats entertained would be through adding items like toys and puzzle feeders to their cage. These not only fill the cage with different items other than hammocks or perches and things like that. It also gives your rats something to do to pass their time when nothing else entertaining is going on. So what are some good examples of the best toys out there to get for your rats. Don’t worry Shadow the Rat has this covered with the Rat Foraging Toys guide. This is a mega list of some of the best examples of toys and puzzle feeders you can get and each one is given a brief review of what the rats have to do to get it to work and basic thoughts overall of how good it is. There is also a great DIY Foraging toy section at the bottom which shows you how to make your own toys for your rats for if you are either on a budget or simply just want to give some things a try yourself. It really is a lot of fun making your own things for them and most of the time the things needed to make them you’ll most likely have in the house anyway.
If you would like to some more in depth reviews of some of these toys and more items including subscription boxes and things like that there is much more in the Rat foraging toy reviews playlist over on the Shadow The Rat YouTube channel.
Of course there is no more cost effective and fun way of filling your rats cages with all sorts of different fun things than making your own items and toys. There are a lot of great resources out there for trying things yourself. The Cage Setup guide by Lurelin Rats has many examples of DIY enrichment items including swings, foraging parcels and hang up toys. The Shadow The Rat Website has a great DIY section which can be found HERE. This is full of great things to try yourself including Agility obstacles, trick props, make your own travel cage and also a make your own rat wheel. Rat Toy Ideas by The Dapper Rat also if a great resource for all different types of toys and items to try yourself too. This guide is great at finding loads of different items you have lying around the house and making use out of them to entertain your rats.
Facebook also has some great pages on crafting and DIY Items too. The best 2 I have found so far are Crafty Rat Owners DIY & DIY Rat Toys. These pages have lots of very clever people who always share their newest ideas and creations with everyone else. Most of the time they will offer instructions for people to try it themselves too. I highly recommend if this is something that interests you to go and apply to join these groups now.
Going Bioactive
For those of you that may want to go a little further with your cages and give your rats some more enrichment you can think about making a deeper base out of perspex which will allow you to have space for deeper substrate at the bottom of your cage. You can also go one step further and go fully bioactive.
Doing a bioactive setup has many benefits. The main reasons being you will rarely have to clean out the substrate as it takes care of itself and also your rats will have fun digging tunnels all over. If this is something you are wondering about, the following 2 guides will explain perfectly all you need to know about going bioactive.
The first one to look at is So You’re Thinking About Going Bioactive by Lurelin Rats. This guide will explain to you what a bioactive set up is all about. It has a handy picture guide on how to make a Perspex base perfect for a much deeper substrate set up and also filling the base and maintaining the soil. Plus how to deal with soil pests too. This is a great way to look at starting your very own bioactive set up.
Also next we have An Introduction to Creating a Bioactive Rat Cage by Azuline Rattery. This will also talk you through preparation for a bioactive base and details of what to fill it with. It will also go into more details of what cleanup crews are and how they will help keep the substrate clean, also how to add extras into the soil to strengthen it so tunnels can be made and help to maintain the soil. Both these guides perfectly cover all you will need to know about taking that next step and going bioactive.
For more information and support on going bioactive check out the Naturalistic & Bioactive Rat Setups group on facebook.
Free Roam/Range
Although this isn’t directly related to setting up a cage it is a very important part of rat keeping and having a free roam setup is something you will want to have as part of your overall setup in general. Free roaming (also known as free ranging) is basically the act of letting your rats out of their cages into a different area for some extra space and a change of scenery for them to enjoy. Some people free roam their rats either daily or every other day whilst others opt to have their rats out most of the day or even permanently. Everyone is different and situations are also different. Some people have to free roam their rats in separate dedicated areas from their cages whilst some others can pop the door open and let them out too. Whatever your situation you have to make the best of your available area and design the free roam area that’s best for you.
There are 2 great ways to create a safe area to free roam your rats. The first is to take them into the best room in the house which has no escape opportunities. Somewhere with nowhere to disappear behind things like bath panels or anywhere with gaps/holes in walls etc for them to get lost. The other is to build an area around their cage that can be easily put up and taken down where you can have them run around safely without escape. How to create a safe training area (Free roam) by Shadow the Rat will show you two examples of how to achieve this second option. You can either make your own area as shown in the tutorial or buy pre made panels which you can use to build your very own free roam space. There is also some very handy sub guides in here too that will teach you how to keep your rats in their new play pens and also what to fill it with to keep them entertained.
For a great idea of something to make for your free roam area take a look at Creating a Naturalistic Free Range Setup by Azuline Rattery. This great guide will show you how Zoe made this lovely climbing frame out of flat pack panels you can buy and turned it into a great space for the rats to climb on and enjoy by adding carious different items for the rats to play with. You can use this as inspiration and possibly make your own variant on this for your free roam setups too just like I did. Inspired by this guide I wanted to make something for people who have less space for a free roaming area than others but still wanted to give their rats lots of room to run around. Just because you don’t have a lot of actual floor space doesn’t mean you can’t create more by making something. So I decided to make a guide on what I call “The Rat Jungle Gym.” This is a structure built up over a few different levels filled with twists, turns and toys for your rats to have fun and play on but it also doesnt take up much room at all. You can make it as big as you want and also any shape you want and the beauty of it is you can add to it or change it at any time.
One question that comes up all the time is whether or not you can take your rats outside for some free roaming. The short answer is you can, but you shouldn’t. There is a lot of people out there that may disagree with this and that is their personal choice but it isn’t something I would like to encourage at all. There are not a lot of benefits to taking your pet rats outside and there are a lot of negatives to it. Just purely the stress you could be putting them through alone is enough for me to be against encouraging it at all. Can you take your pet rats outside by Azuline Rattery covers this in more detail. It will further explain why this is a bad idea by covering the topics of exposing them to bad parasites and bacteria, exposing them to potential predators and the chances of them falling into something or losing them completely. These are just a few examples of how quickly things can go wrong and it’s just now worth risking. There are a few things you can do to bring the outside to them as suggested in this guide too just make sure anything you bring in from the outside is correctly quarantined, cleaned and research has been done to make sure it is safe. The Rat Wiki guide on Why Not To Take Pet Rats Outside further looks into this topic further as well.
That is it for the basics of cages and filling. Remember everyone has to start somewhere so if you just get it filled nicely with plenty of places to hide, sleep and play your rats will love it. Rats aren’t fussy at all. They don’t care if you give them an expensive puzzle feeder toy or a cardboard box. Their little imaginations will make plenty of use from either so start off with homemade toys and DIY hammocks at first and build your way up over time. Soon you’ll find you’ll have enough stuff to fill 2 cages.
Now all you have to do is try and resist buying a second cage and filling it with more rats. Good luck on that one!!!
The Rat Wiki 