This is something I’ve seen come up a few times recently in posts elsewhere, from talking to various people, and from my own experiences.

Before you contact a breeder, whether you are another breeder, someone looking to adopt, or just someone with questions, please make sure you’ve read through their website FIRST. All to often people contact breeders without looking at their site at all. Some don’t even load the site, they just grab email addresses from a websearch or links elsewhere. In many cases, the answers to their questions or inquiries are already posted in policies, FAQs, etc. 

If you are an adopter – looking through a site can potentially tell you if the person breeds a variety you are even interested in adopting. If they only breed red eyed siamese, champagne and silver fawn, etc, and you only want rats with black eyes – contacting them asking for baby rats with black eyes isn’t likely going to do you much good. Its also a chance for you to look at how they operate, and make sure they are someone you are willing to support. Check out my post on Breeders & Rescues VS Pestores – https://moonlitwatersrattery.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/breeders-rescues-vs-petstores/ – it goes over the idea that who you give money to matters, and that YOU as the adopters, are in a position of power to make sure that breeders and suppliers of animals are pushed to make improvements and do the best for the animals, by only giving money to the people whose practices and ethics are acceptable to you.

If you are a breeder or future breeder – contacting another breeder you don’t know without reading their site, and asking about things that are openly stated ON the site is a really good way to ensure they won’t want to work with you any time soon. If you email someone just asking for breeding stock, without reading what their policies are on adopting breeding stock, etc, its not likely you’ll be getting rats from them. Think about it from their perspective – they’ve taken the time to put that information out there to be easily found and read. They’ve put a LOT of time, effort, energy, resources, etc into their animals. If you aren’t even going to bother reading their site, how do they know if you’ll bother to do the things that require more effort, such as taking proper care of the animals, accurate reporting back to them with information about the animals, etc? Cutting corners on something as simple as reading the website is certainly not going to give them confidence in you or your ability to follow through with things appropriately elsewhere.

If you just have a question, whether adopter, breeder, or just curious person – before emailing, make sure its not already posted. It can get you your answer much sooner, and save you and the breeder time in emailing back and forth, waiting for emails to land, etc. This isn’t to say you  shouldn’t email to talk to a breeder! Conversation is great and very important! But emailing to ask when babies from a litter will be available, when its posted right on the litter page, isn’t a good way to start a conversation. While most breeders I know would love to spent time chatting with people who have questions, concerns, curiosities, etc, they also get frustrated when they get questions that they have already taken the time to publicly answer, sometimes in detail, on their website.

So again – while contacting and asking questions is certainly good and even to be encouraged, please make sure you read what is already available first. The breeder has taken the time to answer the question already, and will appreciate conversing with you much more if you’ve taken the time to read what they’ve written!