This critter loves to eat bamboo. Once so popular nationwide that it sold for 400 yuan each, now at 40 yuan each there are buyers willing but no sellers.

With the development of our country's economy, today's farmers are no longer the peasants of the past who faced the yellow earth with their backs to the sky. After learning breeding techniques, many people have started developing the breeding industry in rural areas. The cost of breeding is higher than farming, but the returns are several times those of farming, so the rural breeding industry never lacks newcomers.

Besides the conventional chicken and pig farming, many novel breeding projects have also drawn the attention of farmer friends. Some made a fortune from them, while others, lacking experience, lost everything.

Long ago, on a TV program, many people first learned about bamboo rats, and the story of that one breeder who turned his fortunes around and got rich from bamboo rats inspired many others. In those years, bamboo rats were extremely popular, and it could be said there was no worry about finding a market, booming across the whole country. The price of a single breeding pair reached 800 yuan, equivalent to 400 yuan each.

But in those years the fame of the bamboo rat spread, and even though breeding stock was expensive, many breeders still bought them and put them into production. However, bamboo rat breeding is not as simple as it was described on TV; in actual practice there are quite a few problems.

The first is the issue of the bamboo rat's habits. It has a rather ferocious and combative temperament, and is usually kept one male and one female in the same room. If an outside male bamboo rat is introduced, they will fight each other until one of them dies. The bamboo rat's teeth are formidable, because it is an animal that likes to eat bamboo, its teeth are very sharp, and once they fight each other it causes heavy losses for the breeder. The bamboo rat is itself a wild animal, it has a wild nature and is hard to tame, something many people did not consider before breeding them.

Secondly, breeding bamboo rats is also rather difficult, because in the early days of bamboo rat farming the most profitable part was selling breeding stock. If you could successfully breed them, that meant you could make money, but breeding is a specialized technical skill that many farmers do not understand, and the failure rate is relatively high.

Finally, there is the issue of the market for bamboo rats. Today the bamboo rat can be said to be an "internet-famous" animal, and quite a few young people like to use it to make memes, but actual bamboo rats seen on the market are few. Only in the Guangdong and Fujian areas do people eat them, and they are hard to find elsewhere. This shows that the bamboo rat is not a mass-market consumer product, and its market is limited.

Now there are bamboo rat breeders all over the country. As many people failed to make money in recent years and dropped out, the popularity of the bamboo rat has gradually declined, and along with it the price. A commercial bamboo rat costs around 40 yuan, which is still not a bad price, but there are buyers willing and no sellers. If bamboo rats could one day become an everyday food like pork, then it would probably be worth getting into.