Bamboo rat farming not only has low feeding costs, but the profits are also considerable

You can get rich raising rats too! You read that right, raising rats. But not the kind of rats we usually see - bamboo rats.

Hunan Wangda Special Breeding Professional Cooperative introduced bamboo rats, and the momentum is currently very good - they have already begun breeding a new generation. Recently, under the guidance of General Manager He, the person in charge of the cooperative, the author walked into the bamboo rat breeding site to take in the presence of these "giant rats." At the breeding farm, in square grid nests of about one square meter each, built from large ceramic tiles, pairs of bamboo rats either stood or lay lazily resting. At the first sight of visitors, they immediately became alert and observed with "shifty eyes"; seeing no movement, they went back to busying themselves with their own affairs.

Of the newly introduced bamboo rats, the small ones weighed only about 400 grams, and the large ones only 750 grams. By now, the large ones already weigh 2.5 kg, and a few already weigh 3 kg. Now, the large bamboo rats have begun to breed the next generation. Bamboo rats mate in the normal natural way; after mating, they give birth after a 50-day pregnancy, and can produce 3 litters a year. Each litter can yield 1-5 baby bamboo rats.

The farm owner said that in farming bamboo rats, they were also constantly exploring and gaining experience. When they first started in 2009, with the first litter of newborn bamboo rats, because they had no experience, they thought it was the same as handling other animals and wiped the baby bamboo rats clean with a rag before placing them next to the mother rat. Little did they know that because the babies had picked up the human scent, they were rejected by the mother rat, who refused to nurse them, causing the baby bamboo rats to starve to death.

Bamboo rats are timid by nature and become frightened at the slightest disturbance. When the keepers first came into contact with them, the bamboo rats were also shy of strangers and seemed very afraid. Only after a long time did they calm down. In feeding bamboo rats, feed input is actually relatively easy - at present, their company only needs about 25 kg of moso bamboo per day, supplemented by rice bran mixed with rice cooked into rice. This rice is still the cheapest old rice from previous years, saving quite a bit of cost. The two pairs of front teeth of bamboo rats are extremely sharp; slices of green moso bamboo are chewed into fragments in the blink of an eye, and even the small iron plates used to hold the rice have been bitten out of shape by the bamboo rats. It is understood that if a cat rashly enters the nest of an adult bamboo rat, the result is that the cat will be bitten to death by the bamboo rats.

A bamboo rat is a treasure from head to tail. It is said that lobster, once a must-have at banquets, has largely been replaced by bamboo rat meat in Hunan. At present, one kilogram of bamboo rat meat costs 160 yuan, bamboo rat whiskers cost 40,000 yuan per kilogram, a writing brush made from a single rat whisker is worth over a thousand yuan, and a rat fur coat costs tens of thousands of yuan at every turn...