soya milk

Question

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Followup To

Question - what age can it be before we can rehabilitate it into the wild because he was approx 1 day old when we found him
hi

me and my mom rescued a baby rat and we found out it was lactouse intolerant so would soya milk be better please respond

alex

Answer -
Hi, most animals cannot digest cows milk unless we are talking about calves! The best milk is their mothers but obviously your baby rat doesn't have a mother. You could try to see if you can get some normal lactose free milk, if not you could see how the soya milk works but its hard to tell how well it would digest that and it could have problems with that too. All you can do is get it to eat something without it causing the poos to be soft and runny. Actual baby foods and baby milk are quite good. All you want to do is get it to eat because if it doesn't eat then it won't have a very good chance of survival. Sometimes they can be quite weak as they aren't getting antibodies from their mother's milk and they can be prone to infections. Just do the best you can and good luck with the little creature! Let me know how you get on!

Answer
Rehabilitating the rat successfully will be almost impossible as it has imprinted on humans and has no idea how to survive in the wild. I would suggest finding a rehabilitation centre as they have experience of releasing animals back into the wild. It's a complicated process, not just as simple as letting it go, if that is done it will either starve to death or get eaten probably in the first few hours. Hope this helps