litter train?

Question
I would like to know who said rats don't smell!  I have two young females, and yes, they are always cleaning themselves, but their cage stinks!  They smell too, most likely because one or both of them always pees and poos in their bed.  I put two litter boxes in their cage with aspen pellets, and no other litter on the floor.  Just some bedding or paper towels to shred in their box.  They do go in one litter box, but they also go all around it.  When I give them paper towels for bedding, they saturate those.  Maybe it's just one of them, I don't know.  I clean everything out every other day, and I wipe down all the shelves, but they really stink.  How do I go about litter training them?  If they are such clean animals, why do they pee in their bed?  It's not just a little for marking, the bedding is soaked.


Answer
All animals smell. Dogs smell, esp when wet. Cats smell, rats smell.  What is often said about rats is that they are cleaner animals than most people would think.

Not all rats marinate themselves with their own urine in their sleeping quarters. Some do, some dont. It just depends on the individual rat, I think. My boys will wake up, get out of their bed, go in the corner litter box and pee their tiny hearts out and go back to bed again. However, there are times when the paper towels are a bit damp with urine, its usually not alot and hardly has an odor.  My boys have been known to push their poops out of the cage onto the floor rather than have it laying around on their shelves. I have an old rat that is blind and cannot walk, and he spends alot of time in his little hidey ball. He used to be litter box trained but when he started having trouble getting around, he goes to the bathroom in the corner of his hidey ball and will toss the poops out of the ball. I change out the huge pile of paper towels several times a day to keep him dry and clean and he really appreciates it. He spends alot of time grooming himself and even ME!  There is never an odor unless he has really loose stools from a certain baby food he may have eaten.

For starters, if the girls are younger than 1 years old and already making an attempt to use their litter box, thats a good sign. Usually baby rats and younger rats dont really have the ability to hold their urine in during sleep, much like a human child that wets to bed. They should stop wetting to bed when they mature more.

Also, what type of cage do you have? Is it powder coated or galvanized steel? Galvanized wire can hold in urine odors and the cage will end up smelling terribly from urine even in a short period of time.

Food can also play a role in the odor that they have as far as their stool goes and intake of water is important too, in order to make the urine more dilute.


Let me know about those few things and we can try to figure this out.