05/03/2026
Sometimes, as keepers, we make mistakes. I think it’s important to talk about them, even when it’s painful. This is one of mine.
I lost all but one individual of my first ASF litter of 9 this week after making a bad call.
I was concerned about something I was observing ('dusty' fur) and asked for advice. Some of the answers I got focused on something else: removing moss from the nest. It wasn’t something I had seen as a problem, but it made me second guess what I was seeing. Maybe they knew better.
It wasn’t their fault what happened, either.
By removing material from the nest, the mother rats decided it wasn’t suitable anymore and moved the babies. At the stage they were in, that created a cascade I didn’t understand at the time. They were mobile enough to wander, but not developed enough to consistently stay where they needed to be. Without a stable, established nest, they couldn’t thermoregulate on their own. They chilled quickly. I started finding them one by one over the course of a few days. I panicked and put everything back the way it was, and I lost more.
I didn’t know.
The one silver lining is that I learned. I was also able to diagnose the original issue I was asking about by examining them closely, and it’s something I can fix. It turned out to be minor (fur mites), and it wasn’t what caused the losses, but it was there and my intuition had been right.
That part isn't what’s been sticky in my thoughts since, though.
When we keep animals, especially when we breed them, we’re making decisions on their behalf constantly. Their environment, their care, when we step in and when we don’t. In a lot of ways, we are "playing god."
That responsibility should feel heavy. Because when we make mistakes, we don’t experience the consequences to their full extent. *They do.* Fully. Sometimes the most extreme version of that consequence.
And a lot of the time, those mistakes don’t come from neglect or indifference. They come from trying to do the right thing, from taking advice, from acting quickly because something feels off, from not wanting to get it wrong.
Finding the balance between listening to others and trusting what you’re seeing in your own animals is hard. Adjusting based on the individuals in front of you instead of defaulting to general advice is hard. Choosing not to intervene when everything in you says “do something” is *hard.*
But so is living with the outcome when we do get it wrong.
I don’t think the goal is to never make mistakes. That’s not realistic. But I do think accountability matters. Sitting with it matters. Letting it change how seriously we take the lives in our care matters.
These are small animals, feeder animals. It would be easy to treat them as expendable, as objects instead of something we owe respect to. If we lose respect for life, there's no point in keeping anymore. The first time I had to dispatch an animal, I went into it knowing exactly what I was doing and why. It was controlled. It was intentional. It was done as cleanly and humanely as I could manage. It was hard, but it made sense.
This is different.
Trying to do the right thing and still losing them anyway sits in a completely different place. There’s no clean justification to fall back on. No certainty. Just the knowledge that your decision, however well-intentioned, had a hand in the outcome.
I had one die in my hand. I saw it starting to crash and did what I was supposed to do, but it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t fast enough. It wasn’t the right timing.
We’re human. We’re going to make mistakes.
What matters is what we do with them, whether we take accountability, whether we learn, whether we let it change how we move forward.
I think it’s important to share these moments. Not just so others might avoid the same outcome, but because this side of keeping and breeding is real too. It isn’t all perfect setups, new babies, and beautiful Instagram photos.
Sometimes it’s grief, and the kind of lessons you don’t get to learn any other way. I wish there was a way, that they would understand, to tell them I'm sorry. Because I'm so sorry.
