Plea To Hobby Breeders
Of Short-Tailed Opossums (STO)
By Molly Kalafut
Plea To Hobby Breeders - Go Slowly
I often get emails starting like this: "I saw short tailed opossums at a pet store (or on the Internet), and they were so cute I bought two of them. What do they eat and how soon will they breed?" This is so sad on on so many different levels! I firmly believe that people should wait to breed until after they know how to feed and care for them. Instead of buying STO and immediately trying to breed them - please try owning these special critters as pets for a few years before breeding. Get familiar with their temperaments, habits, activities, feeding, care and health. When you finally do breed them you'll be more confident and better prepared to handle the risks involved. You'll have a better idea of what is normal, or unusual, or possibly dangerous. Otherwise, if you've only had your STO for a couple months and immediately try breeding - everything will be a mystery, you won't know what is normal or not, and you run a much higher risk of your pair fighting or killing each other, or the mother cannibalizing her litters.
Blind Leading the Blind
When you buy short tailed opossums and immediately breed them, you'll be just about as much a "newbie" about the opossums as the people who you are selling them to. People who buy the STO from you will consider you the expert - and if you've only owned them a few months...you're probably not an expert. Short-tailed opossum owners who have years of experience with the animal (but never bred them) are more experienced than you are. Personally, I wouldn't consider a hobby breeder an "expert" until they can really describe the entire life cycle of their animal - including what happens normally as part of the aging process, what are normal and abnormal behaviors and when to consult a veterinarian.
Why Now?
If you've never owned a short tail opossum before and are determined to buy a pair and breed them - the question I have for you is "why the rush?". Why does the breeding have to be now and not a few years down the road after you have experience and really know if you love short tailed opossums? Maybe you'll find you don't like them. Or you'll find you like them so much you don't want to risk breeding them - remember that every breeding attempt carries a substantial risk of injury or death to one or both animals. If your answer to why you want to breed is about making money, and isn't about the welfare of your pets - please rethink breeding.
Reasons People Give For Breeding Their STO
1. Mine are so sweet I bet they'd make great babies. This doesn't always (or usually) work out according to plan no matter what the species - STO, dogs, cats or people. You could even end up with the worst traits of both. Worse, what happens if one of your beloved STO kills the other sweet STO during the mating process? It's devastating.
2. I want to make money. It sounds like easy money - maybe have 10 babies, at $100 each, that's $1,000, right? Unfortunately it doesn't usually work that way. The expenses can really add up too, since STO are solitary - having to get 10 different cages isn't cheap. A local market can be quickly saturated and not many people want to pay for shipping. I know of several cases where breeders couldn't sell their opossums and ended up giving them (for free) to local pet stores, and others who shipped their STO at a loss.
3. I want my children to witness the miracle of birth. There are dozens of ways your children can experience this miracle - television programs, VHS/DVDs, school programs, even the local farm, Girl Scouts or 4H club. And solitary STO are a very bad choice of animal to illustrate any sort of breeding 'miracle' - imagine trying to explain to your children the 'miracle' of the pair attacking each other, the father killing the mother during mating, or the mother killing and eating her entire litter. Even if the breeding goes well, the mating process itself is not particularly sentimental and is even disturbing to many first-time breeders - the male literally wrestles and holds the female down so she can't get away.
4. They're so cute, everybody will want them. While 70% of the country has a dog or cat, people are far less likely to buy exotic pets. Especially opossums that remind many people (unpleasantly) of rats. And many people who do want exotic pets often can't afford them and only want them if they are free. Just one or two litters of STO can often go a very long way towards saturating your local market and you may find that you can't even give them away for free.
5. I've bred sugar gliders so I already know what to do. Just because they're both small marsupials does not make them similar biologically or reproductively. Sugar gliders and short-tailed opossums are separated by more than 50 million years of development, and geographically by separate continents. Sugar gliders are social, STO are not. Sugar gliders generally have 2 babies, STO can have up to 13. Sugar gliders go into heat, short-tailed opossums are induced ovulators. Sugar glider mothers are caring towards their young, short-tailed opossum mothers often act oblivious to their offspring and will trample them underfoot. I can go on and on. If you're an experienced sugar glider breeder you are more likely to be shocked by the callous breeding instincts of the opossums.
Please keep all these points in mind before deciding to breed your short-tailed opossums.
