Inquiry & Q's : RodentPro

Originally Posted by Joejr14

I'd rather spend the extra money and get a product that looks better than a lot of things that are sold in meat cases on grocery stores...

Jesus Joe, where are you buying your groceries?


Chris

My last order from RP (arrived a week ago) was excellent as always. Very frozen, better quality than the much more expensive frozen rodents sold by my local pet store.

I have ordered rat pups from RP once and was very dissatisfied with the quality. I remember seeing limbs, feces,shavings etc in the bags. I know it is impossible to keep them totally clean but the amount was unacceptable. I had to throw away some due to some of my snakes refusing to take them. I've been ordering from Big Cheese for a couple of years now and have no complaints. I also pick up live orders when I can and agree that they run a clean shop. I can also say that my rats consistently arrive chubby and gut loaded not to mention relatively clean and intact. Just my two cents.


Jose

Just did another order with RodentPro - first time using Greyhound (too many rodents for UPS)

Got both an e-mail and phone call letting my know they had shipped.
While they arrived just fine - I probably will just pay the extra money to do multiple UPS boxes next time. Nothing to do with RodentPro - everything to do with Greyhound.

The arrival time at Greyhound was 2:00. Unfortunately, my local Greyhound closes at 2:30 and doesn't open again until evening - so if I called ahead, they would have been closed by the time I got there. So I went in at 2:00. The package did not come in.

It did come in on the Bus that arrives at 11:30 PM - but again, Greyhound closes at night shortly after that Bus arrives - so I had to wait until morning to go get them.

They were well packed, two boxes inside one bigger box. The bottom box still had plenty of dry ice - the top box, one of the dry ice slabs had completely vanished and the second was close to vanishing, so while the mice in that box were still frozen, it was close. Not worth the few bucks I saved to risk delivery of a thawed mess, especially with the hassles of local Greyhound hours of operation.

Originally Posted by Joejr14

Everything from TMF was considerably larger than the identical item at Big Cheese. I was thawing out Big Cheese 'hoppers' that were smaller than TMF fuzzies.

This is one reason why Rodent Pro is better than most companies. Most will sell you "hoppers", "smalls", "mediums", etc, but there is no standardization. One mans hopper could be the next mans small! Rodent Pro at least gives you a well defined weight range that they adhere to (most of the time...see comment below). So instead of comparing apples to oranges, compare weights to weights when you are deciding who's the cheapest.

I have ordered thousands upon thousands of rats from them. I even drove up to indiana with a friend of mine (a 10h drive one way) and completely filled the bed of his truck with boxes of rats. I have had only a single instance where I was dissatisfied with their product. I received a box of medium and large rats from them and they appeared smaller than normal. So, being the good scientist, I broke out the balance and weighed the 60 or so rats I got. It ended up that about half didn't fall within the range that they publish on their website. So I emailed them, explaining the situation and proposed that they refund me the difference in price for the rats that were underweight. They agreed, appoligized, and promptly credited me the difference. This is what makes a great company; one that will admit to and rectify mistakes when they are made. I still occasionally weigh the rats I receive to ensure that they are still within spec and haven't had a problem since.

Originally Posted by TripleMoonsExotic

I had a conversation with a buddy about the broken limb/head situation with RodentPro (which doesn't bother me in the least) and he said that if they are flash freezing (liquid nitrogen), the first couple minutes after the flash freezing they would be extremely brittle. Which would mean any bumping could cause breaking. I looked on RP web site and didn't see anything about flash freezing, but that doesn't mean they don't do it.

There is no way that they flash freeze their rats in LN2. LN2 runs for around 25-50 cents a liter and it would not be economically feasible for them to use.

Also, for those who commented about them taking so long for orders...this is from their website:

"Once an order is received, time is needed to harvest, process, freeze, and package the products we produce to make them available for shipping. Our goal is to keep frozen inventory to a minimum and to process orders as they are received, making the end product much fresher for our customers."

I don't know about you, but I'd rather buy rats that are freshly frozen versus those that have been sitting in a warehouse freezer for a month or two.

I still get my Frozen from Rodent Pro. Casey treats me good.

I order and it is there at Cleveland and he even delivers it on a cart for me. Thanks Casey you are awesome!

I've looked at a lot of rodent vendors and very few have acceptable distinctions in their rodent sizes.

RodentPro offers:
extra small pinkies
small pinkies
large pinkies
peach fuzzies
fuzzies
hoppers
weanlings
large adults
extra large adults

I don't personally need the extra small pinkies, everything I currently breed hatches out big enough for small pinkies. I do however need peach fuzzies, and very few offer a size between large pinky and fuzzy. I like to get young colubrids onto peach fuzzies as soon as I can because pinkies a fairly worthless nutritionally, but if ordering fuzzies from some of these vendors, I'll get some that fit the need - but a bunch that are too big. The ones that are too big will be useful later, but I need to make sure I have enough that aren't too big.

Also - when figuring in shipping, I've yet to find one that competes with rodent pro.

Just last week or so someone suggested a vendor that offers free shipping to east coast, reduced shipping to west coast.

Guess what - after figuring the rodent pro price per item including their portion of the shipping charge, rodent pro was considerably cheaper than this other vendors base price BEFORE adding the "reduced" shipping to west coast. And they didn't have a peach fuzzy size.

The white one fuzzy here is TMF, the black hopper is Rodentpro. These are random picks from the bag. That's all I'm gonna' say.

Thomas,

Can you post a picture of the bag with hoppers from both sources?

Thanks