NARR: The North American Rat Registry

I'm sure you've seen the logo or a link on almost every breeder's website: NARR, the North American Rat Registry. You will find that most breeders belong to this registration site, paying their fees for access to the giant database of rat pedigrees and to include their own rats in it.

NARR is useful as a tool for breeders, indeed, it may be one of the most important tools we currently have access to. A breeder's personal Breeder's Assistant program will contain most of the pedigree information for all their own rats, back as many generations as they felt necessary to include. However, it is unlikely that the information in the back-end of the pedigree is ever updated in our personal Breeder's Assistant.

NARR not only keeps track of all this back-pedigree information, but actively seeks more and to correct the errors that exist in it. Using NARR, you can go back many, many generations of rats from your current stock, and see the trends of where they started out and where they went from there. You can pinpoint color recessives when a surprise turns up, and see what other breeders may have handled or shared in your bloodline through the years.

However, the most important factor of NARR is the most often neglected. NARR also works to track health and longevity information, and here is where the very people who have the most to gain by using it fall down on the job.

NARR can only present us with the information that we put into it. NARR is not just there in order to make adopters feel important by presenting them with a registration number and a certificate. It is a very important tool for the tracking of genetics, health and longevity, and when the member breeders fail to take advantage of this part of the tool, they reduce it to a pretty toy where people can find out about nice colors and nothing more.

Dates of death are the easiest thing to have listed in NARR. Often, adopters fall out of contact, despite numerous requests from the breeder to remain in contact and share information. However, most breeders keep at least one baby from every litter, and so they have some sort of baseline of the longevity of the rats they are directly working with. The date of death should always be submitted to NARR. It is also worth noting that adopters themselves can use the online health update form to record dates of death on their own, even if they have fallen out of contact with the breeder.

Cause of death is even more important, and even less likely to be there. Unless you are a veterinarian, there is no way to know what your rat died of. Every rat in a breeding program should be necropsied (see our Necropsies article for details!) in order to tell exactly what is going on, healthwise, in your rattery and your bloodlines.

Yet strangely, most breeders do not update NARR at all, except to register their litters and get numbers!

Why don't breeders post this information?

Some breeders feel that posting health problems in their line in a public place will cause others to judge them. They feel that if they have necropsies and make such information public, that other breeders will not want to use their lines, and that pet people will not want to adopt from them. In some ways, that is true, but it is a truth that we must work to correct. It was not so long ago that no one would dare publically post that they had a viral or bacterial infection in their rattery; now, we applaud those who are honest, and protect other ratteries with that information. The same should be true of long-term bloodline health information.

Not posting this information, and not giving it to those who adopt from bloodlines which may have serious issues with health and longevity, is tantamount to adopting out a rat one knows is infected with SDA. Worse, in many ways, since an SDA infection is over in 90 days, but long-term health and longevity issues may not crop up until the other breeder has bred several generations from the new rat.

Some breeders may fear the general outcry that they should end lines that have serious health defects, such as heritable tumors, lactation and birthing issues, aggression, deformities or megacolon. The truth is, that only the breeder with the line has control over whether or not they should be breeding a certain line. Some feel that they can, through selection, intense veterinary scrutiny, and outcrossing, breed out a heritable health issue. If a breeder wishes to try, that is up to them; but concealing that information and forcing other breeders who may adopt members of that bloodline to use without knowing the risks, is unethical.

The other reason that some do not post this information is that they simply do not know. They do not stay in contact with adopters and get health information back that way; they adopt out adult animals they have bred and skew their health and longevity information that way; they do not have necropsies performed. No one wants to advertise that they are, essentially, ignorant of their own bloodlines.

Still others may be afraid of backlash from those who gave them breeding stock. Will they be angry and think you're ungrateful if you post about the horrible temperament problems you're having with their line? Will they begin to badmouth you and say its your own fault, that all the littermates they kept are fine?

Generally speaking, these sort of social anxieties have been allowed to get in the way of truly tracking the health and longevity of our fancy bloodlines. No bloodline is perfectly healthy. In fact, let me say that again for emphasis - no bloodline is perfectly healthy. There is no reason to panic if something crops up in your bloodlines, because there is not a single bloodline out there that is completely clean as far as heritable issues go.

However, without the knowledge of exactly what has gone wrong in the line in the past, every breeder who gets rats from that line must start from scratch, without knowing which issues exist and should be looked out for, what sort of rats to avoid crossing into that line, etc. That puts progress back to zero every time a new breeder uses that bloodline!

An emotional attachment to the perfection of our bloodlines is never a good idea. It should not be offensive to us if someone else has a problem with our lines that we have not had. It is all information to be gathered and used. The problems others have may in fact be an environmental issue and not a genetic one, but until more people start posting these things, there will be no way to sort out one from the other.

What is to be done?

The more of us who band together to supply this information to NARR, the more (hopefully) this sort of reporting will become the norm.

We should be supporting and approving ratteries who go the extra mile in open, honest reporting of health issues that crop up. These issues should be discussed and handled responsibly and ethically. Whether or not we agree that it is or is not ethical to continue a line that has produced health issues, the important question is whether the breeder is aware and open about the problem, or are they living in denial and hiding it? Are they subjecting other breeders to surprise health issues, or are they letting others make those decisions in an informed manner?

And while NARR is obviously the most important place a breeder can go to for this information, we should also support more disclosure on rattery bridge pages, so that pet adopters can do their own checking and make their own informed decisions.

It would seem that the short-term effect of such posting will be that other rat fanciers will look at the ratteries who are actually doing the public posting and compare them unfavorably to those that are not. After all, Breeder Y keeps posting about all these issues in her line, and Breeder X never seems to have any problems at all!

However, the long term effects should be exactly the opposite: why is Breeder X never posting anything at all about the health of their lines? Do they even know it?

The more of us who post this vital information to NARR and our personal rattery sites, the more useful NARR will become, the more informed we will all be about the health of various bloodlines, and, in the long-term, the more we can truly work toward making health and longevity a viable breeding goal!