I have two adorable male rats but they do smell a bit LOL! :lol: Any advice for the best kind of cage bedding? I've heard cat litter mentioned, I assume you mean the paper-based pellets?

thanks!

i use carefesh. it is a paper product that reduces the smell somewhat

Aspen chips have a light scent to them, and they contorl nasty boy odors as well.(I have two boys and can vouch for this xD )

Just don't get the shredded aspen, it's kinda dusty.

I've known MANY people who swear by the odor control of Yesterday's News cat litter as bedding. It's only suitable because it is paper based as you said, other cat litters are NOT safe to use. I'd recommend trying it just because I've heard so much good of it as far as odor control ^^

Thanks everyone! I am in the UK so I don't think I can get Yesterdays News here. I heard that Bio-Catolet, a paper-based cat litter, was OK to use?

yeah, its pretty much the same thing

My rats HATED Yesterday's News (so did my cat, incidentally). The texture of the "small animals" YN is not that much different from the cat's. I use Kaytee's comfort bedding. Also, my favorite thing to use which controlled odor even better than the Total Comfort was shredded (unbleached) paper towels! My dad works for an elementary school, and he put packages of those through a shredder for me. The rats loved it, I loved it.. a very cheap win-win situation!

I like aspen the most. I don't like the way carefresh smells when it gets wet blah

I had the grey carefresh for a while and Giz (I had her by herself for a few weeks) sneezed like mad. Other than the sneezing, nothing was wrong with her, no discharge, eating, drinking, playing fine, etc. I switched her to the Carefresh ultra to see if it would make a difference and voila, no more sneezing! Now I have 3 rats in a small-medium cage and I end up cleaning it AT LEAST every 3-4 days though. But I do like the carefresh ultra. by the way, I'm looking into getting them a bigger cage.

I love YN for odor control. Carefresh wasn't nearly as good, and corncob was just awful. Aspen is good too though, and doesn't cost as much.

Aspen is by far the best in odor control IMHO. It's also much cheaper than other types of bedding (141 liter bag of aspen cost around $16 at petco, 10 liters of recycled paper cost around $8 at petco,$4.50 uncolored at Wal mart).