Okay, I know this is old, but I feel like I should say something. Don't get me wrong, I love rats - my first rat I adopted in order to save him from being snake food. However, as a snake owner as well, I do understand the need to breed feeders. I think it is extremely rude to post it here on a forum for people who keep them as pets, which is why I came here in the first place, to find people who like rats as much as I do. However, for a large scale herp breeder, one's snakes have to eat and the more snakes you have the more they eat. They have to get their snake's food somewhere. Even if they don't feed live, someone has to breed those rats and freeze them so they can buy them frozen. And when you have several hundred snakes to feed, trying to buy food for that many (frozen or alive) is expensive beyond belief. It is sort of sticking your head in the sand to think that nobody should breed rats as feeders. I don't particularly like the way some of them ask questions about how to get the most babies in the shortest amount of time, but most breeders are not like that. I answer questions on the herp forum I belong to about taking care of their feeders because they do care. They are animal lovers too and don't want to treat the rats badly even if they are "just feeders".
And in defense of myself, I don't breed my rats or my gerbils. I have two of the same sex of each, all in their own tanks, and I feed my snake on frozen because I couldn't bear to have to kill a rattie to feed it and feeding live is extremely dangerous to your snake (plus I don't particularly want to see the snake sqeezing the life out of an adorable little rattie that I had to take care of and by some miracle avoid becoming attached to before I fed it to said snake).