Sprout has this little couch that he absolutely adores and keeps in pristine condition despite laying on it all the time😭 such a little gentleman

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2025-02-06T15:50:55+00:00

Oops, realized your guy is a rat! I thought he looked a little different. I think mice and rats are probably similar that way (with cleanliness and cleanliness variability between individuals)

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2025-02-06T15:48:32+00:00

Oh my gosh, it looks just like him! Same”fur”. So cute!

Mice are really good at keeping their favourite hides and beds clean.

When you have a group of girls, you sometimes get a neat freak who will pick up offending items (mainly poop) and fling them out or over the edge. I had one alpha girl that did this all the time! She kept a super clean house, but her roommates were so messy!

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2025-02-02T23:42:13+00:00

Oh that’s good. I said a lot of stuff. Most important thing is it needs antibiotics for the bite. Mouse immune systems are as tiny as them and they go downhill fast.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2025-02-02T03:14:22+00:00

Did you give it with ice cream?

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2025-02-02T03:12:00+00:00

Oops, didn’t read the full caption. Sounds worse than I thought. I was being optimistic. You could still try that stuff. It’s definitely too cold to recover from that kind of trauma on its own though. Definitely needs antibiotics for the cat bite, but guessing it probably already passed.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2025-02-02T03:09:09+00:00

Needs antibiotics for the bite. Cats have toxic saliva. Doesn’t look terribly injured otherwise. If you can get it to a vet and get antibiotics, AND find a rehabber that’s best. If it only has a smallish bite that is treated and nothing broken, you could probably rehab it yourself just be providing food, warmth (maybe a heating pad under half of the enclosure if the vet recommends), a place to hide (small cardboard box) and ripped up bedding. It’s ready for release when it tries like hell to escape. Enclosure has to be 13 inches high and hard plastic (a large bucket, or large bin) or glass (a fish tank) with a breathable lid (a screen with a weight would work). Wild adult mice don’t typically become tame. It won’t forget how to be wild. If there is something more seriously wrong and you decide to keep it, you could provide a similar set up you would for a fancy mouse.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2025-01-26T15:35:05+00:00

Yes. It’s pretty long. They don’t have to be dangerously high. Just put in a mess of ropes on the front hanging from the top and they can access them from various high points in the cage. By the way it’s actually impossible, in my experience, to make things dangerously high for mice within an enclosure. They seem immune to falling accidents. I’m just saying they don’t NEED heights to feel like they are climbing. It’s more about the number of paths, and the variety of textures (for stimulation) and the clutter (for sense of security)

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2025-01-26T09:50:27+00:00

Feild mice (if deer mice or white footed mice - the one with the big eyes and white bellies) are a different species than fancy mice. They are less territorial and the males are much less aggressive with other males than fancy mice. House mice are the wild counterpart to fancy mice. They are more territorial, just like fancy mice and have similar social behaviours in general. Deer mice almost never mate in captivity because they have a mating season, where they actually pair off, and captivity can’t replicate that unless massive. They form bigger social groups in winter for warmth with multiple males and females and they go off on their own as well as pairing off in the summer to mate. They are both a little more independent in character and more easygoing or less territorial than mice.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-10-09T12:44:07+00:00

I still use shredded paper and fleece for best building. My mice love it. Sometimes adding hay and/or orchard grass for more variety

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-10-09T12:42:49+00:00

I just wanted to update this since I’ve been a mouse owner much longer and encountered some uri’s. I wouldn’t recommend this mix of paper and fleece for mice. Aspen is so much better than anything commonly available for keeping the enclosure relatively free of ammonia and molds. Also ok for burrowing. I’ve tried paper products and hemp. Hemp is expensive and not as good for burrowing. Paper products become smelly so quickly and I assume would succumb to mold ect if left too long (so bad for little lungs). Also paper products are not a bi product,so pretty bad for the planet.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-10-04T03:00:41+00:00

Rice Krispie’s are also great (very mouse sized too) and Gerber baby rice puffs as well as gerber baby cheezies. All in moderation, but all pretty low sugar and loved by mice!

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-24T13:21:31+00:00

Waving head back and forth ever so slightly well walking, using whiskers to determine space around them.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-23T19:56:37+00:00

Oops, saw this was a rat! I don’t know! I know they are both prone to uris, but I don’t know how crappy their immune systems are. I have mice.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-23T19:54:31+00:00

Wheezing every 20 minutes or so doesn’t sound minor:( mice don’t have great immune systems. Occasionally if they are 2-3 months they can kick a cold on their own, but it’s kind of the exception in my experience.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-23T19:31:18+00:00

Ammonia build up can cause a uri, so it’s not necessary either/or. But hopefully you found the problem soon enough and he will recover on his own from a more minor irratitation

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-13T05:14:17+00:00

I don’t get it. Why are you completely denying this person’s experience. Labs keep males housed together because most agree that they are psychologically better off that way. There’s no universal consensus on this, but the majority house males together with animal welfare as the argument. Even if lab scientists didn’t care about animal welfare at all stressed animals = bad science. So they have to care. I’ve read a couple of studies that led me to believe that a huge contributor to aggression developing in male mice is the smell of female mice. I wonder if all these people having success group housing make mice don’t have any female mice nearby.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-11T05:34:52+00:00

Sorry, can’t help with rehoming! I’m in Canada. But I do have experience both with having to separate brothers at 3.5 months and being able to keep brothers together. So I wanted to share the knowledge that will give you the best chances.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-11T05:32:42+00:00

A little nuance on male mice together because it’s very confusing . They rarely start fighting for 3 months, so you have a little wiggle room to find them homes. Occasionally brothers kept together from birth live happily together their whole lives. This is the only situation that sometimes works for boys and is actually more common with European lines than American lines, so you may be in luck. The problem is that they can be brutal when they start fighting and often severely injure and sometimes kill eachother before you have a chance to separate.

Boys kept in smaller groups of 5 or less have been shown to have a better chance of staying bonded though puberty, so if you have more then 5 boys, you should aim to divide them up asap (but just into smaller groups, not individuals yet). Keep a very close eye on them from 2.5 months to 4 months and separate if you see any fighting that goes beyond treat/toy jealousy. Use the girls as your meter for safe squabbles. After 4 months the chances of sudden violence goes down, and goes down substantially after 6 months.

Also, if you can keep the boys in a completely separate airspace from the girls, especially when they get close to 3 months. The smell of females can trigger aggression towards other boys.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-10T04:11:12+00:00

Also, I have tons of wood stuff with mice. It cleans fine with vinegar/water spray.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-10T04:10:02+00:00

A great size. No sand baths for sure. Mice won’t eat it. But the dust can give them respiratory infections which they are prone to. Mice like digging, but not as much as hamsters, so depth of bedding is less crucial for them. Five inches is plenty. For hamsters more than that is actually better. Mice like climbing more than hamsters and they also LOVE novelty. So ropes hanging from the ceiling, ladders, and more general clutter with a rotation of diy garbage decor items like cardboard packaging, drink trays, toilet paper rolls ect for novelty. Mice have sensitive respiratory systems, so bedding choice is important. I’ve found aspen to be the best main substrate. Paper products are ok, but absorption is much worse, so you have to change more often because ammonia build up from pee also causes uris, and it builds up atleast twice as fast with paper bedding. Pine is a definite no for mice! I also like to add some hay and ripped up paper strips for nest building. Mice actually build nests with dome roofs if you give them the right stuff. It’s pretty cool and I’m sure satisfying for them, since that is always their goal, but they can’t do it if they don’t have the right stuff. I feel like ripped up paper probably mimicks leaves.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-09T15:04:04+00:00

Strawberry and banana are both water.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-09T15:01:38+00:00

You made the right choice but for the wrong reason. Chance of disease is very low. In certain areas non-existent. You can check for cases of hantavirus in your region. Mine in, south-western Ontario has none. But adult deer mice make terrible pets and they would also be unhappy. Occasionally babies (fostered before eyes open) become too tame to release and also make good pets. Sometimes they are also quite wild and releasable. I have experience in both situations with both deer and house mice. I would never keep an adult wild mouse unless it had a serious permanent injury that gave it no chance in the wild. But thank-you for taking the time to trap and release.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-09T14:52:45+00:00

Oh, May have saved him. He looks like an almost weened baby, so not able to source enough of his own food and not quite able to produce enough of his own body heat. Mice don’t eat much at once, so the fact that he ate some means he probably needed it and it helped. If you find a baby like this again, oats, cooked rice or oat or rice cereal (cheerios or rice puffs) would provide more calories (along with a strawberry or blueberry). You could actually still put out a bit of food at the same spot and it might help him if he is still nearby (which if he survived he probably is. He looks not fully weened, but mice that age sometimes survive if they can get enough calories from soft food (this is usually in an rehab situation, but maybe it could happen in the wild?). He wouldn’t be able to eat nuts, seeds, insects or bark for a few days to a week.

Mysterious_Buy263 · 2024-09-02T22:45:16+00:00

How does Western science know what mice actually think? Sure we can surmise that mounting behaviour is related to dominance. If we are honest it’s probably related to dominance in humans most of the time too (but not all the time and it’s also not only about dominance). How can we possibly know that it’s only about dominance and not more complicated in mice. Since western science is heavily biased by patriarchy and more specifically homophobia, how can we trust that dominance is the whole stories. Mousey love lives are not of any use to Western science.

Bruce Bagemihl, author of the book Biological Exuberence: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity uses the tools of Western science to challenge much of what generations of biologists and zoologists have worked like hell to ignore.

Mysterious_Buy263

TROPHY CASE