Question
The babies
Hi Tamarah. I have had mice now for about 8 months. It started with one mouse and then we got another one. We woke up one morning to see that the cage was knocked over (by a cat as we could see the paw prints on the table), and the second mouse was gone. After that we got 4 more mice. The one mouse turned out to be a male and since then he had gotten the 2nd and the 3rd females pregnant. The first mom gave birth to what we could count was nine mice and the second mom gave birth to a few more babies a couple of days later. We left them alone for a few weeks only to discover recently that there is now only 8 mice. I have read that baby mice can be eaten for various reasons and I'm okay with the course that nature takes. What my question is that we are finding it very hard to give the new babies to the pet shop. We were wondering if it is a good idea to keep all the mice? We have since separated the male on the upper level of our three story cage and the moms and babies are in the bottom two levels. We have another two story wire cage that we have the latest bought female mouse and the first female mouse we bought. We also have another standard size cage. Is there an average as to how many male mice there are in a litter? We were considering keeping 2-3 males in the wire cage (if there is only two in the litter), and the rest of the females in the three story cage. Another thing we are worried about is the smell of the males... Thanks for your help. Megan, Derek and mice.
AnswerHi Megan, Derek, and the meeces! :)
Your mice have had adventures! It can be very difficult indeed to give away the babies, and corporate stores almost never accept them for liability reasons. What you can try to do, however, is ask if they'll put them up for *adoption,* rather than selling them themselves. This sometimes work and I know even my local corp shops will help you out that way. You can also try calling around to family owned places outside your usual area to see if they'll take them. Of course, if you've already tried this and it still didn't work, you could try adopting them out on your own. They are usually adoptable by around 5-6 weeks (and easily sexable), so you could try putting them and their photos up on sites like Craigslist or Hoobly or even your newspaper. If you choose to do this, make sure you emphasize if you don't want them to be used as feeders, and adopt out males by themselves only and females in pairs or more. This will keep boys from fighting and girls from becoming too lonely.
If you do decide to keep them yourself it would certainly be doable, but it might be a lot of work on your end. Males who have been together since they were pups have a better chance than most of getting along when their older, but if they are ever separated they should not be reintroduced. Males are very territorial, and when they hit puberty it's entirely possible that their attitudes toward each other might change and serious fighting could occur. I've done it before, but I would really recommend checking on cages with more than one buck every single day so you can catch bite marks or injuries before it's too late. The bucky smell comes from their urine, and almost all males will pee all over everything in their cage and right out of it if they can. You can control this smell by wiping down everything in the cage when you change it, because even if there's fresh bedding the urine on cage bars or toys could still smell potent. Toys should be frequently changed, dirtied food tossed, and the bedding should be changed religiously to keep down the smell. With all of these things together most male cages can be kept to a not-so-intrusive stinkiness.
As far as how many males are in the typical litter, it really is just a roll of the dice. Most of my litters actually hover around the 50% range, give or take one or two mice. I've had the bad luck of having a whole litter of males before, though, so just try and be prepared for whatever they turn out to be. I would start supplementing extra food and protein (like scrambled eggs without milk, or kitty or puppy kibble) to the does in case they ate the babies for nutritional reasons, just to keep it from happening more, but they were probably just trying to get the litter sizes down to a manageable amount of mouths to feed.
Lastly, I'm not really certain about the setup of your cages - I think I'm envisioning it wrong. As long as in the end your males and females are separated, your bucks are being watched for signs of fighting, and nobody is behaving crowded (pushing their faces against the sides of the cage or smelling it up too quickly), your setup sounds swell. I would watch those babies when they start exploring, though, because they'll be able to squeeze right out of bars - you might need to eventually move them to bucket-style caging between when they start moving around and when they're old enough not to fit through the cage bars. A mouse can squeeze through any space it can fit its head in - and babies have tiny heads! Oh, one last thing - I have cats, too, and I find it's best not to fight entropy. The lower to the ground your cage, the shorter distance it has to fall and the less damage will be done if a kitty tries to mess with it. :)
Very cute babies! Good luck with them, whatever you decide to do! :)
-Tam
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