Chewing on cage

Question
Hi Tamarah,

How are you?

I have just bought the pregnant mouse a new cage it is a wirre cage but has tubes going over the top of it. As you can imagine she seems to be spending 90% of her time in the tubes unless there is food to come out for of course!

She has been trying to eat through the tubes it looks like.. There are skuff marks where shes been hacking at it. I was wondering if there was something you could reocmmend i coat the tubes in to stop her doing this?

The other mice are fine. As we speak Molly (the wild mouse) is going around in her wheel.. i dont think she'd be without that thing!!

Thanks Tamarah, :)

Mart.

Answer
Hi Mart,

Be careful with the pregnant mom in the wire cage - pups can squeeze through pretty much anything and once they start leaving the nest you're sure to have a lot of escapees.  My pups can't be trusted in wire cages until they're a couple of months old at least - and even then I've had skinny mice escape from wire bar cages at several months old!  Just watch out.  :)

As far as the chewing of her tubes goes, there probably isn't much you can do to stop it.  Mice chew all the time on everything to keep their teeth worn down - if she doesn't chew her teeth can grow too long and give her problems.  If you want to preserve the cage for as long as possible, just give her plenty of other things to chew on and maybe she'll spread out the gnawing a bit.  I've had a lot of luck making little popsicle stick playgrounds for my mice - they spend a lot of time running around in them and do most of their chewing on them instead of the cage lids.  Maybe you could try that?

-Tam