I guess I’m just not cut out for ranching because, after much consideration we’ve decided to get out of the mouse businesses.
It wasn’t just that the cost of mouse feed has gone up, or the problems setting up the tiny corrals.
It wasn’t even the preliminary word from the tax office that mice don’t qualify for an ag exemption. Even the trouble we had recruiting mouse wranglers seemed surmountable.It was the fact that we woke up one morning and there were six MORE baby mice, doubling our already significant baby mouse count. That brought our grand mouse total to 16 - plus at least one more looked puffy and was complaining about her swollen ankles.
Suddenly I envisioned baby mice pouring out of the bars of the cage in a strange never ending mousey ooze. I immediately loaded everyone up in the car and hightailed it to the pet store, and more than my tires were squealing.
Some people would call that freaking out.
They would be right.
So we’ve traded up. We kept both Mousezilla, who is completely black and therefore likely to be snake food, and Shadow, who was our last acquisition. Everyone else, Sugar, Twitchy, and the dozen mouselets went back to Polly’s for holiday re-distribution.
In place of our 14 head of mice, we received one very adorable dwarf hamster.
Hamsters can live alone. This has already greatly endeared him to me. But it hasn’t been all easy going in our transition to a slightly larger rodent. Jimmy the hamster, named after a beloved cousin, has already required a new glass cage after he escaped our old one by literally PRYING THE BARS APART...
Hopefully we won’t end up changing his name to Hulk Hogan.
Here's the most amusing hamster video I could find. It's been viewed 4 million times. Join the madness.
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