The mice

In June last year, I took on 38 mice from the RSPCA who had been stuck for a month or so with no interest. The day they came home, there were 5 babies and one very obviously pregnant doe.

The next morning, there were 11 more babies.

12 of the 15 adults were boys; these have been the best of the bunch, very sweet, never fighting with each other as boys tend to do (male mice are an aggressive bunch generally).

I duly split the older babies up as needed, and did the same when the new ones were old enough; things were fine. Then the fun started.

I had a couple of escapees; mice are sods for this, to put it nicely. Scarily smart for such tiny things.

Then one evening, my worst, most persistent escapee broke out of his cage at the very same time that my girls - in the tank below - broke out of theirs. He went in with them for the evening and 3 weeks later, babies galore!

All those litters were grown and split up as before; sadly a lot of the babies were killed - one mum had a terrible mammary lump which caused her to kill, and another was obsessively grandmothering the babies by moving them out of the nest so they starved. I built the girls a 6ft cage at the other end of the house to prevent further mishaps, and things were fine. Then the fun started.

No, that wasn't a typo; it was the start of deja vu.

One of the younger males, at a couple of months old, disappeared from his cage one night. I set humane traps - by this point, the younger lads had proven that they had inherited the Escapee Genius Gene (the EGG) and I'd had to buy some traps as every fortification I did was beaten. I didn't find him for 3 weeks; he'd either gone out the dog flap (by this point, the boys were living in my lean-to where the flap is open 24/7) or ventured into the rat cage to meet an untimely end.

No such luck. I walked past the girls' cage and noticed one of them had another horrendous lump. Again, no such luck: 'she' had two lumps, and they were indeed horrendous. There was my missing male, happy as Larry living with my then 25 females. Yikes.

That was a month ago; the last 2 of the 37 babies (less 5, having been eaten by another lump-festooned angry girl - there's a real genetic lump issue with this lot of mice sadly) are now two weeks old, and the older ones - 29 now (one male was moved last week) - are to be split up today, to keep some single boys company who have fallen out violently with each other (as I said, they are aggressive little gits, male mice).

I suspect at least one more litter on the way; annoyingly, one of the younger girls has shown evidence of that pesky EGG and has repeatedly gotten out of the 6ft cage (I still cannot work out how), and found her way across the house, through 4 rooms, past 5 dogs, 2 rats, 2 chinchillas, and 7 degus, into the boys' room and to the shelf 3 feet off the floor, to meet up with another EGG possessing boy and be mated.

ARG.

Fortifications on the boys' room and the girls' cage will begin shortly: I will be entirely rebuilding the boys' setup, to go from 'random boot-fair bought cage setups' to 'fitted cage complex' much like I've done with the chins and goos.

And no more mice once the last ones go!!