First off I should like to state that I do not like the idea of keeping animals in cages. Consequently, I have never kept fish, or birds, except when I was about 12 years old and dependent on my parents' sensibilities. Since having developed my own values I have taken pleasure watching fish swim freely and birds soar to the skies. But I do have a mouse, and she lives in a cage. There is a good reason why this mouse is stuck behind bars.
The mouse comes from a family of tree-dwelling mice. Specifically, these mice live in palm trees around my house. (Palm trees, incidentally, are wonderfully complex organisms, but I'll save that for another intel.) The mice subsist by opening holes in the coconuts, and eating the yummy goodness inside, which is why many people put bands of steel sheets around the trunks of their coconut trees.
Every so often, perhaps due to a domestic dispute, or a case of lost footing, a mouse will plummet to the ground. Most often, the mouse will be dead upon impact. Or it will be fatally wounded. Sometimes, the mouse will scamper away, miraculously unhurt, only to be caught, tortured, and killed by one of my seven cats.
This mouse survived, because it damaged its spine, rendering the hind legs useless. Consequently it was unable to move, and my cats are not interested in slow-moving objects such as snails or paralyzed mice. So I was able to find it, scoop it up, and stash it in my ex-wife's Louis Vitton bag while I dashed off to the city to buy a cage. Clearly, a paralyzed mouse wasn't going to survive very long in the wild, and I felt it was my duty to care for this hapless creature.
The duty became a pleasure. The mouse has been with me for more than a year. She has since regained some strength in her left hind leg; on the rare occasions that I let her out of her cage she runs diagonally toward the right. Instead of a hopping gait which healthy mice affect, her right leg is dragged along. She does not user her exercise wheel. I do not think she is quick enough to survive in the wild, so she's staying with me until death do us part.
We have been through a lot together. On one occasion a lizard bit off an inch of her long tail. It was 2:00 AM (my mouse and I are both nocturnal), so I couldn't take her to the vet. I cauterized the wound with a knife heated red over an open flame. It was nauseating, but she took it well, and the wound healed cleanly.
My mouse has a white tummy and delicate fingers, a pianist's fingers. And of course she has very cute ears, just like Mickey Mouse only cuter. I do not understand the hypocrisy of human beings; they love their animated mice, and their talking mice in films such as "Stuart Little". But when they see a real mouse, they dash off to buy Bayer-brand rat killer. Pet lovers are the worst; if their bag of cat food or dog food has a hole in it, they will complain to the grocery customer service department, which of course means impending genocide for the rodents trying to eke out a living in the supermarket.
Anyway, back to my mouse. I can't get enough of her, but she detests me, perhaps because I represent the hypocritical human race. Every time I pick her up and lovingly stroke her soft fur, she sinks her needle-like teeth deep into my flesh. I think she is rabies free, because I'm still alive and kicking.
At first I thought my mouse might be a rat. It's become quite big. But it does not eat what rats normally like to eat. My mouse eschews fish and meat; she seems to be an ovo-lacto vegetarian, going for coconut flesh, apples (though she won't eat the peel), grains intended as chicken feed, crackers, chocolate, cooked rice, and cheese. Surprisingly, her favorite dish is omelette. Since I am a mafist, I end up sharing most of my meals with her. I realized that I probably have more in common with this mouse than with the carnivorous predators in my house.
I try to talk to my mouse, but mice are quiet creatures. I've since discovered, both from interacting with my mouse and the mice that I meet near my house, that the squeaky sound mice make is not a greeting, nor a form of normal communication. It is used only to ward off attackers in life-threatening situations. Consequently, when I immitate the squeaky sound mice make, my mouse does not respond with a series of squeaks of her own. She does not feel happy to communicating with one of her own kind. Instead, she jumps back in alarm, and then hurries off to hide in her house.
My mouse lives in a little house inside a cage which itself is within a cage, for security. I remove the doots from her tray every day - being a vegetarian, she produces a LOT of doots - and clean her cage thoroughly about once a month. This is when I replace her sock with a fresh one.
I once put all sorts of junk (including a toilet paper roll, a matchbox, etc) inside her cage, for her entertainment. Amongst these was a cotton sock. The next day I was surprised to find that my mouse had dragged the sock into her little house, using it as both bedding and as an object for plugging the door closed. I'm not sure whether she does this because she isn't feeling sociable, or because of the cold weather we've been having.
Unfortunately, my mouse spends a lot of her free time gnawing on the iron bars of her cage, trying to escape. You'd think that someone smart enough to keep her house tidy with a sock is smart enough to gently lift the door of her cage and scamper off into the night - but despite having been with me for a long time, she still hasn't figured this out. It's a good thing. I look forward to a good many more years with my little mousy.
