Bored Panda reached out to the owner of the page to get some more insights.
When asked how their mouse breeding journey first started, the owner said that they had started searching more about rodents after getting a pet hamster.
“Watching YouTube videos, I came across the "MouseAgility" channel - mice doing tricks! I was absolutely stunned by their intelligence and curiosity.”
Then, they went on to get three pet-store mice, which is one of the worst sources to be buying animals, but they didn’t know that at the time.
Their new friends would get sick a lot, having even more problems with parasites. Since then, they began getting mice from ethical breeders only and soon became one themselves.
A day in a mice breeder’s life is no easy feat, apparently!
“Taking care of this many animals is a huge responsibility and it’s really time-consuming. Currently, I have nearly 200 mice (adults and babies),” Mysigonek Rodentry’s owner clarifies.
All of these mice need attention: feeding, taming, cleaning enclosures. According to them, constant disinfection and deworming are the worst.
“Another fact - mice can smell (or more specifically - their pee),” the owner says, jokingly, “when you have 5-10 of them it's tolerable, but can you imagine 100? 200?”
They need about 1-2 hours of work daily, sometimes they can take an entire weekend for cleaning.
The owner says that there are good and bad sides to breeding mice.
The good are their fascinating genetics, cute baby mice, having a “mouse TV” for your viewing pleasure, meeting other people crazy about mice, and the excitement about successful breeding efforts.
The bad - you often see sick animals, pain, birth complications, weak offspring, and euthanasia.
Rodents of all kinds have become popular pets in recent years, but the history of their domestication is very, very lengthy. People first “domesticated” mice about 15,000 years ago. I say “domesticated,” because they were pitter-pattering around human settlements and eating our crumbs about 3000 years before the advent of agriculture.
More recently and conventionally, keeping mice as pets has been documented in the 1700s. In China and Japan, they were domesticated as pets, even with Chinese records referring to yellow, albino, and waltzing mice.
These mice breeds were then imported to Europe and they became a very popular pet in the Victorian era and these ‘fancy’ mice were prized and traded. The UK’s National Mouse Club was founded in 1895 and has been “the leading authority on all things mouse” for more than a century now.
And just in case you were wondering, when you hear about ‘fancy’ mice and rats, that refers to domesticated animals, rather than their wild counterparts.
Nowadays, rodent pets are more popular than ever. According to a Forbes Advisor article for 2023, ‘small animals’ (hamsters, gerbils, rabbits, guinea pigs, chinchillas, mice, and ferrets) are the 4th most popular pet in the United States, only overshadowed by freshwater fish, cats and dogs, in that order.
These ‘small animals’ are present in 6.7 million US households. Pisces Pets say that hamsters are the most popular and a real classic choice, but mice are another popular contender, a very active and social animal.
There are loads of types of mice (as you can likely guess). You can also guess what’s the main difference between long-haired mice. Satin mice are ones with a dense, silky, and very shimmery coat. A lot of these mice that you’re seeing in this list, are the frizzy mice, with the wavy and very dense coat.
You’ve also got hairless mice, which - just like Sphynx cats - may be your unusual cup of tea.
Of course, there are so many more types, especially when it comes to the colors and patterns of their fur, it would be far too many to list.