Cannibalized!

[Lil_Branchette]

Yesterday, I came to work at 7 am, and I had to make sure that all the animals had food and water before opening the store at 9 am. I was doing my rounds, and I peeked in the mice's cage. I saw two mice that were snacking on what looked like a peach. Karen and Pia bring fresh fruit often, for the animals. The rest were sleeping in their house. However, I noticed three mice that were very sluggish, and barely moving. I petted them and they opened their eyes and slowly crawled. I know the animals really well, and our mice don't usually act like that. Those three mice looked sick. Usually, the mice are perked up, healthy and energetic. That's when I looked more closely at the "peach". That's when I noticed the "peach" had a mouse tail and ears. Oh my god, it was a cannibalized mouse that was so chewed up and bloody, that you could clearly see all the guts and bone. I nearly puked! I took the sick mice to the sick room, and later on, one of the sick mice died. Oh yeah, I also had to get rid of the mangled carcass..... Exactly why did the mice do that, when they had plenty of good, healthy food to eat?

 

[3CsMommy]

1. Adult mice are generally solitary. When they're kept in communal enclosures in pet stores, they often fight.

2. Once dead, though, another mouse is just a meat source, and a lot of commercial mouse diets don't provide a lot of meat/protein. (I feed mine a custom mix with a good dog food to balance it, but they're an omnivore like we are.)

 

[addictedtochins]

I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

 

[SunshineChins]

I have had gerbils, hamsters , mice and spiney mice all do that. If one dies and you don't catch it and don't remove the body they will eat it. I supplement our spiney mice with cat food and have had it still happen to a baby that we brought home. She died and I didn't notice until it was to late.

 

[Parka]

I'm sorry you had to deal with that. I had the same thing happen at two of the pet stores I worked at, I think it's mainly an overcrowding problem. Like 3CsMommy said, they're not meant to live together in masses like they are kept at the store. The rationale is they will be sold quickly for food, but it just ends up being really gross. And food is food to a mouse, they don't discriminate between different sources. Dead cagemates are fair game. If you can lessen the number of mice in one cage, it will help.

Also, watch out for the dwarf hamsters. With the exception of Chinese, they tend to fight and kill each other and then make a show of it. Then some of them pitch a fit after you clean it up. I swear they're evil. I thought maybe it was just the hamsters at one store, but I saw it happen at two different ones. I'm not sure what the proper term for them are, I guess Russian, but the little fat ones were the worst.

 

[Lil_Branchette]

Uggggghhhh...The mice didn't actually attack the mouse? They didn't gang up on one and kill it, did they? How would mice even do that?

 

[3CsMommy]

They might well have ganged up on a sick one, though if there were that many sick at one time, my money is on one just dying of the URI or whatever and the other two taking an opportunity for protein.

Do you know how to sex mice? If so, and if there's room, try to keep the males separated from *everyone*, and the females in smallish groups (3-4 per cage would be crowded but probably better than all in one). I don't know if you could set up something like a 'betta barracks' for the male mice in a 20 gal long aquarium or plastic tote, but you might save some cage space and still be able to separate them before they attack each other. Otherwise, this sounds like just another not so fun part of working in a typical pet store.

And those little fat hamsters are generally sold as Dwarf, Siberian Dwarf, Russian Dwarf or Robovorski. I'd love to keep a Chinese since their temperament is so different, but pretty much every kind of hamster *but* the Chinese will cannibalize babies/dead cage mates, and most will fight viciously, even the females. They're really not too different from mice in many ways.

 

[Parka]

Well, what I meant about the little fat ones--which indeed are sold under a ton of different names--is that they don't just kill each other and eat them like the other hamsters, they like to smear the remains across the cage and then get angry when you clean it up.

Chances are the mouse just died, or it was already sick and dying and the others finished it off. The little fat dwarf hamsters would fight just to fight and every time I removed the aggressor, someone else stepped up to the plate. If you end up having any pregnant female hamsters, like 3CsMommy said, they will often cannibalize the babies. If they feel especially threatened, they will kill all of them. It's just what they do. Kinda like fish food is made from fish and fish eat each other. Cannabalism is not uncommon among animals, but it's still gross to clean up after.

 

[Lil_Branchette]

I agree. Cannibalism is gross.

3CsMommy, the only mice in that cage were females, and there weren't that many. The cage is also huge, so they had plenty of space. After I found the remains, I cleaned the cage, and everyone else looked fine. Most of the mice were in their houses, sleeping...

 

[dinhdinh]

i had my robo-dwarf hamster eaten by another one, it was actually my sis, her's was special out of the family of 4, that one unlike the others are white with a golden hairline at the belly, really cute, came home one day, thinking that they are sleeping ontop each other, put new fod in there, eveyone moved revealing a terror, worst of all was my baby sis was there....i had to lie that it might have been the heat that it laid there.....terribel indeed, now all three have own cage...chinchilla arnt that way are they?

 

[aznmexaggie]

Are their water bottles working properly? When I worked at a local pet store, we had a few incidents in a couple cages after we switched to the glass Super Pet bottles (which are crap, btw!). The rodents couldn't get water out of it and when I came in one morning to open, there were carcasses in the cages and I noticed the water bottles were still completely filled, many of the mice were trying desparately to get water to flow out, and some were lapping at the blood and eating the carcasses of their dead cagemates... I put a bowl of water in the cages and they drank ravenously.

 

[Lil_Branchette]

Nope, no water bottles. When we sell animals, we recommend bowls, because our animals find it easier to drink out of bowls, even though the water needs to be changed twice a day, because the mice soil their water often.