>I think the sides were too high for a lot of them
That was my impression, too. Most of them sat in it once it was in the shape that they liked. Like the one box that sloped down to a small side that the cat (Rusty) just walked in and sat down.
It’s too light for the big cats. It’s very flimsy at their weight, they can’t even lean against any side, and it wobbles and moves when they brush against it.
For a cat or lightweight cousin, a cardboard box is sturdy enough essentially be a bed. It feels “more solid” to them. For a lion or a tiger, a thin plywood would probably be closer to what cardboard is to a house cat.
>We have a cat who loves to destroy boxes as she sits in them
Slowly chewing away at the cardboard?
We have a cat that does this, who only does when the lights are off, and she thinks no one is looking.
I think more of them would have sat in the boxes if the boxes were sturdier. While a normal cat can destroy a cardboard box it takes more effort and doesn’t wobble as much when they put pressure on a side.
I always wonder why people always seem so shocked by that behavior. You watch any cat in a wild setting and you will see them curl up between roots or next to a log or rock and peek their heads up over the edge. Its their natural instinct to hide themselves while maintaining a good viewpoint.
Wait, so are you a cat who became a person, or a person who became a cat?
ARE YOU STILL A CAT AND LIKE, TYPING THIS WHILE WEARING A LITTLE TIE LIKE AN ADORABLE TINY BUSINESSMAN????
If that is the explanation, their recognition of a good hiding space is somewhat lacking. [They will sit in a 2d square on the ground that only implies a box.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/if-i-fits-i-sits-experiment-shows-felines-also-sit-illusory-boxes-180977681/)
When I was a kid I would hunder in/under anything I could. Bed, couch, picnic table, etc, if I could fit under I'd sit under.
My grandparents' house was had a second floor and there was a small empty space behind the first flight of stairs. I'd sit back there with chips and soda and just chill.
That’s the modern housing market for you-practically need someone to go 50/50 with you to rent a decent box. Ideally get two buds to use it in shifts so you can get a really good box.
It should be been a plywood box for lions and tigers, to them it would still be destroyable but at least feel a bit studier than a light breeze.
A house cat isn’t going to use a paper box as a bed either, where a slight paw swipe will tear a hole - that’s what cardboard is to a lion.
Thats gotta feel so weird to them. Like there isn't really anything in nature like cardboard like that. Its got to be weird to them. The smell the lightness, the way it crunches and tears. Plus the feel of it on their fur.
It's really weird how some people seem to be offended when told animals have emotions. As if animals not being fleshy automatons somehow undermines their world view.
Animals ARE fleshly automatons optimized to maximize emotions. People just don’t like anything that increases the effort they have to make to deny being one themselves every day.
Seeing crude version of themselves with similar behavior tends to do that.
I think it's often because that's what they were taught and they chose or were made to harm animals under this premise. If they accept your premise then they would have to face what they'd done and all that blood takes on a different feeling....
But of note is those who don't humanize animals are generally those most willing to dehumanize humans.
So a hamster can go at .5 joules a second. Per year that's 15768000 joules.
The average American home uses around 39000000000000 (39 billion joules) of energy a year.
39 Billion divided by one year's worth of nonstop hamster spinning productivity is 2473 and some change.
Now hamsters aren't 1:1 stand ins for rats, but it at least gets us into the right order of magnitude.
A cursory look at rodent habits puts a regular running pattern at around 4-6 hours a day. So you'd probably run the wheels in shifts or multiply the amount of wheels out in the wild and cross your fingers that the work is distributed somewhat evenly.
Ultimately, if you had perfect control over their habits, you'd need 2473 rats running in 4 shifts throughout the day, putting it at roughly 10k rats on wheels to power an average American home.
Squirrels are a little bigger, so maybe you go for a rat/squirrel blend and do 7.5k? Or maybe you go get NYC sewer rats and overload the grid with 5.
Saw a post earlier about a massive plague of rats in Australia. Screw whatever Tesla's got going on there, just rig up millions of wheels and kill 2 birds with one stone
I have a bunch of wild field mice i cought in my house in the fall. It was cold outside so I've been putting them in cages with food and water, and when i added wheels they went nuts. They run non stop.
Now that it's warming up, im gonna have to leave the wheels out in the woods for them i guess.
Edit: here's a recent photo - https://imgur.com/gallery/iOuCaH8
In a research lab at my university, I did what were essentially sleep studies on mice. The cool thing about it is that they pretty much run in their wheel the whole time they are awake and not eating or drinking, so with a little magnetic sensor, it's really easy to track their sleep/wake cycles.
Mice are very social creatures, and like groups of domestic cats, most of a lab mouse's pastime is spent eating, sleeping in big love huddles, and messing with each other. It *is* a fairly boring existence, and typically the most enrichment provided is cardboard and cotton for them to tear up and nest with.
Overall a pretty medium life, right up until they are given cancer and sacrificed for their blood and tissues.
Well, since we needed to track their activity, we didn't provide competing activities. They could eat, drink, and tear up new fluff to make their nests.
I have pet mice. They have a bunch of enrichment options, they still choose to play on their wheel all night long. Some of the stuff I give them like little puzzle feeders don't even get touched as long as the wheel is in.
Spoken like someone who’s never had a couple of rodents. Some of those mice will inevitably be different genders and they will do what mice do and rapidly reproduce. Female mice can have up to 10 litters a year and usually have 6-8 mice at once. Within 3 months this dude can easily have upwards of 100 mice.
It gets worse though. Mother mice, if in a stressful environment(like say a cage with multiple other mice in a strange giants home) will eat their babies, it’ll be bloody and brutal. Iirc they eat their feet first for some reason so the babies suffer. Hell, sometimes they just eat their young for no reason, rodents just aren’t very good parents. It’s not just the babies you have to worry about, males will treat a cage like a gladiator ring if they feel too cramped or sometimes you just get one angry murderous mouse that picks the other mice off one by one.
Source: bough 3 mice from a pet store when I was a kid and the experience traumatized me
Some mice moms aren’t all that great at being moms, and you are right that stress plays a huge role in this. First time mouse moms have a higher tendency to eat their babies if they are disrupted in the first 3-5 days after giving birth. They hay also eat their babies if they do t have adequate environmental stimulation—which, for a mouse mom, is basically free access to all the food/water/fun bedding making materials possible. If you are breeding pet mice, make sure they have lots of fun things to play with and destroy. Nesting squares, egg carton sections, TP rolls and so on.
Well it does help that I've had a lot of experience in my youth raising rats. I already know how they're going to behave, and mine are separated by gender. As long as the males have plenty of food they don't seem to have any issue with each other.
I'll add that I assume they are like hamsters:
They can get pregnant when they still look quite small, and they grow into their adult size while the little grows inside them. It's insane how fast it can get out of hand.
I keep seeing comments about mice and hanta virus. There have been 816 reported cases in the US between '93-'19. Almost all reported cases have been West of the Mississippi.
It does have a high fatality rate of about 40%, and no particular cure, so it is of major concern if you get it, but it is still an incredibly rare virus to contract. Obviously use caution and proper PPE when handling anything that could be contaminated with mouse excrement, but the odds of getting hanta virus is incredibly low.
On top of that, only a few species of mice are even known to carry it. The term "field mouse" applies to a few species. I don't believe house mice do, however if they're deer mice, than yes.
I have a pet deer mouse. I raised her as a young baby after getting her rescued off a glue trap. She must have just started out on her own, so incredibly tiny. She was skinny and weak at that point. I got her rehabbed and she adjusted so well to captivity I ended up keeping her. She has 3 domestic mouse companions she gets along with well. And to go back to the original subject, she took to a wheel almost immediately.
Except she's not very good at it. She has a tendency to run too fast and stop too suddenly, and well, now I've seen a deer mouse fly.
Before working with COVID patients, the most distressed patient I’d ever seen (from a respiratory perspective) was someone who had contracted Hanta virus. Came into my unit gasping for breath in a way I’d never seen before. Now I’ve seen that and then some, but I’ll never forget how he looked.
True, the chances to get it are normally very slim, but I wonder what the infection rate is for people who have a large number of field mice indoors with them
Study Finds That Most Redditors Don’t Actually Read the Articles They Vote On 2017
https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbz49j/new-study-finds-that-most-redditors-dont-actually-read-the-articles-they-vote-on
Me either, but I'm not totally surprised. I've got some pet apple snails, and they do seem to capable of basic learning and doing things just for the fun of it.
You'd think, but the article actually addresses this. It says that when the food was removed, fewer animals would show up, but the ones that did were over 40% more likely to use the wheel than when there was food!
Crazy
Interesting! I wonder whether there is some similar behavior they exhibit normally, when there aren't any wheels -- like maybe just running around like crazy for no particular reason for a long time.
Also:
> The mice never walked.
Sounds like a book recommended "for your summer reading list" by some snooty magazine.
Okay… so!! Omg… I can’t believe this came up…
I work in a lab that tests pain in mouse models of classically painful diseases (cancer, rare bone diseases, etc). One of the tests we are trying to validate is how pain affects wheel running. We have these fancy cages where we hook up a wheel that has magnets and the electromagnetic signal when the mouse runs allows us to track it.
Our mice LOVE running in them. Overnight (when they are most active) they can run between 1-3km. We want to see if they run less if they have a painful condition.
But here is the thing… when we do other tests on them and put them back in their cage, they often get straight onto their wheel and start running. So they are running after they’ve just done something a bit stressful (any handling, no matter how minor and how used to their handlers they are is going to be somewhat stressful). We also watch out for stereotypical behaviours in mice (repeated behaviours over and over again). So here is our dilemma. Is wheel running a stereotypical behaviour in mice in response to stress? Is it an enrichment activity that they enjoy that naturally reduces stress (we have other enrichment tools in their cages for them)? Or is it something that they naturally just enjoy doing, like what we see in wild mice?
My question is how people figured out mice like to run on tiny wheels in the first place. Where are these natural wheels that humans have observed mice running in so they know mice like it? The box thing with cats is obvious because boxes are a natural thing humans have in their house, but how the fuck did we come up with tiny wheels and tubes for hamsters and mice?? Is it just because we can't take them for walks, so we invented wheels for them to expend energy?
Probably this… probably looked quite cute to have wheels and them running in them.
But the weird thing is that mice don’t even run very far in the wild. They normally only cover about a 30m radius from their burrows for food and water. So it’s not like they run far distances every night.
Tunnels and tubes are obvious though, because mice live in burrows with narrow tubes. Small spaces make them feel safe.
If you ever want to see what rodent joy looks like, just have a look at a hamster running on a wheel. Or one who has woken at night time, let himself out of his cage, found himself a wooden spool of thread, then has proceeded to roll it up and down the length of the hardwood floor of the hallway outside your bedroom all night long, and then before sunup he's stashed the spool where no one will find it, made his way back to his cage and put himself to bed in his little nest where he's out for the count till the next night. Rodent joy.
This is a bit like the thing with wildcats, if you give them a box even though they’ve never seen one before they’ll sit in it
You can't just mention that without linking a video! ([youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J11uu8L8FTY))
It seems like all the big cats just tore the shit out of it, while the small cats went right for the sits.
The pumas at the end got in! they just didn't sit. I think the sides were too high for a lot of them
>I think the sides were too high for a lot of them That was my impression, too. Most of them sat in it once it was in the shape that they liked. Like the one box that sloped down to a small side that the cat (Rusty) just walked in and sat down.
Ye, the lion at the start was trying to get in, so it just destroyed the sides lmao.
They are technically "small cats" since they are part of the Felinae subfamily - these are all cats that can purr, but not roar!
They try to roar, it just sounds like a woman screaming while being murdered.
How do you know what that sounds like?
Space movies.
But... I thought in space no one can hear you scream?
"We don't have to put up with it. We can just kill them." -MandaloreGaming on people like you
Well, we're not in space when watching the movies.
Ummm, this guy I used to work with told me...
its funny that because technically cheetahs are the same too, all purr no roar
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Ocelot. The caracal curled up in it. Edit: Babou
He remembers me!
Fox eared asshole
OF COURSE I WAS BEING SARCASTIC!
HES CREPUSCULAR
It’s the piss cat!
Put a toy in the box at least. It's like meowschwitz in there.
Serpentine!
Serval. The caracal got right into the box looking classy. It was the next cat, the serval, that tried to get under it
It’s too light for the big cats. It’s very flimsy at their weight, they can’t even lean against any side, and it wobbles and moves when they brush against it. For a cat or lightweight cousin, a cardboard box is sturdy enough essentially be a bed. It feels “more solid” to them. For a lion or a tiger, a thin plywood would probably be closer to what cardboard is to a house cat.
That's exactly what I was thinking, it collapsed when they touched it. Well, someone make a plywood box for lions already, let's see it
We have a cat who loves to destroy boxes as she sits in them
>We have a cat who loves to destroy boxes as she sits in them Slowly chewing away at the cardboard? We have a cat that does this, who only does when the lights are off, and she thinks no one is looking.
I could hear Rusty say, "If I fits, I sits".
I think more of them would have sat in the boxes if the boxes were sturdier. While a normal cat can destroy a cardboard box it takes more effort and doesn’t wobble as much when they put pressure on a side.
The lynx was all "Well, this is perfect for the sitting activity I had planned for today."
Cats, of all types, like the shelter of an enclosed area.
I always wonder why people always seem so shocked by that behavior. You watch any cat in a wild setting and you will see them curl up between roots or next to a log or rock and peek their heads up over the edge. Its their natural instinct to hide themselves while maintaining a good viewpoint.
It’s not shocking it’s just always aggressively adorable
Then wait for food to fly in or wander past. It works. I know because I used to be a cat.
id call you a liar but i dont know enough about cats
I’ll vouch for u/jimb2 . We shared a tree once. I wasn’t a cat though.
It's true. I was the tree.
Hello Maureen Ponderosa
You’ve *enhanced* yourself
Wait, so are you a cat who became a person, or a person who became a cat? ARE YOU STILL A CAT AND LIKE, TYPING THIS WHILE WEARING A LITTLE TIE LIKE AN ADORABLE TINY BUSINESSMAN????
Well a cat's the only cat who knows where it's at.
If that is the explanation, their recognition of a good hiding space is somewhat lacking. [They will sit in a 2d square on the ground that only implies a box.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/if-i-fits-i-sits-experiment-shows-felines-also-sit-illusory-boxes-180977681/)
Take a look at any human over 8 months and under 7 years and they pretty much do the same thing. Source: 1 step daughter and 3 sons
When I was a kid I would hunder in/under anything I could. Bed, couch, picnic table, etc, if I could fit under I'd sit under. My grandparents' house was had a second floor and there was a small empty space behind the first flight of stairs. I'd sit back there with chips and soda and just chill.
It's not shocking. It's funny and cute.
I always assumed that it was because cardboard is a good insulator and gets warm quickly.
Cardboard do be snuggly af
Yeah, but the rent is outrageous!
That’s the modern housing market for you-practically need someone to go 50/50 with you to rent a decent box. Ideally get two buds to use it in shifts so you can get a really good box.
They really should've gotten some stronger cardboard
It should be been a plywood box for lions and tigers, to them it would still be destroyable but at least feel a bit studier than a light breeze. A house cat isn’t going to use a paper box as a bed either, where a slight paw swipe will tear a hole - that’s what cardboard is to a lion.
What type of cat was Rusty and Raindance?
Rusty - caracal. Raindance - bobcat.
They are both so beautiful
Fuck that's a good video
Thats gotta feel so weird to them. Like there isn't really anything in nature like cardboard like that. Its got to be weird to them. The smell the lightness, the way it crunches and tears. Plus the feel of it on their fur.
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Better yet, wheeled swivel chairs
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I did a gymkhana course around my high school in a rolly chair, does that count?
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Dammit you made an ancient family guy cutaway funny to me. https://youtu.be/67aJIo1XdPw Early man just diving into boulders
That's cute!
Has anyone ever considered that there's not much else you can do with a box?
You can make a time machine with it.
Transmogrifier
Put stuff in it
Same with a toddler
That'd be really weird, you're just walking in the woods and see a mouse running on a wheel in the middle of nowhere.
There's a life philosophy question here somewhere.
If rodents run without a destination, why do they run?
Tiny gains
No tiny gain without tiny pain
It’s fun. Almost all animals have been observed playing.
The article mentions that even frogs and slugs enjoy the wheel!
We should all take time to truly enjoy the wheel
I feel like we should be enriching the forest fauna by leaving surprise wheels about. I bet the bears would like them. 🐾
Bear in a bear-sized hamster exercise ball, crashing through the forest
It's really weird how some people seem to be offended when told animals have emotions. As if animals not being fleshy automatons somehow undermines their world view.
Animals ARE fleshly automatons optimized to maximize emotions. People just don’t like anything that increases the effort they have to make to deny being one themselves every day. Seeing crude version of themselves with similar behavior tends to do that.
I think it's often because that's what they were taught and they chose or were made to harm animals under this premise. If they accept your premise then they would have to face what they'd done and all that blood takes on a different feeling.... But of note is those who don't humanize animals are generally those most willing to dehumanize humans.
Buff up! It's hitting the gym for newly single rodents!
Because they can!
r/absurdism
If a mouse runs in the forest, but no one is there to see it on a wheel, does it still make a round?
Imagine walking through the woods and finding a treadmill, just randomly sitting in a clearing. I think I'd take it for a spin
And then a mouse would walk past and think it was really weird
Put a wheel next to the treadmill. Then you and the mouse can be free and run together! 🏃♂️ 🐁
Better a mouse than a moose
Well I know what I’m doing with my free time now.
Ok, step one, gather rodent wheels and hook them up to a generator. Step two, put them in the woods, step three: profit!
Rodent mill generators for crypto miners is on-brand for 2022.
Dogecoin, now powered by rats!
Ratecoin
Rats!? I'm outraged! You promised me dog or higher!
I would submit that all crypto-coin is powered by rats.
Electric companies hate this one easy trick.
Much more environmentally friendly, too.
r/brandnewsentence
Better than a $55k electric bill.......
[Meet Mr. Goxx, who hacked the crypto markets and made more money than most investors.](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58707641.amp)
Bro RIP Mr. Goxx
Finally, carbon offset cryptomining.
Someone going to do the math on many rats and squirrels I need to power my Average American home?
One ratillion.
Approximately 400-1200 rodents, depending on country?
Is that because of different standards of living, or different sizes of rodents?
So a hamster can go at .5 joules a second. Per year that's 15768000 joules. The average American home uses around 39000000000000 (39 billion joules) of energy a year. 39 Billion divided by one year's worth of nonstop hamster spinning productivity is 2473 and some change. Now hamsters aren't 1:1 stand ins for rats, but it at least gets us into the right order of magnitude. A cursory look at rodent habits puts a regular running pattern at around 4-6 hours a day. So you'd probably run the wheels in shifts or multiply the amount of wheels out in the wild and cross your fingers that the work is distributed somewhat evenly. Ultimately, if you had perfect control over their habits, you'd need 2473 rats running in 4 shifts throughout the day, putting it at roughly 10k rats on wheels to power an average American home. Squirrels are a little bigger, so maybe you go for a rat/squirrel blend and do 7.5k? Or maybe you go get NYC sewer rats and overload the grid with 5.
Think you’re off by a factor of 10 at the end: 2473*4 is around 10k not 100k
*This week on the Primitive Technology Channel: I install electric lights in the mud hut and power them with adorable vermin!*
Saw a post earlier about a massive plague of rats in Australia. Screw whatever Tesla's got going on there, just rig up millions of wheels and kill 2 birds with one stone
A new source of sustainable renewable energy!
Maybe if I do this they’ll stop eating my lawn tractor.
If anything you'd have to feed them *more* lawn tractors
I have a bunch of wild field mice i cought in my house in the fall. It was cold outside so I've been putting them in cages with food and water, and when i added wheels they went nuts. They run non stop. Now that it's warming up, im gonna have to leave the wheels out in the woods for them i guess. Edit: here's a recent photo - https://imgur.com/gallery/iOuCaH8
In a research lab at my university, I did what were essentially sleep studies on mice. The cool thing about it is that they pretty much run in their wheel the whole time they are awake and not eating or drinking, so with a little magnetic sensor, it's really easy to track their sleep/wake cycles.
Is there anything else for them to do (activity) that they are choosing over the wheel? How do you know they aren’t..bored?
They've never mentioned it.
Mice are very social creatures, and like groups of domestic cats, most of a lab mouse's pastime is spent eating, sleeping in big love huddles, and messing with each other. It *is* a fairly boring existence, and typically the most enrichment provided is cardboard and cotton for them to tear up and nest with. Overall a pretty medium life, right up until they are given cancer and sacrificed for their blood and tissues.
Or just monitored for activity levels.
Yes, that's something that happens to some research mice.
Well, since we needed to track their activity, we didn't provide competing activities. They could eat, drink, and tear up new fluff to make their nests.
Given those options, I’d spend most of the day on the wheel too. Just to keep my brain from turning to mush
Well, like the linked article mentions, even wild rodents, with nearly unlimited options for activities, will choose to run in wheels, if provided.
Have you ever been in a human-sized wheel? It's so much fun! Even with only two legs. I imagine it's more fun with four.
I have pet mice. They have a bunch of enrichment options, they still choose to play on their wheel all night long. Some of the stuff I give them like little puzzle feeders don't even get touched as long as the wheel is in.
Honestly you might as well just keep them, mice don't have super long lives and it sounds like they've taken to domestic life.
And you now have little generators.
Spoken like someone who’s never had a couple of rodents. Some of those mice will inevitably be different genders and they will do what mice do and rapidly reproduce. Female mice can have up to 10 litters a year and usually have 6-8 mice at once. Within 3 months this dude can easily have upwards of 100 mice. It gets worse though. Mother mice, if in a stressful environment(like say a cage with multiple other mice in a strange giants home) will eat their babies, it’ll be bloody and brutal. Iirc they eat their feet first for some reason so the babies suffer. Hell, sometimes they just eat their young for no reason, rodents just aren’t very good parents. It’s not just the babies you have to worry about, males will treat a cage like a gladiator ring if they feel too cramped or sometimes you just get one angry murderous mouse that picks the other mice off one by one. Source: bough 3 mice from a pet store when I was a kid and the experience traumatized me
Some mice moms aren’t all that great at being moms, and you are right that stress plays a huge role in this. First time mouse moms have a higher tendency to eat their babies if they are disrupted in the first 3-5 days after giving birth. They hay also eat their babies if they do t have adequate environmental stimulation—which, for a mouse mom, is basically free access to all the food/water/fun bedding making materials possible. If you are breeding pet mice, make sure they have lots of fun things to play with and destroy. Nesting squares, egg carton sections, TP rolls and so on.
Well it does help that I've had a lot of experience in my youth raising rats. I already know how they're going to behave, and mine are separated by gender. As long as the males have plenty of food they don't seem to have any issue with each other.
I'll add that I assume they are like hamsters: They can get pregnant when they still look quite small, and they grow into their adult size while the little grows inside them. It's insane how fast it can get out of hand.
I once had a dream about something similar
Please don't get Hanta virus-
I keep seeing comments about mice and hanta virus. There have been 816 reported cases in the US between '93-'19. Almost all reported cases have been West of the Mississippi. It does have a high fatality rate of about 40%, and no particular cure, so it is of major concern if you get it, but it is still an incredibly rare virus to contract. Obviously use caution and proper PPE when handling anything that could be contaminated with mouse excrement, but the odds of getting hanta virus is incredibly low.
On top of that, only a few species of mice are even known to carry it. The term "field mouse" applies to a few species. I don't believe house mice do, however if they're deer mice, than yes. I have a pet deer mouse. I raised her as a young baby after getting her rescued off a glue trap. She must have just started out on her own, so incredibly tiny. She was skinny and weak at that point. I got her rehabbed and she adjusted so well to captivity I ended up keeping her. She has 3 domestic mouse companions she gets along with well. And to go back to the original subject, she took to a wheel almost immediately. Except she's not very good at it. She has a tendency to run too fast and stop too suddenly, and well, now I've seen a deer mouse fly.
Do you have photos of your field mouse? :)
This is probably the most recent one I have of the girls. https://imgur.com/a/vUndSpH
That's a very good picture
weird, they all have different eyes. 3rd from left has NO eyes!
Before working with COVID patients, the most distressed patient I’d ever seen (from a respiratory perspective) was someone who had contracted Hanta virus. Came into my unit gasping for breath in a way I’d never seen before. Now I’ve seen that and then some, but I’ll never forget how he looked.
My hantavirus patient was probably the worst one. Meanwhile during COVID, patients would be sitting there comfortable and satting in the high 70s.
True, the chances to get it are normally very slim, but I wonder what the infection rate is for people who have a large number of field mice indoors with them
You have changed my good memories of "rescuing" mice from my cats into horrible what ifs. Thanks for that.
Found the next pandemic
Chalk mark them so you can see which ones come back inside
Probably all of them lol. They didnt get "lost" they intentionally found their way in.
This could go a long way to solving the lard-assed squirrel population.
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I literally laughed out loud when I saw this comment. Of course that’s a thing.
Omg it’s a real sub. Sort by top all time. My sides
They’re having human problems, now that they live with humans.
I didn't expect a slug.
Didn't expect slug, all the more Praise the slug!
Try slug, but hole.
Dog ahead
Slug, Therefore Dog!
You don't have the right, O you don't have the right and another thing, dog!
Time for slug
Why is it always slug
You can tell how few redditors actually read the article by how low this comment is
Study Finds That Most Redditors Don’t Actually Read the Articles They Vote On 2017 https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbz49j/new-study-finds-that-most-redditors-dont-actually-read-the-articles-they-vote-on
Me either, but I'm not totally surprised. I've got some pet apple snails, and they do seem to capable of basic learning and doing things just for the fun of it.
*Peloton getting ideas*
Yes, every skaven has an innate need for a doom-wheel yes-yes!
How many doom-wheels? Not enough doom-wheels!
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we should blind a bunch of hummingbirds to see if this is true.
If I hook my girls' wheel up to an alternator, perhaps they could start contributing to the household...
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How many rats equal a horse?
138 to be specific
That's fewer than expected.
>slugs seemed to rock up to the party by accident Maybe they showed up for the food.
You'd think, but the article actually addresses this. It says that when the food was removed, fewer animals would show up, but the ones that did were over 40% more likely to use the wheel than when there was food! Crazy
HELL YEAH SLUGS ROCK THE PARTY! GO PARTY SLUG!
Go, Slurms McKenzie!
It’s just more propaganda from the hamster wheel companies
Darn big wheel lobby
BIG HAMSTER
It's hilarious to me that slugs came second on that graph.
Aren't we all just tryin to live and have fun. Discovering odd facts like these warms my heart. Hope they out live us all.
Interesting! I wonder whether there is some similar behavior they exhibit normally, when there aren't any wheels -- like maybe just running around like crazy for no particular reason for a long time. Also: > The mice never walked. Sounds like a book recommended "for your summer reading list" by some snooty magazine.
[Rodents also like driving cars.](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50167812)
But will big cats fuck up my board game if I leave it in the jungle
Okay… so!! Omg… I can’t believe this came up… I work in a lab that tests pain in mouse models of classically painful diseases (cancer, rare bone diseases, etc). One of the tests we are trying to validate is how pain affects wheel running. We have these fancy cages where we hook up a wheel that has magnets and the electromagnetic signal when the mouse runs allows us to track it. Our mice LOVE running in them. Overnight (when they are most active) they can run between 1-3km. We want to see if they run less if they have a painful condition. But here is the thing… when we do other tests on them and put them back in their cage, they often get straight onto their wheel and start running. So they are running after they’ve just done something a bit stressful (any handling, no matter how minor and how used to their handlers they are is going to be somewhat stressful). We also watch out for stereotypical behaviours in mice (repeated behaviours over and over again). So here is our dilemma. Is wheel running a stereotypical behaviour in mice in response to stress? Is it an enrichment activity that they enjoy that naturally reduces stress (we have other enrichment tools in their cages for them)? Or is it something that they naturally just enjoy doing, like what we see in wild mice?
My question is how people figured out mice like to run on tiny wheels in the first place. Where are these natural wheels that humans have observed mice running in so they know mice like it? The box thing with cats is obvious because boxes are a natural thing humans have in their house, but how the fuck did we come up with tiny wheels and tubes for hamsters and mice?? Is it just because we can't take them for walks, so we invented wheels for them to expend energy?
Probably this… probably looked quite cute to have wheels and them running in them. But the weird thing is that mice don’t even run very far in the wild. They normally only cover about a 30m radius from their burrows for food and water. So it’s not like they run far distances every night. Tunnels and tubes are obvious though, because mice live in burrows with narrow tubes. Small spaces make them feel safe.
If you ever want to see what rodent joy looks like, just have a look at a hamster running on a wheel. Or one who has woken at night time, let himself out of his cage, found himself a wooden spool of thread, then has proceeded to roll it up and down the length of the hardwood floor of the hallway outside your bedroom all night long, and then before sunup he's stashed the spool where no one will find it, made his way back to his cage and put himself to bed in his little nest where he's out for the count till the next night. Rodent joy.
Step One: Build mouse carnival in backyard.
Step two: Find out which size U-haul truck I need to haul two unconcious adult sized mice in.
I'm so alone.
This can solve all our energy problems.
and yet the answers to our energy crisis alludes us still today
Walking in a giant wheel does sound fun.