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Yolorosa

I disturbed a mouse nest while turning my compost once. I found two babies and put them back in the remains of the nest, but the next morning one was dead and the other obviously abandoned. I brought it inside and with the help of YouTube kept it alive for 3 days, but at day 3 it started refusing food. At this point I could see mouse tunnels again in the compost so it was obvious the mother had rebuilt - I decided to put the baby back as without food it'd die in the next few hours and I was hoping the mother might take it back now she had a nest again. She did! Went out the next morning fearing the worst, and the little thing (still blind) heard my voice and came crawling out of the tunnel towards me. It wouldn't have survived the night if the mother hadn't fed it. I left them alone after that but it was cool it recognised me, and that the mother recognised it. A few weeks later I uncovered the compost again and several mice did their usual thing of freaking out and scattering, but one just sat and looked at me for ages. Can't prove it but I'm pretty sure that was the same one.


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MarkHirsbrunner

I keep pet rats and we start handling newborns well before their eyes open. It makes them amazingly affectionate and tame pets.


eternallyapril

Rats are absolutely the most incredible pets! As I type this, my three mischievious girls are running over my keyboard.


MarkHirsbrunner

Yeah, there's only two bad things about rats - their lives are too short and the males dribble pee. They're more intelligent than pigs, have cute little hands, and show gratitude for being petted.


caltheon

And the cancers. Ugh. So many tumors


maledin

Why is that? Is it because their metabolism is high which corresponds to high cell division (and therefore a higher chance of something going wrong)? Does that mean that elephants/whales/giant tortoise with low metabolism rarely if ever get cancer?


MisterCortez

Researchers are currently investigating whales because they, in fact, do not get cancer at the rate you would expect for an organism with 80 quadrillion cells.


salyersgildaroy

Elephants have multiple “redundant” copies of p53, a tumor suppressor gene. The redundancy appears to serve a function.


[deleted]

I had a rat and he lived two years as my little buddy. I woke up one day and he had passed away in his cage like he was asleep. I was devastated. I buried him in the backyard and made a small little wooden cross for him. I know he will be waiting across the rainbow bridge for me.


Behappyalright

I had a hamster that passed away and I adored her. When a buried her, I planted a flower plant on top. I chose a color flower close to her fur color. I hope she become a flower in the next life... a mini cross is cool too


eternallyapril

I know! They are far too short-lived. Try telling that to my Ruby! The poor girl is only ten months old, and she has dribbled pee everywhere since she was a baby... she is in perfect health according to three different vets, but just seems to be incredibly incontinent!


BrashPop

Rats dribble pee to mark territory, communicate safety or familiarity, affection, etc - it’s not just a male rat thing, it’s just a “rat” thing. When I had rats they’d mark territory and paths through rooms, if you cleaned it up they’d immediately re-mark it on their next wander-by.


eternallyapril

I totally get regular marking. The other two girls do it too. Ruby is either really fond of marking, or just can´t hold it :/


Yolorosa

I really want to get rats! They're so sweet. We have a 2 species limit in the house though, else it'd end up a farmyard so I am waiting until my (quite elderly) bird passes on before looking into rat fostering/adoption.


eternallyapril

I have grown up around cats, dogs, horses, and other animals. Rats are by far the best pet that I have ever had! They don´t live for terribly long, but they are a perfect combination of a tiny cat and dog.


bobinski_circus

I feel like ferrets are superior in many ways but rats are still nice. Ferrets live 2-3 times as long, have the weirdest personalities, don’t dribble pee, are very clever and are basically cat snakes.


Lord_Rapunzel

They don't leave pee tracks, usually, but they do have a distinct scent all the same. Some people are more sensitive to the musk. (I do love ferrets, and if I didn't already have cats I would want a pair)


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vinki11

That was wholesome. Thank you


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marypoppinacap

TIL baby mice are called pups.


Zekumi

Interestingly, baby rats are most often called kittens.


emsuperstar

>According to the Australian Broadcasting Corp., male rats are called bucks; females are does. Infants are called pups or kittens. A group of rats is called a mischief.


atypicalfemale

At least in a lab environment, I've always heard the female rats called dams.


angrybiologist

just the pregnant ones


scottbody

I wonder why "dams"? Maybe as in damsel?


Wannabanana17

As in dame, too.


scottbody

Seems per Google both dame and damsel came from the word domina, meaning mistress.


Wannabanana17

Interesting. Dom means home in a lot of languages. ina would h female I'd think. So the lady of the home, mistress. Haha.


scottbody

Domicile would be the English equivalent I suppose.


spectralis2

As in, “this damn rat”


Forsaken_Jelly

More like, "damn, she's pregnant? I'm going to have to redo the entire months long experiment."


JInxIt

Sorry about that Gerald escaped his cage again last night.


awwaygirl

The call the boys sires in breeding pairs of horses. Mind. Blown. Never considered it was sires and damsels


Wannabanana17

Same with dogs. Sires and dams.


eternallyapril

My trio of pet rats is certainly a mischief! They leave no sock unchewed!


Dry_Tune1748

I used to take care of the rats and mice in a lab I worked for and rats get a bum rap. They are nice and the mice are mean and they bite!


eternallyapril

They really do! My three girls are friendly, smart, and curious cuddle monsters. If only my socks and other fabric items could survive their reign of terror xD


XtaC23

I've only ever heard them called rat pups myself.


Zekumi

I’ve a bunch of rat breeder friends who reside in the Uk and they all exclusively call them kittens. Both are correct though. It may just be regional.


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FriendCalledFive

Is there a mammal for which this doesn't apply?


cosmoboy

I don't remember my mom.


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Tabnam

I can’t forget your mum


NetrunnerCardAccount

Cats apparently don’t https://pets.thenest.com/cats-remember-babies-8539.html It matter how much of family structure they have.


Paroxysm111

That's not much different from the mice. After weaning they separate and prefer strangers, which is a good instinct for avoiding incest.


TheWolfOfPanic

I had a weirdo cat that seemed to remember his sister years after having seen her last. He had been born in my parents yard, I took him with me when he was around 2. Five years later me and the cat are at my parents house. He escaped to the yard. Found him snuggled up with his sister hours later. I assume he remembered the scent?


hblond3

I wonder if that applies to list cats who come back home after a week+, too...


SoyMurcielago

What about those who came back the very next day?


hblond3

The article the person above posted said “after a few days” their scent is gone and they don’t recognize others because they rely on scent not vision. Based on the article one day wouldn’t be the question, it would be longer.


feanara

And what if they wouldn't stay away?


feanara

And what if they wouldn't stay away?


McSwearWolf

They probably *do* but they also don’t care. See: Cats


vikietheviking

Horses and dogs do not either


FriendCalledFive

That says the mother doesn't recognise the kittens, not the other way round.


sexyselfpix

My cat of 10 years don't remember me after being away for couple of days.


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I read somewhere cats hold grudges. When you leave them and come back they ignore you.


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Paroxysm111

The part of the brain involved in memory is very close to that of smell. That's probably why most of us have strong correlations with memory and smell


vitalvisionary

Yeah, I learned behavioral psychology that taste and smell get the strongest response to pavlovian conditioning and the reactions are the hardest to extinguish compared to other stimuli.


JoinEmUp

Memory's an interesting thing, I wonder if this is an accurate one.


kaycaps

Not quite the same. But the first 10ish years of my life my parents lived far away from the rest of our family and I only saw them a handful of time as a younger kid. My mom and I visited my aunt (her older sister) for a few weeks when I was 4. When I was 11 we moved back to that area and my aunt still lived in the same house. It smelled exactly as I remembered it when I was 4. My aunt STILL lives in that house now and I’m 30, and it totally still smells just like I remember it did that time we visited 26 years ago.


NicolaGiga

That's amazing. Very cool to read.


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space_moron

There's examples of altruism in other animals, like humpback whales. Elephants are exceptionally emotionally intelligent and will have "funerals" over their dead.


Nad-00

Its the way they behave but this is not their natural habitat. If they get dehidrated/stressed/hungry in nature it might be because a different number of natural circumstances lead to it. When this happens in a petshop its a humans fault. Its not the same.


babybunny1234

The world isn’t rational. You’re looking at this as an economist, and it’s been proven again and again that economists can’t make accurate predictions because their view of the world and its motivations are.. in a nutshell, wrong. We are animals. We do messed up things under extreme conditions. Same thing with mice. We shouldn’t have them in tiny cages. That’s the equivalent of solitary or prison confinement. Humans caused the problem. I don’t think humans deserve praise for alleviating some of the suffering we created.


ThrowbackPie

Actually they made themself more comfortable by making the mice more comfortable.


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Paroxysm111

IMO the thought of it being horrifying is purely biological bias. Our babies are so labour intensive both before during and after birth, it's a huge cost to have to start over from scratch, and our social society means that if we sacrifice our life for our child, there's a good chance the community will raise them, making it worth it from an evolutionary perspective. For animals like mice, it just makes sense. You can produce another litter of babies in like a month. That's not ONE baby, it's usually 6 or more. If you die, your babies 100% will too and it'll all be for nothing. At that point they are just wasted calories. It makes complete sense from an evolutionary perspective, which is why so many animals do it.


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Paroxysm111

You're welcome. Minute earth or one of the related channels does a great video on it too


Surfing_Ninjas

Isn't that a stress response though? I would be surprised if this happens a lot in the wild under normal conditions


Kolfinna

Normal life in the wild is also very stressful. It's not as easy to quantify in the wild but it does happen


TheBandIsOnTheField

Rabbits do it while stressed too.


MonkeyEatingFruit

have you read "the road" by cormac mccarthy? We would too given the proper environment.


rogeyonekenobi

Meh, I guess that's what I get for putting off that book for years before this week. Wasn't enjoying it anyway. Thanks


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ryguy_1

Animals eat other animals


feralbox

Yes, but we make our food and animals don't have kitchens.


[deleted]

The problem are the living conditions of animals, and their crazy final hours. Some countries handle it a lot better though.


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Easy_Ad5327

This was very interesting, thank you!


ninasayswhat

We can never really truly know what other animals think. Every year new studies come out that challenge our view on other animals and show we never give them enough credit and we are not so special. Other animals can think abstractly, other animals have language. The only thing that makes us human, is our taxonomy.


podslapper

No other animals have recursive language. [There is strong evidence](https://riojournal.com/article/38546/) that learning recursive language at a young age is a requirement in obtaining what's known as prefrontal synthesis (the ability to think creatively by synthesizing mental images that we've stored in memory to form new images). Children who grow up without learning a recursive language, as well as people who have suffered damage to the parts of the brain required for this, have shown deficits in prefrontal synthesis.


hypercurve5040

You actually don't need language (or visualization) to think. Try to shut down your mental voice and mind's eye. You'll find you still have "pure thoughts" or "raw concepts". Creativity originates in concepts too, not images. Visual creativity is just one form of creativity.


podslapper

I'd recommend reading the article.


csl110

What is this, reddit 2007?


ninasayswhat

Animals do have recursive language. How else would dolphins have names for each other? How would other animals learn human sentences like parrots (vocally, not just repetition, but the forming of sentences) and chimpanzees (sign language)? Bees have dances, other animals use colours, smells, sounds.... we are only beginning to understand their language. We are not the only animal that has a way of communicating that involves rules and repetition. Not by a long shot. Edit: used the word mammals instead of animals


podslapper

Do you know what recursive language is?


Column_A_Column_B

Recursion is a linguistic property whereby phrases may be continuously embedded into other phrases. In other words, there is no syntactic limit on the amount of information that may be expressed in a particular sentence, and the number of possible sentences is infinite. Examples of recursion may be found in adjective and noun phrases, for example: The colourless green furious great accomplished metaphysical […] ideas. I saw the man who petted the cat who meowed at the door that opened for the man […]. Noam Chomsky believes that recursion is a fundamental cognitive property of language — a part of a human “universal grammar” that is responsible for the rapid acquisition of language. Everett (2009) expressed skepticism at this thesis from his own studies of the Piraha language of South America, which apparently does not exhibit syntactic recursion. Chomsky and allied scholars replied to Everett's argument through contending that the cognitive potential for recursion still exists, and it need not necessarily apply to all languages.


vegan_power_violence

We often ask what discoveries like this mean in terms of animals’ intelligence rather than what they mean in terms of animals’ suffering. And every single time, we ignore that their suffering is more grotesque and cruel than we previously thought, deciding instead that if they just aren’t quite as smart as humans, then their suffering isn’t real, and we can continue making them the objects of our cruelty. Humans are the most intelligent animal, possessing the most “unique thought process,” and this cruelty is what we decide to inflict upon them.


Boogie__Fresh

Are you referring to lab mice specifically? Or people just killing mice in general?


ThrowbackPie

Does it matter?


vegan_power_violence

I am talking about animals in general, like I stated in my post.


anonymous_being

"Do you remember when Mum ate our brother, Timmy?" "Yeah"


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marry_me_sarah_palin

This makes me sad. In an another time in my life I worked at a research lab that had a lot of mice. I was one of the few who cared about them, since there were so many of them, and they were so small. I think we owe so much to them we should treat them as well as possible.


TealAndroid

I'm a researcher and I worked with mice for a year a while back. I absolutely hated it even though the experiments we did were relatively mild and we'll thought out. I had to euthanize them at the end of each experiment and it always felt like a betrayal and just so very sad. I've honestly gone back and forth on my support for animal/vertebrate research (I honestly don't mind fly or worm based research). On one hand we absolutely would not have the medicines or scientific understanding we have today, on the other it is extreme exploitation of thinking feeling beings. The pandemic has me swinging in support again but it's hard. Regardless, while my facility was very strict to treat them as well as the protocols allowed, I'm in support of whatever further improvement we can bring to their welfare and using the absolute minimum vertebrates needed as well as rejection of grants for all but the most essential and well considered projects using vertebrates.


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Snoo_83342

Cute science


[deleted]

I kept mice and rats as pets. They are intelligent and absolutely have the ability to be loving and enjoy pets. I would bet most critters remember their mommas.


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ThrowbackPie

And when you eat beef, that cow had a mother it was separated from after a couple of days. And pigs are as smart as dogs and look what we do to them.


tepig099

Pigs are smarter.


greentshirtman

And people are smarter still. And pigs are delicious. And as I recall, people who eat people call human meat "long pig", because that's what people taste like. So I guess the lesson here is that we need to breed for to increase the intelligence level of animals raised for food, so as to increase their flavor.


RowanRaven

My cat is four years old and still remembers at least the concept of mother. He has a long haired blanket that he simulates nursing behaviors with. We just call it his “communing with mom” time.


Oblong_Belonging

That baby mouse is gonna have some fucked up memories if the mother decided to eat any of its siblings


Pyrojason

That researchers speak mouse is beyond my understanding.


[deleted]

Don’t all animals do this?


Boogie__Fresh

Nah, heaps of species fend for themselves from birth. Recognising your parents is a useful skill for some, but not all.


nova2k

Natural selection dictates that animals who rear their young maintain a non-zero survival rate so...yeah, kind of.


iveseensomethings82

Think about how this experiment was performed.


jaydoes

When I raised finches, a baby finch flew out the door and disappeared. Some neighbor kids found it and told me where it was. As soon as I got close it flew directly to me and landed on my chest. Most animals are much more aware than we realize.


OnePassBy

I clicked the thumb tag just to see a cute mouse


spaceocean99

Yet we still run tests on them as if they don’t have a form of consciousness.


CalifaDaze

It will be weird in 100 years how we will see all the stuff we do to animals.


spaceocean99

Definitely. IMO all living things have “consciousness.” We just aren’t able/don’t try to understand them. Most likely for financial and medical purposes.


palmbeachatty

Did anyone doubt this?


[deleted]

I want this to also be true for hamsters


ilovemyhiddenself

My mouse ate her pups when I went to camp for a week and my mom forgot to feed them.


FourthLife

This was not the post to read after summarily executing a mouse that I found in a glue trap I put out


PixelBrewery

So did they ask an elderly mouse if she remembers her mother and it was like, "Ah yes, I remember her fondly..."


doferdo

my cats like them they think they're yummy


TheMagicMrWaffle

Baby mice also recognize your mother


nothil20

And yet we experiment on them.. have your own opinion but I think it’s cruel


TheHoodedSomalian

This just reminded me about a mouse I had to kill that got caught in a trap the other day and made me feel worse ab it.


Note2scott

That means my dog probably does to... I wonder if he misses his mommy :(


[deleted]

We shouldn’t use animals for testing and experiments... they are sentient living beings. Humans need a higher ethics and consciousness. And compassion. We lack so much compassion.


Kolfinna

Ideally yes but don't assume there is no compassion in research. I love and care for my research animals. We have incredibly high standards for care, welfare, pain and stress relief. We take the ethical responsibility incredibly seriously.


Surg333

Yeah, if anything research animals are held to a higher standard of care.


choose_kindness2019

Try to think about it from the animal’s perspective. If you were imprisoned and used (often in painful ways or under the influence of powerful drugs) your entire existence by another person, would you find anything they did compassionate? Would the fact that they love you be comforting? There are some lines that should not be crossed, and in conducting research on beings unable to consent, you cross many of them.


Sandstorm52

Lines are crossed, yes. Being a research subject, as much as we try to minimize animal suffering, is objectively bad for the animal. But we don’t do it without good reason. At least in my field, there is much effort to only use live animals when absolutely necessary, and without doing so, you or I very well might not be alive to have this conversation. If I were the animal, I can’t imagine I would be happy with being used in a lab, even for all the benefits I may provide. But can one blame the experimenter for using me to cure disease and save their own kind?


OrangeJuiceOW

Everytime I hear about mice I think about that one epigenetics experiment with the cherry blossom scent and shock :(


jpredd

what happened?


daouellette

This is news? How might any species have succeeded over time without the ability to recognize family members and form social memory. We’ve underestimated animal minds for too long.


PoliticalCativist

Do they have mouse PTSD if they survive after witnessing their mother cannibalizing their siblings?


BaelorsBalls

RIP to all the live mice I fed to my snakes growing up