One of the things I’ve thought about as a result of getting to know him is his experience of time. When PeeWee gets in my hand, his tiny warm feet feel to me as if they are almost electric. He seems to be buzzing with energy.
Numerous sources cite a mouse’s heart rate to be between 310-840 beats per minute, mine is about 60 beats per minute.
Likewise, a mouse’s respiratory rate is reported to be between 80-230 breaths per minute; a normal adult human’s is 12 to 16 breaths per minute.
Even though PeeWee will live for only a couple of years, maybe his life span and mine feel more or less the same to each of us. He lives a fast life. Everything he does, he does at a quick rate. (That's why my pics of him are always blurry.)He never seems to move slowly except when he is evaluating whether he can make it down a steep surface. Other than that, he generally runs everywhere, he scurries. When he's holding something and eating it, his hands are turning it this way and that a mile a minute. He bites off little pieces so quickly that it seems almost to disappear. When he grooms himself, his foot is a blur. Maybe to him, when he is grooming, the speed of his scratching feels the same to him as it feels to me when I scratch myself. And he does have hands; he isn't a four-footed animal like a horse or an elephant or a dog. He has hands. Others have noticed this too. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0226774
PeeWee isn’t on the same schedule I am. His “days” and “nights” seem to last a few hours. In the period of my single 24 hour day, he seems to have a number of days or active periods.
The speed of his life has increased my sadness and alarm over the use of these small animals in labs around the world. The overwhelming majority of them live out their lives in small barren plastic bins; typically, about 80 square inches of floor space. https://www.allentowninc.com/rodent-housing/nexgen/ In most cases, from what I can glean on-line, they have very little to do and no place to go. Their environments are cramped, bleak, and often crowded. While they seem to us to live for only a short period of time, to them, their life in a plastic tub in a lab must seem to go on forever. I wonder whether they are all somewhat insane as a result.
The annual number of mice used worldwide is anyone’s guess, but sources I’ve looked at acknowledge that it is over 100 million. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79961-0
It is hard to calculate the area of floor space PeeWee has, but it’s around 40 sq. ft. and is filled with many places to hide. Tubes of varying sizes and construction connect his main area to satellite areas. The longest tube is about ten feet in length. He is essentially on an archipelago in my office. The only barriers he encounters are the edges of his islands. He has three exercise wheels and four water sources. We periodically give him a block of wheatgrass which he seems to like, both for the grass and the roots.
His diet is varied. We also put bits of popcorn (thanks JB for that tip) and oats throughout his estate.
He seems glad to see and interact with me. I call him early in the evening and most of the time, but not always, I can hear him rustling around in his ship for a while (one of the pieces of furniture upstairs in his main house) before he comes down and visits with me. (Lately, he has been shacking up in one of the more distant annexes, but still gets out of his nest box there to come see me when I call him.) He walks around on my lap and climbs into my hand. He seems genuinely glad to see me. I don’t feed him by hand; I assume he interacts with me simply because he wants to.
The other day, I leaned a small mirror where he could see it. He stops and checks it out every once in a while. I've learned that he is very alert to changes in his environment. He scopes out new things, investigates new passages and seem altogether fully aware of everything around him. The zillions of mice in the labs live in a never-changing mind-numbing environment.
I think he has the best life a lone male fancy mouse could have. A “fancy mouse” is a mouse bred for the pet trade, for humans who fancy mice. We breed them to entertain us. We also breed mice to use as tools in laboratories. We also breed them to feed to other animals we fancy who we keep in confined spaces. The astronomical number of mice we create and consume each year must make them the most suffering-filled species on the planet.
I’ve been struck by the claims of some of the people who work in labs that use animals that they got into their profession because they like and care about animals. This seems to me like a concentration camp guard saying they got into their line of work because they like people. Given the fact that the overwhelming majority of the mice in the labs are stored in plastic tubs that are stored in racks and that they are accessed only to clean the tub, refill the water bottle, or to do something to the mice, I’m doubtful that many, if any at all, of the animal care- and lab-techs ever get to know any of the mice in the tubs. It’s unlikely that they could even if they might want to.
There is something dark and very ugly about our use of animals, our indifference to their suffering, our arrogance. I’m glad I’ve gotten to know PeeWee, and am glad I have been able to make his life a little better than the lives of most other captive mice.
PeeWee is most assuredly a someone rather than a something.
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