This article is from the Win-Spr 2018 AFRMA Rat & Mouse Tales news-magazine.

By Karen Robbins

Judy Brown, CA, e-mail
Q Last night we were cleaning our garage when we unveiled a litter of mice. We put them back where they were hoping mom would come back to them, and today I checked on them and they are all gone except one. It looks like Mom did come back and relocated them but forgot one. I left it alone for several uninterrupted hours before recently checking on it again. So far the mother has not returned. I don’t have a car so asked a friend to go to the grocery store for me and pick up some Pedialyte and baby formula. I have been trying to feed the baby just Pedialyte with a very small paint brush but it refuses to open its mouth. Every time the paint brush touches its mouth it recoils. I warmed up the juice a little so it wouldn’t be so cold but it just refuses to open its mouth or to attempt to suckle on the paint brush. It is so tiny too—couldn’t be more than 3 days old and probably a house mouse? To make things worse, my city’s wildlife rehabilitator (Project Wildlife) won’t even take rats or mice. Do you know of any mouse lover in my area who might want to take over responsibility of this little guy? He seems like he’s still got a lot of energy and is desperately looking for his mom’s teat but I don’t feel like I can do anything for him at all. In addition to that, I have two cats who love to hunt mice.

I’ve thought about euthanizing it but I don’t even know a humane way to do that. I called a veterinarian’s office who was open today (mine was closed) and they refused to euthanize a wild animal. I called animal control and they told me it was a pest control issue and call an exterminator, etc., etc. What do I do?

A I don’t know of anyone with domestic mice that would take in a wild mouse and there is only one wildlife rehab person in Southern California that I know of that might take in a wild mouse (or rat) (Judy Griffith in Long Beach, rodentlady44@yahoo.com). With the Hantavirus in some wild mice, you need to be careful when dealing with them. They can also carry mites and other things that would be harmful or deadly to a domestic pet mouse.

When feeding for the first few times, the baby doesn’t know what you have is food, so you have to get it in the mouth. They will struggle with you holding them but once they figure out the foreign thing (paint brush, syringe, tubing, etc.) has food on it, then they will take it and suck the formula off.

To humanely euthanize a mouse only a couple days old, vets in the past recommended the freezer as the best method (put the mouse in a small container with a lid, like a yogurt cup, with some bedding, and place in the freezer—this is very quick on the newborns).

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