Mice are amazing little critters. The common house mouse, Mus musculus, is found pretty much everywhere people are found – so, almost everywhere. Females reach sexual maturity at about six weeks of age, the gestation period is 19 to 21 days, the typical litter size is six to eight pups, and the mother can become pregnant again 24 hours after giving birth, so can produce as many as ten litters per year. When you hear the idiom “breeding like rabbits,” rewording that as “breeding like mice” would be taking that to the next level.
So, yes, that’s an a-mouse-ing life cycle. So you can understand how a New Hampshire man, who was evidently keeping mice as pets, got overwhelmed and ended up bringing nearly a thousand pesky rodents to an animal shelter.
A group of mice is called a nest, but what do you call 1,000 of them in one animal shelter?
“Crippling,” said…
