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Anonymous Guest asked:

Your mice are adorable, thanks for posting so much about them and writing such great alt text! How does having mice compare to having guinea pigs? I loved having guinea pigs, but I'm allergic to timothy hay and they need to eat that! (I love having cats too, but I am also allergic to cats.)

Thank you! Please enjoy this bonus mouse.

I love them both but mice are very different from guinea pigs. To name a few things:


  • Mice have much shorter lifespans. I had my guinea pigs for six or seven years; with mice, you get one or two.

  • Guinea pigs are more handleable. My mice are maybe a little on the cautious side because they're rescues and probably didn't get good human socialization when they were babies, but they tend to tolerate petting for only very short times before getting squirmy. (Or bitey. My mice have never broken my skin, their teeth are teeny and they don't bite me full-force, but my guinea pigs never even tried to bite me and... the mice cannot say the same.)

  • Mice are also more aggressive to each other. You can and should cohabit a group of females, or females and a neutered male, but intact males have to be housed alone and get their socialization from human contact, because they will fight and can kill each other. Mice also are more prone to eating their babies if the mom is stressed (and sometimes just being a new mother is stress enough...)

  • Mice live in three dimensions! They dig and climb much more than guinea pigs. They need less open floor space, more "clutter" that they can clamber under and over, and deeper bedding that they can dig burrows in. Mice can also use running wheels, which guinea pigs cannot. (Hamster balls are not a good idea. Honestly I don't think there's any species other than humans that actually enjoys hamster balls.) Because they're so good at climbing and squeezing through small spaces, mice are best kept in a glass tank with a lid; I used to keep my guinea pigs in an open-topped cage but mice would climb out of that or squeeze between the bars in a hot second.

  • Mice really like to rearrange their space. Guinea pigs mostly leave furniture where it is; mice will do a full remodel after every cage cleaning.

  • Mice are overall lower maintenance. They tend to cache their food when you give it to them and nibble as needed, rather than eating it all at once, so you can safely leave them alone for a day or two just by giving them extra food. You also usually don't need to trim their nails or brush their hair; they do all their own grooming.

  • Mice are more nocturnal than guinea pigs; it's good if you work day shift because they'll be waking up just as you get home, but if you're home all day they'll be asleep for a lot of it.

  • Mice are much quieter than guinea pigs. They do have voices, but they speak (at least in the human-audible range) much less often and less loudly.

  • Mice poop, like, a thousand times less than guinea pigs. Which is weird to say because mice poop a lot. But, you know, relatively. Also, some guinea pigs will use litter boxes or establish a pooping corner of the cage; mice will not. They just let it go wherever they are.

  • Unlike guinea pigs, mice are omnivores; they need more protein than "mice and rat" food provides, so you should supplement them with little bits of egg or unseasoned cooked meat. Or bugs. I feed my mice dried mealworms as their protein supplement and they love it.

There's probably a lot more, can't stress enough to do your own research and all that, but these were the first things that came to mind.


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