This was Hell on Earth: callous abuse and egregious neglect of rodents and reptiles.

Say what you want about PETA, but they still do good work where others cannot or will not. For two months, one of their investigators worked at a mill, Global Captive Breeders, that produced reptiles and the rodents that "feed" them.

I put the word in quotation marks because the animals that go for human consumption, as well as those that are rendered for pet food, produce more than enough palatable, nutritious food to feed the reptiles in the pet trade. Breeding and feeding live animals to pet reptiles is inhumane and only serves man's tendency to cruelty, a tendency that we ought not to leave in any legal or moral grey zone. There is no "cycle of life" about it, as I have to repeatedly clarify for people who think it's just fine and dandy for pet cats to kill wild birds, or any such vain indulgences we have for our pets being still part of the ecology. They are not. We are responsible for them. Therefore they are part of our moral sphere. (If you fail to recognize this, you are part of the problem.)

18,000 rats were neglected, drowned, dehydrated, thrown, beaten, shot, suffocated - and the lizards fared no better. Left for dead, and not even disposed of. The video shows it all. Watch it, weep, and do something about it.

When I look at the rats in the video, there is no way I can be cynical about this. They are just like every rat I've ever known - a conscious individual born into the body of a rat with the same hazard that you and I were born into the human race. 18,000 rats at the end of an investigation. 600 reptiles. How many multiples, hundreds of thousands, suffered like so?

I know that almost none of you that read this will go out and take action in your community - identifying the companies that do such things and confronting them about their level of accountability, demanding that they be investigated, insisting that your legal authorities demonstrate that they are doing more than "monitoring the situation" (pretending to take notice until complaints have concrete grounds for conviction, already prepared by volunteer citizens).

So make a donation. Yes, to PETA. Or to any organization brave enough to do the dirty work, the legal work, or both. The people who investigate and end this suffering need support - they need to eat, they need to live with dignity, they need some kind of proof other than social media statements like "I'm sad and outraged" that other people care, because this work is bona fide traumatic, and it shows how much humans suck. Every animal from this Hell was euthanized because their state showed that life was just not worth living - and the cost of bringing whatever few would be able to make it into homes far outstripped funds available. 

Make sure you and the people you know do not buy pets from pet stores. Stores are supplied by commercial suppliers and breeders looking for extra cash. These places — like Mirdot, in Quebec (a cursory search shows they no longer exist, but due to their unsavoury nature, digging might prove useful), whose owner with his wife and children passed by one of Small Victories' fundraisers and did not contribute one red cent — would not be profitable if they treated animals properly.

Do not go to pet shows - I have documentation from the Exotic Pet Show in Montreal that they swept shelters under the rug:

On 26-Mar-07, at 7:34 PM, Expo Exotique wrote:
I am sorry that you feel an ethical dilemma about that. Since this our first year for the Expo congrès we decided that we did not want to give mixed signals to the visitors: On one hand we tell them how amazing exotic animal companions, and on the other we tell them that there is a need for refuges.

Adopt a needy animal, and actively seek them out. All documentation you get from the pet trade tells you to pick the friendliest, brightest-eyed, healthiest looking pet and reject all others. But everyone knows that the bond you form with those who need you most is the one that does you the most good.

If you have pets, then do what people did with their children after last Friday's tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Go home and hug them, spend time with them, because you are fortunate to have them and to share a life worth living.

A warm welcome

Yesterday I checked my blog statistics for the first time in ages. For the longest time, Mooshika was reliably viewed by people in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and other French-speaking countries (including those in Africa) as a place to obtain information on pet rodents and animal rescue. Realizing "holy crap, that's half my audience!" I made sure to get the major information translated into French - at the time, by friends and rescue colleagues, not Google Translate - so that it would be easier for readers to find what they needed.

Now, I can see more detail than I used to, and of course the United States, Canada (French and English), France, and the UK are among the countries that visitors come from. However, I was surprised to see that Germany had a much higher visitorship than I expected, and China beat out France and the UK by one visit in the past month. So, Willkommen and 欢迎!  (As for the Russians: nastrovia.)

I would also like to welcome two new rat boys into my home: brothers, separated at weaning, one remaining in his original home only because he went on the lam and was hiding in the furniture (yes, yikes!). The other was adopted out by the Ottawa Humane Society, where his sisters are still available, and later returned to a pet store, to be found and reclaimed by his momma's guardian (owner) and turned over to me. The feral one has since been named Dweezil (and a few days after I named him, I passed the nearby Corona Theatre and saw a poster in the window that Dweezil Zappa will be playing here in a few months. Coincidence?). The new boy, who is less feral, will tell me his name soon enough. They are both suspicious of people, with good reason - their mother was a "feeder" rat, abandoned, set loose, and her companions killed. They will hopefully come to have a better opinion of man's dominion through me.

Dweezil, sleek and well-fed, left. His brother, sweet but scared, right.

A mouse in the house

This one here is a young teenager.
There's another on the cuff of the wrist, too.

Today while I was lounging on the couch, doing my work (yes, indeed) I saw a little mouse in my peripheral vision, and turned my head to see that no, I wasn't hallucinating. Sheeee's back! Or he. I knew it, because I could hear the mouse in the wall between the kitchen and bathroom earlier today.

I dropped my hand down to the floor as she approached, and zoom, off she ran in the other direction. She looked exactly like this mouse in the picture, except smaller. These house mice are very tiny, indeed. The adults are the size of the domestic mouse juveniles that I've had the pleasure of keeping as pets.

I do not know how the mice get in, but I know it isn't very often I hear them and less often that I see them, or even evidence of them (a half-eaten cherry tomato or a hole in a bag of bread was the giveaway). Perhaps once a month, with two weeks in June or July being clearly youngster-training season. I've only seen two babies, one time; every other time just one mouse. Still, since May, I have managed to catch three of them - or the same one two times and another the third - and put them outside. That is going to be a lot harder to do, now that winter's almost here.

And so long as they're in the walls, what can be done? I cannot use a sound repeller, as I have two pet rats and a mouse. The pet rats are a mouse deterrent. Keeping my kitchen counter free of bread and other comestibles is helpful. I can also staple down some hardware cloth over the gaps and holes that kitchen cupboards have, where the plumbing and electrical pass through the walls. That will only keep them out of the public space. I'd rather keep the public space open. That way, if I can manage to trap any mice, I can keep them in captivity until spring returns. It's sad to keep a wild animal captive, but I don't want to have mice breeding in the walls if I can help it. I can, at least, give them a good captive environment.

I know this post will send some readers into a tizzy - mice being "vermin" and all - but I've never been one to panic about the boom and bust of population cycles of rodents. If a place isn't kept very hospitable, they will keep moving and not have the opportunity to settle and ruin things for the humans. Moreover I've been thoroughly exposed to most disease vectors, including humans, enough to a) not fear getting sick and b) know what to do if I were to get sick. Besides, Public Health cannot say more than that rodents' possible infectious diseases (leptospirosis, borreliosis, campylobacter, melioidosis, tularemia, plague, rat bite fever, ricketts, scrub typhus, ringworm, pneumonia, protozoans, flukes, roundworms, and cestodes, the list goes on so it's little wonder I've never been sick) are only possibilities and not guarantees. The possibility is, in my 8 years' experience, quite overplayed. Don't come eat at my house if you don't think I'm capable of keeping things clean. Don't eat…or garden, or swim, or do anything…anywhere, for that matter. Unless you are a sensible, well-educated person and realize that immunity is also dependent on exposure.