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Introduction: Cairo Spiny Mice |
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I should start this off by saying how it all started... huh?
Well it all started with a single satin spiny mouse I named Cleopatra. I went into a tiny icky pet store in central New York for supplies, when I noticed spiny mice for sale. This place was NOT USDA licenced to sell them, but they stated that they weren't on their "species list" so they didn't worry. They were selling them rather cheap, trying to get rid of them. I bought a young girl, and kept her alone for almost a year only knowing the basic care of spinies, forgetting completely about the fact that they NEED company. |
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Cleopatra as a younger mouse. year 2000. |
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| I went back to the pet store to find "SPINY MICE 99 CENTS EACH"! I couldn't believe it! They never seperated the genders, let them breed and they never handled ANY of them so they bit CONSTANTLY! I decided to now get a girl for Cleopatra as a cagemate. Little did I realize it's VERY hard to sex spiny mice, and I wound up with a baby boy instead. I went back to the pet store not even a week later, to find every single one of them gone. NO clue what happened to them...... |
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| Well Cleo's friend turned out to be a boy, and long story short a year later I wound up with a baby! She only had a single baby, and considering I only had dealings with domestic rats and mice, I couldn't figure out why the baby looked like a 3 week old baby mouse. I had cleaned the cage out not that long ago, and I feed and water and handled them daily, how did this mouse spontaneously produce?? After a bit of internet research, I found out Spiny babies are born furred, with their eyes, ears, teeth, etc already intact. Well that meant I had a male/female pair, but I still couldn't figure out who was who. Eventually I noticed that one had a slightly further space between openings than the other. That was my male. |
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I renamed the boy Mark Anthony, and the newborn was Ramses. Unfortunately after seperating the two boys from the girl, they met an accidental end.
Not long afterwards, three girls were born to Cleopatra. I named them Mocha, Latte, and Cappuccino. I hadn't seperated her in time, obviously. |
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Mocha, Latte, Cappuccino. 2002. |
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| Because Cleopatra was seperated from the father so early before their birth, she seemed to suffer from mental problems and began severely barbering the three girls' fur. I later learned this was common, and they need company, and mate for life. I felt devastated and there was nothing I could do about it. The three girls grew their fur back, Cleopatra calmed down, and they became EXTREMELY close. This is when, after researching spinies one HELL of a lot, I decided to start breeding them. Eventually I will apply for a USDA license but until then, it's more of a project to get them more docile, and improve the mouse as a whole because let's face it, Spinies are far from perfect... but they're close. |
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