Cage furniture & Toys
Mice are very active little animals and their environment will need to keep them amused and occupied, ideally offering opportunities for climbing, burrowing and chewing/gnawing as well as places to sleep and eat. This is where the items you put in the cage become important because even a fantastic cage won’t make a good home for your mice if it’s empty!
A good place to start is with the essentials, these being food and water ‘dispensers’. Fresh water should be available to your mice at all times and a water bottle is usually best for this. You can offer it in a bowl but most mice - or certainly all the ones I’ve ever tried it with - will either knock it over or fill it with bedding! Most standard small animal water bottles can be used with a wire cage, though with a tank you may need to find one that can be hung from the lid, or with suckers to stick to the walls. Food dishes will need to be of a size to hold around one or two days worth of food for your mice and ideally should be either ceramic or metal so they don’t get chewed and are heavy enough not to get knocked over. If using a ceramic bowl it is best placed on the floor of your cage and not on a shelf where it could be pushed off the edge and broken.
The next thing to consider is somewhere for your mice to sleep. They aren’t usually fussy on this front and any small, enclosed space will do fine. Most of the multitude of commercially available small pet houses, beds or hideaways make good sleeping spaces but similarly so do small cereal and tissue boxes so you needn’t spend a lot of money. Cardboard boxes also have the advantage of being not only disposable but also recyclable too and can simply be put in with your paper recycling when they become too smelly or chewed. It’s also worth bearing in mind that materials that absorb moisture, such as wood, are likely to become smelly very quickly and can be difficult to clean although they can be good for gnawing on. Plastic on the other hand washes clean easily but can’t be chewed which may or may not be a problem depending on your mice.
With eating, drinking and sleeping taken care of the rest of your cage can now be given over to keeping your mice amused and occupied. There is no end to the range of things that can make good mouse toys, both available to buy and around the home. Here are some suggestions to give you some idea:
tubes from the middle of toilet roll/kitchen towel
wheels
rope (if you have a wire or mesh roof you can clip it with clothes pegs on the outside)
stuff to shred (tissue/newspaper etc)
hamster bridge
pesticide free sticks/branches from safe source (oak, fruit trees)
small boxes
dividing walls
wire mesh to climb
small pet hammocks
the list is pretty much endless, as most toys sold for small animals are safe and tons of free household stuff (eggboxes, cereal packets etc) can also be used. A note on safety though. All wheels for mice should be of the solid kind, not spoked as their tails can easily become caught whilst they are running and cause injury. I also think the diameter is important as many wheels sold for mice are too small and if the mouse has it’s back curved whilst it’s running I would get a bigger one. Rope should be of a natural material if at all possible, ie not nylon as this could cause problem if they manage to ingest any. Branches are best cut directly off of the tree as you can’t guarentee where it’s from if it’s picked up off the floor. They are then best scrubbed to remove any dirt or bugs and put somewhere warm like the airing cupboard or on a radiator to dry out. Wire mesh makes a good dividing wall and is great to hang on the inside of glass tank to allow climbing and to provide somewhere to hang a water bottle, but you must make sure there are no sharp edges or bits for tails or paws to get caught on.
There are also lots of way to provide extra entertainment for your mice both with food and whilst out of the cage, see Treats & Extras and Time out of the cage for more information.
