Ghostly Joins RLF?
Or how he embraced his inner rodent. Come over to the dark side...The refrain often heard from Mad gerbil/Bergil and others. For a long time I've resisted the entreaties, but times have changed. Let me start from the beginning... Where we live my landlord won't allow cats. My wife loves cats, she wanted a pet, so we tried parakeets. while they are entertaining, you can't really pet them or do much except watch them, so.. She says to me, "why not get a small animal like a rat, gerbil or hamster or mouse?" Well, after much time with everytime we go to the pet store to get bird supplies ending up looking at small rodents,we finally, today decided to get a couple of mice. We couldn't find a Gerbil anywhere (go figure), Maybe MG has liberated them all? Anyway, we have 2 small young female mice, one brown and one white. Cute little gals I must admit. Guess what she decides to name them? Thelma and Louise. No joke. I'm more than a little worried about the choice of names but I'll keep my wits about me and hope all is well. The critter cages and such have come a long way from the little wire cages with a single wheel in them, that I remember. Tubes comeing out and going god only knows where or why. http://www.arcatapet.com/item.cfm?cat=8988 This is the one we got. Wheel is up on top. Anyway, wish me luck on my journey to embrace my inner rodent.

Mice are delightful - but they have a powerful odor that you might regret real soon. Gerbils and hamsters do not produce anywhere near the odor that mice do -- my daughter has a mouse and I cannot wait until the thing expires. If you are keeping them someplace where the odor is no problem, you'll enjoy them. Feed mice carefully, they over eat. Gerbils don't over eat. Hamsters hoard and don't over eat either. Gerbils like to have pals. Hamsters like to be alone. A more convenient cage to clean would be a 10-20 gallon fish tank. Buy a cracked one on the cheap and affix a wire top to it. If you use pine bedding the clean up of the cage is as simple as removing the mice, dumping the tank into the garbage and putting in more bedding. I used to do the habitral thing like you've got there but they can be a bummer to get clean. Enjoy.

Gerb's advice is all good, but he left out some info. Mice are social and need friends as well. If you have two, that's just fine. I never noticed the smell being all that bad when I had mice, but if it gets to you and you don't mind the cost, cedar bedding instead of pine will help with odor control. Hamsters are fairly foul-tempered and prone to biting. Really not good pets for kids or for handling. Last time I checked the price of 10 gallon aquariums, they were still single digit. You can get a cracked one, but a new one isn't going to be much more. And they're INFINITELY easier to keep clean. Do get a secure lid, though, rodents are amazing escape artists. They'll find a way to the top of the cage no matter what, and if it's not on tightly.... Guinea pigs make really good pets, too. They're very friendly, and despite being much larger than mice, hamsters, gerbils and rats, they don't need much more space. They're also not very smelly. Some of them sqeak up a storm (they all can squeak quite loudly, but it's a matter of individual temperament whether or not they do so constantly), so be forewarned about that. I had a friend who named her first two mice Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. She also refused to actually assign either name to either mouse - the two of them were just "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern".

I don't know about Cedar bedding, LR. I've read that it is hard on the little guys. Pine isn't even ideal - if you want to save $$$ find a local lumber yard and get bags of sawdust for free.

Thx for all the info. Mice don't smell bad yet. Maybe they've been deoderized. MG , you still haven't answered my question about what you've done with all the gerbils. Went to 3 different petstores, no gerbils anywhere.

I think the reason gerbils were banned from california was because they'd take over the desert and destroy the native species or something. That's how we ended up with a gerbil in 2nd grade. Its owner was moving to California and left it with our class to take care of. Although thinking back, it might've been a guinea pig...