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| Name: |
Brightback
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Age: |
Seven months old
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| Gender: |
Female
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Kind: |
Fancy Mouse
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| Home: |
Alberta, Canada
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Brightback
is an inquisitive girl whose coloring is known by some as piebald.
Others would call her a cow mouse - I quite like that, too. I had Brightback
in a colony with about eight other females until recently. However I noticed that
my male, Frankie, was getting depressed. So, while I was cleaning his cage I
put Brightback out so he could play with her and interact with her. This was
apparently not the greatest idea as she was in heat! There is no real way to
tell when a female is in heat unless she squats and lets the male do his
thing. So they had a liaison. I wasn't 100% unhappy I used to be a small time
breeder and I have a private breeder that will take any I don't keep. She did
in fact have eight healthy babies, three girls and five boys. I can sex pinkies,
takes a lot of practice but I bred mice for at least ten years. Of the babies
in the picture, the one that is a little more pink in the back is a female
and my current favorite. Her name is to be Lechku. In front is my favorite
boy, he looks a lot like his dad Frankie. I wasn't 100% unprepared, so all is
going well thus far.
Brightback is a very loving mother and pet, when I pick up her house to check
on the pinkies, she is often nursing them. The fun thing though is she
doesn't run and even lets me pet her while she is feeding her children. If
she is not nursing them she comes up to my hand, and gives me a good sniff
and paw touches. She is very laid back, and her babies seem to be the same.
In recent studies apparently they figured out that a mouse that trusts her
owner will pass on that trust to any children she has, sort of a
physiological trait. The babies are sweet as honey and have fallen asleep in
my warm hand more than once. I hold them with gloves as getting my scent on
the babies before they get fur tends to upset mother mice in my personal experience.
Brightback just had pure black spots when I first got her last November as a
baby, but as she grew she got all these lovely white streaks all through the
black. She truly is a treasure, a sweet pet that rarely protests to being
picked up and puts up with lots of petting and kissing. She loves out of cage
time, she patters around like crazy sniffing everything.
The first pic is of her pregnant the day before she had her beautiful
pinkies. They were born Friday the 13th. I have been feeding her "cat milk,"
so she has lots of rich milk. Cat milk is cow milk with 98% of the lactose
removed so is actually ok for her tummy. And she loves it, licks it till it's
all gone. I soak baby cookie pieces with the milk, and she prefers to lick
all the milk first and the cookie gets second priority. Cat milk still has
plenty of fat, and she needs that to feed all them babies. Both she and her
young are healthy and thriving. I plan to keep her three daughters with her
for life. They seem to have inherited Brightback's sweet personality. She is
precious to me, and I bet they will be, too!
View more images of Brightback!
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Talk about Brightback in Pet Talk!
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