Today I read that The San Diego Zoo was attempting to certify in the Guinness Book of World Records the “oldest living mouse in human care.” The mouse in question? “Pat” - a male Pacific Pocket Mouse (the smallest mouse species of all) born in 2013.
A fête for Pat was held at the zoo with “light refreshments,” (and I assume this meant for Pat, as well as Pat’s pals) for the press and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance staff.
This is all fine; but it is all a lie.
My family owned and raised what I believe is the oldest living mouse in human care … and we tried to document Sally’s life (with date-stamped photographs) to the Guinness Book of World Records – which ignored us.
Pat is now nine years and five months old; but when Sally died in 2019, she was nine years and eight months old.
I want to say that I hate mice almost as much as I hate rats and all forms of fast-moving vermin (except spiders, for which I have a grudging respect and literary regard based on E. B. White’s classic, Charlotte’s Web). Spiders are not bugs, but arachnids - fierce little predators who oblige me by eating all the nastier species … just as bats (which I love, and are also hideously maligned) are harmless creatures who can eat thousands of mosquitoes on a single summer night. They are not rodents; they are chiroptera, a five-fingered species of its own, most closely aligned to primates. (But yes, I digress - this is a rant for another day.)
We found Sally when we mashed her mother in a trap - and the mouse baby, the size of the nail on my pinkie finger, was by her side.
What kind of being murders a creature’s mother and then feeds the baby with an eye dropper? Probably, one whose (then) 11 year-old daughter burst into tears and pleaded for Sally’s life (this is more and more like Charlotte’s Web, except that Sally could not write or spell or do anything except mouse around … she did like her exercise wheel).
She was robust. Sally never let anyone who meant well touch her, and bit everyone in the family at least once, particularly on those occasions when Sally, born free, tried to make a break for freedom … but eventually succumbed to her fondness for pumpkin seeds.
She was not an interesting pet. My daughter is still traumatized, years later, by the fact that she didn’t notice for a day that Sally had expired.
Perhaps a representative of the Guinness Book of World Records will read this and proffer our righteous title – for the “oldest living mouse in human care, home edition.”
Write “care of” this address. - JM
