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Trump Campaign

Charles Krupa

An animal shelter in New Hampshire found itself overwhelmed by hundreds of domestic mice last week when a man surrendered the pets at the facility after they had bred out of control in his care.

The New Hampshire Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Stratham has moved more than 800 rodents from the home to the shelter in eight days, but there could be more on the way.

Lisa Dennison, the shelter’s executive director, said it’s a situation “nobody wants to be in.”

An anonymous — and overwhelmed — owner had brought a couple of bins of mice to New Hampshire SPCA on Nov. 11 to surrender the animals, Dennison said. At first, she thought he wanted to surrender 150 mice to the shelter — a number that was already too high for the shelter to handle on its own. She soon learned he meant that he had 150 bins and up to 1,000 mice that he hoped to give up all at once.

“No one community can absorb that volume of pocket pets,” she told The Washington Post.

Dennison said the animal shelter has worked hard to take in the hundreds of rodents, but they needed help from other local humane societies and residents to foster the pets. The local community has donated tanks, water bottles, food and supplies to the shelter.

“We reached out immediately to other shelters,” said Kelly Marinel, the manager of animal care at New Hampshire SPCA. “We knew that this was going to be a big undertaking, and we weren’t going to be able to accommodate them all.”

About 400 mice are currently at New Hampshire SPCA. Another 400 have been distributed across other local shelters, and about 20 mice have been adopted by local residents.

The man who surrendered the mice started out with just a few, and the litter was supposed to be all female, Marinel said. But some male mice were unknowingly mixed in, and it was a downward spiral from there.

John Farrell

Marinel said she can’t guarantee that there’s no more mice coming from the overwhelmed original owner, “and we have many that are pregnant.”

Mice have a rapid reproduction cycle, she said. They can have offspring as early as four to six weeks of age, and the gestation period is just 21 days. Each litter is also large, ranging from seven to 12 babies.

The New Hampshire SPCA quickly turned into a circus, the shelter workers said, as the bins containing dozens of mice started piling up. They needed to separate the males and females and had to get enough enclosures to house them. All the females can be housed together, but the males sometimes fight when they’re confined together.

The youngest of the litter can’t be adopted yet so they have to be fostered at a shelter. The adult male mice are being put up for adoption.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Marinel said. “They’re everywhere.”

Dennison said the shelter has a chaotic and lively energy now that they have taken in hundreds of mice. She said the staff and volunteers enjoy watching them run on exercise wheels and seeing them eat in clean cages.

“They’re very cute. They’re very sweet. Many of them are very friendly,” she said. “If they had come to us when they had 75 or 100 mice, it would’ve been much easier for us to help. But don’t allow it to spiral so out of control that it becomes this monumental crisis.”