We reach sexual maturity in our teenage years and usually have one baby at a time. If you compare rodents to humans, it’s easy to understand why they don’t live very long. It only needs to survive long enough to raise the next generation An animal doesn’t need to live a long life if it can breed from a young age. The heart of a Galapagos tortoise beats 6 times per minute, and it lives for over 100 years Rats have a heart rate of 330-480 beats per minute, and live for 2-3 years. The faster an animal’s heart beats, the shorter its lifespan. A mouse may only live for a year, whereas an elephant can live until the age of 70 Smaller mammals, for the most part, have much shorter lifespans than larger ones. Here are the reasons why rodents have shorter lifespans: As mentioned, some rodent pets live long lives, such as chinchillas. If you want a rodent, you must be prepared to say goodbye to your pet within a short time. Gerbils are smaller than rats, and yet they outlive them by 2 years on average. This doesn’t apply to all rodents, however. For example, rats live longer than mice, and guinea pigs live longer than rats. In most cases, the larger the rodent, the longer it will live. But even with exemplary care and an optimal diet, most rodents succumb to old age within a few years. This is because wild rodents often fall victim to predators, starvation, extreme temperatures, disease, infections, and parasites.Ĭaptive rodents live in controlled environments and rarely face such dangers. Pet rodents live significantly longer lives than wild rodents. Rodents make great pets for people who can’t commit to a decade or more of care. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. You can expect most pet rodents to survive for a few years at most, depending on the species. Most rodents (such as mice and hamsters) don’t live very long compared to larger pets. But one of the downsides to keeping a pet rodent is their short life expectancy. The main upside is that they’re relatively small and don’t take up much space. They’re sociable and intelligent animals and are simple to care for. Rodents make popular pets for several reasons.

Watch this space.īelow, cheap mouse trap before and after the great escape.2.8 Related Articles: How Long Do Pet Rodents Live? The new trap is now on the top shelf, directly under the chocolate biscuits. Later, I went for a packet of chocolate biscuits (Tunnock's Caramel Wafers to be precise) that I had carefully left out of mouse's reach balanced on a tin of soup on the top shelf of the larder.Īs you can probably guess, the first biscuit in the packet has been nibbled. Come this morning, the trap was untouched.

I left it overnight on the lower shelf of the larder. In the meantime, a plastic tub of breadcrumbs in the larder has acquired a mouse-sized hole.įinally, yesterday I went back to the hardware store and bought a more robust trap. Since then, I have used the remaining intact trap, but a few times the trap has been tripped, but with no bait or mouse left inside, suggesting that my opponent had got wise to the trap. A mouse had been caught in the trap, but had managed to gnaw its way out through the front door. I redeployed the traps, and after a few more days, anothe success, sort of. Within a few days it or one of its mates was back. My first mistake was to release the mouse just outside my back door.

Given that a 250g packet of mixed fruit and nut had been consumed overnight, the healthy state of this mouse was no surprise. After a few days one of them finally did the trick, and I found a very fat and sleek looking Wood Mouse in the trap. Wanting both to find out what species they were, and to remove them without killing them, I bought a couple of cheap live traps in a local hardware store. I way away over Christmas and came back after New Year to find that one or more small rodents had made a home in my larder. Let me say in advance that no mice have been hurt in the making of this thread.

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