Toy ideas for bored mouse?

by Oreoandfriends Tue 07 May 2019, 8:30 pm

Hello!
I have a male mouse named Oreo, he is a very active little guy and gets bored incredibly fast. He also begins to self mutilate when he has nothing new to do! I try to give him at least one new toy every night but I’m running out of things he will still take interest in. If you have any toy/enrichment/climbing toy suggestions let me know! Unfortunately he is not very tame (he bites a lot, also runs up my arm and tries to escape onto the floor) but I am trying my best to get him tame enough! His favorite thing to do with his toys is to utilize them for making very creative sleeping spots (he likes to sleep in pretty visible spots) so something he could use for that would be great too. Right now he’s in a 540 square inch cage.
Oreo means so much to me! I’ve gone through so much with him and I just want him to be happy and comfortable. Any ideas are appreciated, thank you! Smile

by BrendoniUrie Tue 07 May 2019, 11:02 pm

I have three girls in a 20 gallon with a mesh top, but I bet some of my ideas can transfer to you!

- Paper towel wall: I hang paper towels on the back wall and secure them with binder clips
- You could make him busier by making him scavenge for his food, to make this cleanup easier on me I put a large critter keeper in the tank with some bedding for them to dig through and tunnels to get inside the container
- I also make it a dig box, right now they have a minimal layer of aspen on the main area and carefresh in the box, with tunnels going in it. I also wrapped twine around the plastic tunnel so they have some purchase as they enjoy climbing the outside of it.
- I also have ladders (unscrewed the screws) hanging from the mesh top and I connect them with rope toys, tied together with twine as well.
- You can also secure things like egg cartons and cardboard boxes.
GET CREATIVE WITH YOUR VERTICAL SPACE!!!
- You can also get him all kinds of wheels, I've got them a saucer and a silent spinner, but I'm also planning on a mesh one as well (I alternate or put in two), they run on them differently
- My mice also like to climb upside down on their mesh lid
- I also sometimes hide dabs of peanut butter in obscure places like up on the mesh lid, on the top outside of the wheel, pushed into the cracks of their pumice stones, etc.
- You can also put some kind of treat inside a cardboard box and have him sniff it out and chew it up. I recently put a macaroni box full of hay in their tank and they chewed that thing up.
- Get paper towel rolls and/or popsicle sticks and make him things! You can use nontoxic hot glue guns to stick them together! You're only limited by supplies and imagination
- I'm planning on getting all my cardboard boxes and creating a mouse metropolis for them
- Get him things to climb, my mice can climb up a rope toy that's vertical, but its fairly short, to a stable platform
- I'm also planning on cutting one side of a cereal box out and making an entrance, then gluing all sorts of paper towel roll pathways in there and putting it up against the glass so I can see them explore
- If you have mouse safe objects in your house, feel free to put those in too! I put in a ceramic mug for a bit until I dropped it cleaning, they found it very slippery, but were excited because of the treats inside.
- Once you do get him tame, check out Mouse Agility on YouTube! They have some great stuff and training/trick ideas
- get toys that you can configure to seem like new. I got a few kritter trail tubes when I got my mice and I've used them on the floor under bedding for them to run through, a path from the bottom edge to the upper edge (paper towel wall side), and I'll probably tie them to the mesh top sometime.
- You should really just be jam packing your cage so that there's hardly any space left anywhere.
- If there's something your mouse likes to dig under that you would rather he didn't move, you can always put it directly on the floor and have bedding around it.
- I also put new materials in their cage like a white index card, a piece of white paper, and paper towel, plain tissue paper, toilet paper, etc.
- I also give them a variety of substrates to walk on like aspen, carefresh, mixing them, etc. I want to try hemp, and also yesterday's news (a paper based cat litter) but i heard something in their formulation changed and it's not safe for mice, so I'll have to look into it.
- I also hang the kaytee treat kabob thing on one of the ladders with the triangular pumice stones and apple wood sticks, and some other toys, if you space it right he can figure out how to climb that too

That's all I have for right now, I'll let you know if I think of anything else!