Scary Story

I woke up late on the 31st of December 1999 and I decided to clean the rat cage before going out to celebrate the millennium with my friend. My rats live in three stories cage with woolly hat to sleep in, paper tube, and various other things together with a bedding material. It's like a shredded tissue paper that rats use to make a little nest for themselves. The rats were asleep in the woolly hat, so I thought I pull out the bedding since it gets soiled often and needs replacing regularly.

And there was this purple string like thing tangled in the bedding. I wondered to myself “when did I put this in there?” So I picked it up, it was about 5cm long and it had a little pink foot attached to it.

It certainly was a part of rodent's anatomy. It was a tail. I was so shocked that I could not even scream. The first thing I thought to myself was that one of the rats somehow managed to trap foot and a tail somewhere in the cage and managed to bite it off because it was so painful and it was the only way to free itself. Another possibility that crossed my mind was that the rats got into fight and bit the body off. In either way, I thought it is not going to be pleasant and I needed to prepare myself to check the rats in the hat.

I thought I better check the extent of damage on the remaining so I know what to expect. I really thought I've lost one of the girls. So I pulled out the tail and found that it had about 6cm strip of gray fur attached to it. "???" I thought, and my boyfriend who heard my scream suggested that it is a mouse. Now the questions were 1)How did it get inside the rats cage? The gaps between the bars were not wide enough. 2)Where did the rest of the body (including the bone structure and internal organs) gone? The rats could not have eaten it because when I tried to give the rats some McDonald's Burger, they refused to even sniff it. In fact this was the reason that made me assure that they were vegetarians. Well, my assumptions were proven to be wrong. I found a part of the metal bar of the cage was pushed open, probably by the brute force that rats were trying to pull the mouse in. And the rats must have eaten the remaining because there was no trace of skull, and a dead mouse does not land in the rats cage very often. I was quite horrified how these friendly fur balls could turn into a vicious wild animals. However, I was a little bit proud that they somehow managed to preserve the natural instinct despite they were in the cage all their lives.