h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Careful with the gerbils, they can be gerbilsome.

We should feed the hamsters on weetabix boxes then. Not wine. You'd have garbled server messages then. Rather than gerbiled.

So what do you do with the old, worn out poor hamsters then? Is there some horrible secret heap of corpses at the back of the BBC?

And as for replacing them with gerbils; well, i think this is exploitaion of desert rats. What about field mice? harvest mice? the humble vole? Even shrews (as in "taming of")

And don't even get me going on the subject of rats, who have a terribly bad press image.....

"campaigning for a smiley"

zdt

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Yes, but they had star billing in "Mrs. Frisby and the
Rats of NIMH."

When I go into a pet store and see rats and mice in cages, the
only real differences I can see are differences of size.

Actually, rats make much better pets than mice do. Mice just want to run around in their cages; rats will let you interact with them and will even ride around on your shoulder while you do stuff.

I had a pet mouse once, but I haven't had any pet rats.
I think they're cute, and I don't care what anybody says.

I've never actually had a rat either. We have mice, because my sister wanted a rat, but while my mom put her foot down on rats, she was (for some odd reason) okay with mice, so we have two charming little rodents.

One thing I will say for mice - they are terribly cute!

I've had lots of mice and one rat, but not at the same time cos that probably wouldn't be a good idea. I really want a miniture rabbit, they're SO cute! Or maybe a ferret.

BTW, thanks for the title of that book, I've been trying to remember it for ages!

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eeewwwww!


az

*** but while my mom put her foot down on rats ***

my mom stepped bared footed on a dead rat at back door when she putting something in the garbage bin outside. I never heard such loud noise in my life.

i haddent hurd the amount of noise 2 year seven girls can make till they started screeming that there was a rad, in the coridor in school. the funniest bit from my point of view was when asked how big it was they indecated the size of a small ; which i told them, they still spent 10 minets refusing to get down off the tables that they were stood on. *shakes head*

Mice and pet rats *are* seriously cute. Big time sewer and street rats *can* be a bit scary looking though. As well as dangerous as they could carry rabies and other diseases.

Last summer I had a group of bats (mice with wings) living in a nest on my balcony, and they kept flying into my living room when they missed the nest opening. One bashed itself against the living room wall one night and fell to the floor - it was just the cutest thing ever, tiny cute ears, adorable. I waited until it looked somewhat recuperated and then tossed it off the balcony again.

Wow - serious thread drift or what???


az

I contributed to the topic drift (mea culpa!), but I think it's reassuring that at a time of fear and panic, we can all think of cute little furry animals. It's like the Rorschach ink blot test: we saw white mice, not vampires and sabre-toothed tigers.

we had a bat come in one night, it held onto the curtan just abouve the windo opening, i had a good look at it and a chat, told it it could get back out if it went down through the gap; it seemed to nod befor it went it was cute

are the hamsters just retired to low usage servers, like radio 3 ?

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You do know I didn't mean that literally?

This past year, the class next-door to my English classroom was incredibly noisy, and one day when we were taking a test it got incredibly out of hand - we were hearing kids screaming in there, and my teacher was getting incredibly upset.. So he poked his head round the other room's door to ask them to be quiet, only to discover all the kids (and the teacher) standing on the desks - apparently a rat had run into the room!

Let me get this straight. That class was so noisy, even the rats couldn't concentrate?

That's more or less the idea.

I had a pet rat, name of monty. We also have a (livid) colony living in the garden.