HUMAN. NATURE.

“She’s figured out you’re writing about her,” warns my friend Monica Wood. But I think Mitzi’s new reign of terror indicates a more internal process. I think Mitzi is getting in touch with her inner wild mouse.

Mitzi and Maxi (RIP) were bred to live two or three months before being eaten by pet snakes. These “feeder mice” are famously infirm and fragile. Both girls came down with mouse TB shortly after they moved into their condo here on my desk. Mitzi survived, but Maxi went almost immediately after the sneezing set in. Mitzi is fine as long as I keep the temperature and humidity in the condo EXACTLY right. I spend my days in a mouse sanitorium. But Mitzi, life expectancy 6 months, is almost a year old and FINE!

Because female mice are social it’s not ideal for Mitz to be alone, but due to her disease, I can’t get her a roommate. So I make her life as interesting as I can. And now she’s returning the favor.

She has free run of my desk. Mice won’t jump off an elevated surface, so she’s safe. And until recently, so was I. But I think Mitzi’s high level of mental and physical stimulation is awakening long-dormant mouse instincts. She’s self-actualizing.

"nds jects an arly modern an Neander"

When I first got the girls, I gave them a napkin to shred for bedding, as better research labs do. They ignored it, burrowing into the pre-shredded bank statements instead. But they did cotton to the climbing rope I added, and then to the stairway to heaven that allowed them to move from condo to desk at will. And then, last week, Mitzi suddenly started shredding her own bedding.

Problem is, she started with my stuff. I walked into my sanitorium one morning and saw a crumpled page of Science protruding from the towel that covers the condo. And inside, shreds of the article, which I had torn out to read later. Beautiful, professional wild-mouse shreds. I was so proud. And kind of bummed. Now I have to keep a neater desk.

There were warning signs that Mitzi was going feral. Once in a while I’d enter to find a pen whose cushiony grip had been chopped to bits and strewn over the desk, or blue chips of Cat-5 internet cable scattered around the computer. Sometimes during her afternoon anti-siesta I’d watch her gnaw a ruler, or shake a binder clip the way a dog shakes a rope toy. I moved my passport to a Mitzi-proof location.

(Mice poop randomly, so there are a few turds here and there. But mice establish a latrine for pee, which Mitz does in a convenient location at the back of the desk.)

I welcome this new, wild Mitzi. She’s welcome to be as much of a mouse as she wants. The girls helped to guide the book I’m currently finishing, about the biology of personality. In another context (my basement, for instance), I’d have trapped the girls and tossed their bodies out on the snow for the crows. But Mitzi has earned her keep, and built a shreddy little nest in my heart.

Bedding and bedtime reading in one.

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