N.H. man surrenders possibly over 1,000 mice after becoming ‘overwhelmed’

New Hampshire shelter is asking for help after a man surrendered plastic tubs full of mice on Monday.

The New Hampshire Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said the “overwhelmed” man came into the shelter on Monday. He said he had around 150 tanks with mice in them in his home.

The statement said he brought three large plastic tubs to the shelter that same day, which held a combined 73 mice. Shelter staff said they made house trips on Tuesday and Wednesday and took over 400 mice from the man. The statement said the mice were not separated by sex and were reproducing “uncontrolled.”

“By Tuesday morning, more mice had been born,” the statement said. “Our current estimate is that there are an approximate 400 still at the man’s home, but we may be looking at intaking as many as 1,000 mice in total.”

The shelter said they alerted all other shelters and humane societies in the New England area, asking for help transferring the mice out of the NHSPCA to make space for the rest of the mice still in the man’s home.

The mice were living in “filthy” tubs when they arrived at the shelter, the statement said. Now, the shelter said the mice are in clean spaces with access to food and water.

“We have never seen anything like this,” Savannah Alcero, Director of Animal and Veterinary Services at the shelter said. “And the longer we wait to get all of the mice out of their terrible living conditions, the greater the likelihood is that the numbers will continue to grow. With a gestation period of just around 20 days, mice can reproduce at an alarming rate.”

I never read that either but I have heard told, a first hand account by a utility worker, of rats in an underground manhole in Philadelphia in such numbers the utility he worked for, after two attempts to remove the rats by whatever means failed, abandoned the manhole and left it for the rats.

I appreciate all the connected thoughts flying through your minds regarding Philadelphia, democrats, underground and a population of rats so overwhelming, modern progress, despite the determined efforts of the worker to set up his work area and complete the job, was unable to continue when one of the rats jumped on him causing him to abandon the area and call it in to his boss as a 'I ain't going back into that manhole ever again' close out on that ticket. He numbered them in the hundreds. It was a big manhole.

Free Republicans familiar with the Delaware Valley might remember when the Vine Street expressway was being constructed back in the 1980's; I mention that to give you a time frame of how long ago this took place.

How long did that spca scientist say it took for the mice to regenerate?Let's just double that for rats and divide that number into 14600 which is the number of days in 40 years. Getting ugly by now.

After the boss went out to the worksite he called the subcontractor of choice and turned over the job of recovering the manhole to them. They called him back about an hour later with a no way, jose message, there's thousands down there, we can't fix that.

So the boss, after discussing it with his boss, I'm sure, calls an exterminator, the one thats been around probably since the end of WW2 and shortly thereafter they called back and said 'sorry, they can't handle that big of a problem'.

At that point, the decision was allegedly made to abandon the manhole. I'm not sure how that worked out. Maybe after consulting with their engineers and social scientists of all kinds they might have concluded that all the construction disturbed the natural social pattern of the rats and decided to give them time to resettle.

What I do know is there's miles and miles of ductwork underground all large cities; imagine the rat population under NYC. One abandoned manhole doesn't mean the rats stop there.

If everything is political, rats are the perfect model for the democRAT party.

Just sayin'

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