Apparently, Austrian Airlines takes rodents on their planes more seriously than American Airlines - http://www.ksdk.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=100017
Yoiks. I'm going to have to fly back from Atlanta to Richmond in a couple of weeks, I don't need to imagine that I might be sharing that 717 with a bunch of mice. It sounds funny, but mice have enough of a taste for wiring insulation that it can actually cause problems.
True mouse war story--in 1942 during the Stalingrad campaign, the Germans ordered their 22nd Panzer Division to prepare to move out to block a Soviet attack north of the city along the Don River. When the crews started their tanks and tried to move, some of the tanks caught fire, others stalled. They found that in months where the division had been in reserve, immobile, that mice had nested in the engines and gnawed through fuel lines and wiring. They only had twenty out of two hundred tanks still mobile.
}:-)4