Posted by:
amarilrose
at Thu Feb 8 14:57:39 2007 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by amarilrose ]
As others pointed out, a major concern with plastic caging is the fact that the little buggers don't stop chewing.
I'm happily married and therefore, I have not imposed rodent keeping on my husband's sanity. When I was growing up at home though, my dad & I kept a large collection of reptiles, and a mouse & rat breeding colony to sustain them.
We used plastic 5-gallon buckets for our mouse cages, since dad could get them cheap (and CLEAN) from work. There are a few nice things about these buckets that make great cages - the round shape leaves very little for the mice to even get a hold of to TRY chewing, and the thickness of the bucket holds up very well to the occasional gnawing, as well as just about any abuse you can dish out while cleaning & changing foul mouse bedding (UCK - I don't miss that!!!).
For water, we drilled a hole for the bottle spigot to enter from the outside (and mounted a wire on the outside to support the top of the bottle). This hole was reinforced on the inside of the bucket with some hardware cloth (1/4" wire mesh) held in place around the opening with a screw at each corner of the roughly 2" x 2" piece. The hardware cloth prevented the mice from getting any real purchase on the lip of the water hole with their teeth.
For food, dad created a chute out of sheet metal that sat inside the cage, but you could put it out in a dish if that works better for you. We liked having the food up off of the bedding to prevent the mice from crawling/peeing/defecating all over it before they ate it.
For a cage top, we used squares of hardware cloth that were just a bit larger than the top of the bucket, held down with weights that we had an over-abundance of. This allowed for plenty of ventilation AND escape-proof security - all on a shoestring budget! 
These cages were really easy and cheap to make - and they were the only cages we used for mice. One bucket would nicely house 2 or 3 females and one male.
Good luck with your colony 
~Rebecca
Now, mice will smell bad no matter what you do, but
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0.1 Dumeril's Boa '04 (Courtney)
1.2 Ball Pythons
0.2 American Pit Bull Terriers (40lb darling lap dogs:Brandy&Mara)
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worked for me - amarilrose, Thu Feb 8 14:57:39 2007
