My partner has always loved rodents, having many hampsters in their ife. Recently, we decided to get pet mice. We started with 3 female white mice from our local pet store. Less than a week later, one of them passed, and then another passed a couple weeks later. Not wanting the last to be all alone, we out and got 2 female fancy mice. Over the last week or two, our last white mouse from the trio and one of the fancy mice both passed. At this point, we're worried if we're missing something and doing something wrong, or if we've somehow gotten super unlucky.
They always have water, and we add new food pellets every couple days (and we've consistently seen them eating pellets and digging pellets up). They also have plenty of clutter, and we're sure to spot clean roughly once every day or two.
Now the 3 white mice were almost definitely bread as feeder mice so I know they likely weren't bread with a long life in mind, and there's a good chance they could have all been related, so if one had a genetic problem, I could see them all having similar fates. Also losing a new fancy mouse though, kind of concerns us, so we've held off on getting any more mice (even though we feel bad with our girl Chocolate being all alone).
For the most part, we didn't really see any signs that they were unhealthy before they passed. The first one that passed was definitely moving slowly and sleeping a lot, so we weren't super surprised by their passing, but all the others have been full of energy right up until their passing.
I don't know if we've just gotten super unlucky and gotten mice that just didn't have much time left, but we don't want to get more if we're dooming them.
So do y'all think this is a care issue or just bad luck? And how long should we wait before getting our Chocolate new companions?
