[Jack Garcia]

Tail chasing (or carrying) can look funny to us, but it is a mental disease related to OCDs in people, involving anxiety, obsession, and even paranoia. The animals who do this are generally pretty stressed out. In dogs, cats, and monkeys it is treated with fluoxetine or other similar medicines. I don't know how you'd treat it in a mouse, if you would be able to at all.

Their cage looks pretty empty. Do they have toys or a house? Sometimes these behaviors indicate mice who are suffering from stimulus deprivation and simply by adding a wheel, toilet paper tubes, empty macaroni boxes, or other such things the symptoms will lessen. It doesn't take much to occupy a mouse's mind, but some mice seem much more susceptible to these diseases than others and need more stimulation than others.

 

[Jack Garcia]

Yep, it's very sad.

It happens a lot in laboratories, where the animals are given nothing but bedding and food to stimulate them.

It's weird, though. There are some mice who seem to do fine in cages with no houses, no toys, no wheels, and no anything. I know a couple fanciers in England who use the old-fashioned wooden cages, relatively unfurnished, and the mice don't seem to have psychological problems like tail chasing or barbering (both of which can result from sensory deprivation). I think a mouse's psychosocial world is a lot like a person's: some people would be content to sit in their bathroom all day and do nothing, but it would make most of us crazy (pretty literally) after a couple days.

 

[Jack Garcia]

Yep, they really are!

I think that if we were mice we would understand more of their psycho-social lives, and I sometimes wonder how much of ours they really understand! From a philosophy standpoint, these questions are just a small-scale version of the "Problem of other minds" that people like AJ Ayer talked about. A few years ago in a "Philosophy of Mind" class we talked about him, and I always thought of animals and how the same epistemological questions we ask about other human minds ("How can we know what they're really thinking/feeling or that they think/feel at all?" etc) can also be applied to animal minds, with even less clear answers.

What we can be reasonably certain of is that behavior such as tail chasing, barbering (of self or others) and self-injury are psychological phenomena that usually indicate high levels of anxiety and stress, regardless of the species. In environments as barren as a lab cage (for example), the only way mice have to cope with their high levels of stress is to mutilate themselves or engage in repetitive behaviors. Sometimes people do something to cause this stress (in themselves or their animals) and sometimes it's just naturally in the brain without any inducement. A naturally high-strung disposition can have its advantages: in wild animals, an easily-stressed, easily-anxious personality is an asset when you have zillions of things to keep you occupied and around every corner awaits a cat or an owl trying to eat you. In captivity, though, whether as pets or show animals, this kind of personality quickly leads to maladaptive, compulsive behavior like tail chasing or barbering. Like in humans, though, mental traits are often inherited. And in animals as inbred as mice, you often find whole families that suffer from these kind of things (just like you find whole families who suffer from obesity, kinked tails, or whatever else the case may be).

 

[Jack Garcia]

Of course I do. Here are just a few which deal with different aspects of obsessive compulsive disorders in mentally ill mice (and thus people), all ultimately benefiting humans more than mice. That's how these things, go, though. The experiments are carried out on mice and the results are translated over to people:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/ ... T/ABSTRACT
https://www.ffri.hr/datoteke/ARW/mice_ocd_jan12.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1180373/

These types of articles are extremely technical and most people (including me!) need help reading and understanding them and their relevance to the mouse fancy.

If you Google "obsessive mice" you get millions of additional results as well. A great number of these are laboratory reports dealing with neurological studies and subsequent findings in mice or rats, but I would also recommend searching for the reports of OCDs in nonhuman primates and in cats and dogs, if it interests you. If in your search you find anything that needs pay-access, I may be able to get it for you for free since I have default access and I don't mind in the least. I read a lot of obscure scholarly journal articles about mice.

By the way, I'd imagine that working in PetCo would give you lots of opportunities to observe animal behavior. Kadee (who also works there) says that her favorite part is watching and playing with the animals.

 

[Jack Garcia]

You're very welcome!

I know so many people who work in pet stores currently or who used to, I guess I get you all mixed up. It's a very common occupation for animal lovers, I've found.

What kind of degree or certifications do you need to train dogs? I thought that basically anybody could do it without much training at all. That you need certification to do it (from who?) actually surprises me. That's not the impression you get from all the varied people who call themselves "dog trainers," "animal trainers," "animal behaviorists," "animal psychologists," and so forth. From my outsider-looking-in perspective, it seems to be a pretty unregulated field.