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Posted by dpallas on May 27, 2002 at 11:37:31:
In Reply to: back to back breeding posted by marisa on May 27, 2002 at 03:38:05:
I don't think you can win an arguement with pet-owners, because "it's cruel" is an emotional response, not a statement of fact. If mice are successfully breeding back to back, then it's only because they're content with their living arrangement. There's obviously enough nourishment, water, space, etc... for the mice to be "farmed".
If that were not the case, then the mice would do some combination of the following: stop breeding, kill off the young, kill off the males, kill off the other females, or drop dead. When a female comes near the end of her productivity, she will exercise her options to stop breeding. There's nothing cruel about letting her do what comes naturally in the meantime. Giving her a break would be appropriate if she was run down, so I wouldn't try to convince the pet owners that rodents should be bred to death. If you temper your opinion with some statement to the effect that the rodents are kept in robust health and not run down, then that might help.
Some of these pet owners are relating mouse breeding to the factory-like production of chickens and pigs. Those animals are kept alive and reproducing by artificial means that are quite inhumane for purely financial reasons. To the best of my knowledge, nobody uses those methods to raise feeder-rodents. Either they breed and raise their young - or they don't- you can't force them to do anything.
These days, public schools are cranking out a few PC little kids who think any sort of animal production is cruel, so many have decided to be vegetarians. They don't know the first thing about where food comes from, so they have no real intellectual ability to discuss the issues. I wouldn't try to explain "mouse farming" to that type.
