Mice hold a really strange place in our culture. They are simultaneously considered cute but also a major pest. These critters likely occupy the role of the most common non-domestic mammal humans encounter on a daily basis, besides maybe squirrels, but definitely the number one non-welcome creature found within the house. Also, squirrels don’t have the same amount of cultural relevancy as mice (I’ll touch back to this in a minute). Anyway, the point of this post is to unpack the idea of the mouse and the social role they play in a global cultural context. I also have some personal connections to mice, so I will jump into that just a little bit.
So, mice. We all know them. They are the little rodents that are all over the world, living in fields, the woods, and most notably, in our houses. Is it a coincidence that mouse and house rhyme? The common house mouse’s Latin name is Mus Musculus, which is incredibly cute. And these creatures have been with humans from the beginning, living in the warm spaces we create and feeding on our crumbs. It’s no surprise they have become so entwined in our cultural mythology.
One of my favorite mouse facts is that muscles (like the meat on our bones) etymologically come from the Latin mus. I guess the curl and ripple of our muscles under our skin were reminiscent of the movement of mice. It’s odd to think that our muscles were considered mouse-like in form and that’s how they got their names. These symbols of strength in our bodies come from something that is understood as small and meek, a beautiful irony. I also think that muscles being named after mice is a major theme that will come up in this post, that the species of Mus Musculus and Homo Sapiens are inherently linked to one another - and the fact that the literal flesh on our bodies is named after these little guys is evidence of that.
Mice further play a significant biological role in human history. So many scientific experiments and medicines have been developed due to the sacrifice of mice. Without the presence of mice, then so many scientific advancements would not have occurred. There’s even a Russian statue that is dedicated to the sacrifice of mice for science, and it’s adorable. But this once again shows how bound together mice and humans are, the health of the modern human species is due to the usage of mice lives.
The most peculiar thing about mice is their cultural role on a mass media scale and how they are so entwined in the stories we tell. Two of the most widely recognized fictional characters of all time -Mickey Mouse and Pikachu - are representations of mice (of
course hyperreal versions, neither of these mice look anything like a real mouse). These two figureheads can be identified by almost everyone, and the mouse has become the literal symbol of the most powerful media company of all time. It’s surprising that a creature that is so often feared within houses controls such a powerful position in the media landscape with these two behemoths of characters. I theorize that because of how closely mice live in the margins of human life that we can’t help to connect with them and create these near-mythologized mouse-god creatures.
And I think Mickey Mouse is especially important to discuss. How ironic is it that a mouse, the smallest, meekest of all critters, has become representative of a brutal mass media company that has a near monopoly on the popular stories told on a global scale? When I say that Mickey Mouse is a mouse god, that is only a half-joke because Mickey Mouse is the figurehead of the most far-reaching cultural export in an age of globalization. It is not an understatement that the image of Mickey has near-deity-like qualities.
Mickey and Pikachu aren’t the only popular mouse characters - there is a whole pantheon of mice in modern media. Mice are often the characters in children’s books: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Stuart Little, the Geronimo Stilton series, Clarissa the Mouse, the Secrets of Nimh. But then you have more mice in animation as well: Tom and Jerry, Danger Mouse, Speedy Gonzales, Pinky and the Brain, the Great Mouse Detective, Fievel Goes West, the Adventurers, Timothy Q. Mouse from Dumbo, etc. etc. I wonder how many of these animated mice are just riding on the coattails of Mickey? And this is not even to mention all the Pikachu clones found in the Pokemon series. Mice appear quite a lot in literature as well - using mice as the allegory for Nazi fascism in Maus is a prime example of the mice. The classic Aesop Fable “The Lion and the Mouse” is perhaps the most popular of the bunch. Needless to say, mice are a constant in the stories that we tell, especially the ones we tell to children.
(This is not for this blog post because this is not a dissertation on mouse media [yet] but i do find it interesting that mice tend to be more of a modern phenomenon at first glance. With cursory research and my memory of mythology, I don’t recall any “mouse gods”, pre-Micky or that many tales of mice represented in world religion. Like are there references to mice in the bible? I think so, but only as pests. How/why have mice shifted in such a way for their images to be worshiped on such a grand scale?)
Symbolically, the mouse is a small cute critter that everyone is familiar with. Further, they are domestic in the sense that they live in houses. It is no wonder they are often represented in media so frequently as protagonists. It is the nature of the mouse to scurry and be fearful - thereby they make great main characters as they often need to go against their nature in order to accomplish great feats and overcome antagonists. But they are always happy! Mice are never (or rarely - notably excluding the nazi mice here) depicted in media as being duplicitous, two-faced, or cruel - mice are always represented as the heroes of their tales, creatures filled with bravery and earnestness.
So it is so curious that despite this exceptionally positive mouse representation in media and science we still fear them and consider them pests. If you were to have mice pets, most people would say, “Eww why?” rather than an acceptance of them as companion critters. When we see a mouse in the house we are in shock and upset! We buy mousetraps and glue traps. It’s the pest factor. They hold this really interesting place where the symbol of the mouse is worshipped whereas the real mouse is feared (similar maybe to snakes and bats). Why is there this duality, where we both love and hate these little critters?
And I have a personal connection to mice as well (which is why this topic is of interest to me). In June of 2021 I experienced a pretty bad car accident that left me a little traumatized and I was in serious search for a coping mechanism. About a week after the crash, I found two baby mice alone on my driveway, they must have been abandoned by their mother who was carried off by a hawk or something natural like that. They were so small and clearly born recently; they had fur but their eyes weren’t even open yet. Naturally, I wanted to salvage them – so I picked them up and put them in an old tomato sauce can with some hay. I was so worried that they were going to die so I spent a lot of time looking after them making sure they were okay.
Basically, these mice became my main project for the next three weeks. I was so scared they were going to perish without their mother but I felt like it was my duty to help them. They lived in my garage for a little bit in a shelter I made, I gave them oat milk and watched them open their eyes and begin to navigate the world. I knew they needed something besides oat milk so I did some research and apparently they like to eat insects. Luckily there were all these invasive beetles in my garden, so I caught them and put them in the mouse house, where the mouse siblings gobbled them up without question. I recognize There is a bit of lunacy here; my mid-pandemic post-car accident self hunting the garden for invasive beetles to feed some mouselings was definitely a manic mood, but one that did make a lot of sense at the time.
Ultimately, I became so fond of these mice. I knew that I would have to let them go eventually, so I never named them. But they were so cute and clearly emotionally connected – the two of them “held hands” with their tails, and it just swelled up my heart. I loved how human-like their hands were and how they roamed around the contained area I built for them. Although initially a little fearful, I became comfortable picking them up with my hands. I would just hang out during the day and play with the mice, watching them interact with one another and navigate the world as little critters. It was an adorable time.
Unfortunately, I did have to release them, so I let them out of their little crate and let them move around and adventure around the woods. They were ready to be released, and I saw them quickly adapt and use their natural instincts to navigate space. I feel like these mice definitely survived and didn’t die immediately once they were released into the wild (this is the story I tell myself).
But it’s not like I haven’t had the classic bad experience involving mice as well. And by bad, I mean there being mice (gasp) in the house. Living in an old flat in Philadelphia, mice were a natural denizen of the environment. At one point, we were flooded with mice (maybe not flooded, but there were actively at least 3 mice around, which means there were likely more). Almost every night, we would see a mouse scurry around our kitchen before jumping into a hiding space.
I was so curious about these critters that I set up MouseCam (i.e., my camera) and recorded the kitchen without human presence. It was a little shocking - barely 30 seconds after I left the kitchen, 3 mice came out of the gas stove and crawled around the countertop for the majority of the 25 minutes I was recording. When I showed the damning footage to my partner, we knew that, unfortunately, something had to be done.
We tried to set up some humane traps, but the mice seemed to be too smart for them - so tragically, we needed to get mousetraps. Poison and glue are absolutely inhumane, so after some deliberation, we decided the snap traps were the only way to go about it. We set up a mousetrap with some peanut butter in the kitchen and went to the bedroom. Five minutes later, as I was closing the blinds, I heard a snap. We went to the kitchen and what we discovered was tragic - the trap killed not one but two mice at the same time. This simply devastated me, as it reminded me of the mice siblings I brought back to life two years prior. This tragedy reduced the mice population of our house - we didn’t need to bring another trap out - the mousetrap either made the mice less likely to come around or because it curtailed the population we didn’t notice them enough. So, fortunately, we didn’t need to set the mice traps up again.
I couldn’t help this hypocrisy though - how can one develop such intimate connections with animals in one context, but then commit such violence against them in another context? This is an ethical question that would need to be thought about on a much grander scale, but I think it’s the basis for this whole conversation - in the modern world, why is it that our ideas about animals supersede our actual relationships with them? How can the same people who wear Mickey Mouse ears also invest in glue traps? Similarly, how can I adore mice but still eat meat?
One last point is that mice have quite literally invaded my psyche as I often have mice dreams. Mice dreams are often dream versions of me needing to either rescue or manage animals, almost like a rodent shepherd. The dream may start with mice, but other critters, like raccoons or weasels, show up and I need to be responsible for them. I don’t know what this means, but I have about one mouse dream a month so they have even crawled into my subconscious.
The mouse is such a talented critter, able to scurry away from trouble, to sneak into the smallest places, able to avoid detection. They are one of the first other animals we are exposed to as children - the domestic trinity of cats, dogs, and mice (maybe throw common birds and squirrels in there for good measure). Their image has been elevated to represent the mass media that dominates popular culture. Ultimately, I think the mouse, and the role the mouse plays in modern human culture, is incredibly complex and has long eluded critical analysis. Thinking about the cultural role of mice, just like the mice themselves, a subject hiding and scurrying around, seemingly insignificant, until one day you encounter it, and you have to confront that they have been there all along.
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