#goinggreen

Being an eco-friendly small pet owner 🐭

In April, Tom and I finally got our first pets together - two little mice! Having grown up with hamsters, I was painfully aware of how plastic-heavy small animals are. Their food, treats and bedding are all stored in plastic bags and their cages and toys are often ladened with plastic.

We were desperate to have life other than houseplants to look after, and we had fallen in love with the idea of getting mice. We were also desperate to not break the planet by getting them, however.

So! Here I am to share with you how our eco-friendly mice were brought about. A lot of this can be applied to rats, hamsters and gerbils etc. but bear in mind the specific care points are mouse-centric.

Before going into any details, I just want to disclaim that I was crushing on these mice hard, months before they were even born. I budgeted for them three months ahead and chipped away at buying their things over the course of those three months.

My mentality is to buy secondhand if I can, and if I can't then to buy high quality (and often therefore a bit pricey). This is manageable for me, but only because I'm an organisation gremlin and plan my budgets to the extreme.

🏠Starting with the cage:

This cage is the Ferplast Cage for Hamsters and Mice KARAT 60. The key thing here for me was that it's made of glass and metal, with minimal plastic - only the clips and wheel are made of plastic. Unfortunately for mice, they need a solid wheel which means we couldn't get a metal one. For mice, they need good ventilation as they're prone to respiratory diseases. They also need a deep base to the cage so they can exhibit their natural digging behaviour. The bar spacing of this cage is mice appropriate (0.6 mm or less) as mice are small! They can squeeze between the bars of some hamster cages.

Food bowls! Made of ceramic, one for grains, one for fruit and veg. Shallow enough that they can perch on them (often in them) to nom.

Wooden house and log. Instead of a plastic house, you can get lovely wooden ones that double up as good chewing posts for them as they get older. Plastic isn't the best thing for them to get their teeth onto.

You can't really see it in this photo, but the water bottle I have for them is made of glass instead of plastic. Always check the labels at the shop to make sure anything you're buying is suitable for the critter you're getting!

Edit: It's been brought to my attention that the scale of this cage isn't necessarily obvious from the photo! In terms of gallons, the glass tank is around 12 gallons and the cage area is a further 17 gallons, bringing the total volume of the whole area up to about 29 gallons (these are from my measurements, from the measurements on the product page, it comes out more around 27 gallons. Mine were a bit rough so maybe trust this number more!). For our two mice, this is an appropriate amount of space.

🛏️Now onto bedding:

Mice need materials they can burrow into, but also need a substrate at the very base of the cage to absorb their urine. If you're going a plastic route, this normally involves cat litter at the base and a mix of paper shredding and tissue shredding (if you get sawdust/wood chip, you have to be very careful with what wood it is from, as some trees irritate their respiratory systems)

My plastic-free suggestion depends on you already getting your loo roll and kitchen roll from a plastic-free company (like Bumboo or Who Gives a Crap).

Substrate: As you can see here, the substrate we use is a (slightly mangled from the washing machine) bath mat. It's 100% cotton and every fortnight when we clean them out, we shake it out in the garden and pop it in the washing machine. We have two that we cycle between so the girls never go without. Be careful with what material you buy - 100% cotton is fine, but if it's a blend with a synthetic fibre it should be avoided.

Burrowing materials: Why on earth would you buy paper and tissue pre-shredded in a big plastic bag when you could just...shred paper...and tissue...at home? I got myself a cheap shredder and have one of the technicians at work hoarding scrap paper for me that would otherwise go in the recycling bin, so I'm re-using stuff that would get junked. After its use here, it can then go in our home recycling as our council accepts shredding in mainstream recycling. Whenever we clean the girls out, we add in some loo roll and kitchen roll that we tear up into strips by hand. We never use up all of our loo roll and kitchen roll from each Bumboo order anyway, so it doesn't cost us any more than our standard subscription already. Plus, two mice really don't use up much!

Extra bits: Nutmeg and Honeysuckle are very happy burrowing, running in their wheel and Spidermanning it around the cage bars and the ceiling, but we do provide them with tubes to tunnel through and some DIY structures we've made for them to play with. These are just from our usual waste of loo roll and kitchen roll.

🍴Lastly, on to food:

Now, we love the girls and hope they life a very happy 2-years-life-expectancy, but mouse food from pet stores is honestly a rip-off. Looking at the ingredients and talking to the staff there, there was nothing we couldn't get from our local refill store and farmer's market.

The girls get sunflower seeds, oats and wheat in their grains bowl and a selection of seasonal fruit and veg in their other bowl. Every now and then they get treats of popcorn (plain), different seeds and nuts (not walnuts which are toxic) and even some suet and seed block from what I buy for the garden birds. Nutritionally, this is what they get from the mouse food in the store - the ingredients list is identical to what we give them, the store stuff is just all dehydrated instead.

They are very happy. Almost too much. One of them is weighing in at a whopping 27 g. We're trying our best, moving on...

My point being that it's easy to avoid the plastic if you have a good refill store near you. Ours is priced competitively to the local supermarkets, so this isn't actually an expensive venture at all. But if you're living somewhere like London and have a refill store near you, I know this price comparison is a distant fantasy with a lot of them. On the positive side, the sunflower seed and wheat jars in the photo above haven't been refilled since I filled them first three months ago. They really don't each much! (Apart from Honeysuckle. Twenty-seven grams).

Apart from some balls for them to run around in, and a little carry case for transport, these mice use absolutely zero plastic, a far cry from the plastic-hungry hamster care from my childhood.

In conclusion:

It takes:

planning

budgeting

sourcing of resources

certain habits to already be instilled

but it is possible.

Just because they're little and often seen as the "easy" pets, doesn't mean they shouldn't get just as much love and planning as you would put into getting a cat or dog. Owning any animal is a responsibility one should take seriously and I feel that rodents and fish get overlooked deeply (did you know that a goldfish on average should have a 20 gallon tank?).

ETSY STORE UPDATE! 🌱⁣⁣

⁣ First 100 orders receive a plantable dirt kid print made from wildflower seed paper! 🌸🌼🌺⁣⁣ I’ve been very excited to release these new line of products that are more eco-friendly and pushing a plastic free agenda! Your can now buy one of the recycled tote bags, dirt kid metal pin, and my “Star Boy” large print! ⁣ ⁣

Link to my Etsy HERE

Over the past several years, vegetarian and vegan diets have become increasingly more popular in our society. There are many reasons why someone would choose to switch to a plant-based diet, whether it’s to save the animals, environmental concerns, food intolerances or personal and cultural values. In this post, however, I will be focusing on the various ways that eating more plant-based can benefit the environment.

The animal-based agriculture industry accounts for an exorbitant amount of the damage to our environment. Here are some of the benefits of following a plant-based diet:

1.    Conserving Water

·      According to the Water Footprint Network, it takes 1,000 gallons of water to produce only ONE gallon of milk. Also, it requires about 100 times more water to produce a pound of animal protein than a pound of grain protein. So, by these numbers alone you can see how eating less meat and dairy or completely avoiding them can DRASTICALLY help reduce the amount of water consumption by animal-based agriculture.

2.    Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

·      Livestock production is responsible for more than 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It is estimated that a meat-based diet creates 7x more greenhouse gas emissions than one that is plant-based. These numbers only account for production alone, not to mention manure management, transportation and fuel to grow their feed (Major Cuts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Livestock Within Reach, 2019)

3.    Cleaner Air & Water

·      Large amounts of livestock being raised for food = LARGE amounts of manure. 300 million tons of manure are produced from factory farms in the U.S. alone… per year. So, what happens to all this waste? The hundreds of toxins in such large quantities can’t be absorbed by the soil, so they find their way into groundwater and then into rivers and oceans – destroying marine ecosystems. They also produce ammonia, which kills fish, promotes algae growth, and contributes to smog. As well, the air surrounding factory farms contains immense amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen sulfide, and other harmful emissions (Ventrice, 2015).