# Lone mouse behaviour?



## We Love Mouse (Jan 5, 2011)

At the moment, I have 2 1.5 years old bucks (who live together all of their life and never had any problems) and a lone doe in a separate bin cage. The bucks are really tame and always run up to me and beg for attention and always been like that since they're 2 months old. But the doe, however, is very skittish and scared of almost everything, even though I got her for 3 months now and do everything the same as the bucks. 
Could this be caused by keeping her alone? I wasn't intend to keep her alone at all but her cage-mate escape from the cage, went into my rat's cage and got killed. I'm planing to get her some new cage-mates very soon but the last time I tried to introduce her to my bucks, who seems to be very calm about the introduction, she turns out to be really stress out and squeak all the time. Will this work well with new does?

Also _if_ I bred her, will the pups learn to be scared of humans like their mom or regular handling will make them tame?


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## morning-star (Apr 9, 2011)

Sometimes when introducing new mice to another mouse they will fight and tussle for a few days for dominance. With females this is rarely a problem and they will settle down, same sort of thing will happen when you introduce a male to a female, until the doe comes into heat she may not accept the company of the buck for a few days.

The doe will probably calm down a lot more if she had a friend.

If you handled the babies from 3-5 days old every 1-3 days you'll will end up with fairly tame mice (once they get past the jumpy stage and things like that)

welcome to the forum


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## Cait (Oct 3, 2008)

Mice do learn a lot from their mothers, so it is not advisable to breed from a less than tame doe. Not only will it make life difficult for you to check on and handle the babies, but if she's really nervous you could increase the chances that she'll harm her litter. You mention that you tried to introduce her to your bucks - not a good idea unless you definitely want to breed. Also, you need to be aware that if you use one of your bucks to breed that they may never go back to living together again and may have to be kept in separate cages.


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## We Love Mouse (Jan 5, 2011)

Thank you, both of you. After I re-read my own post and your's post, I realised that what I've done is not a very good idea to put my two bucks with the doe  . Luckily I just got 4 new does and a buck yesterday to be friends with the lone doe that I have. Right now I keep the does and buck separate, all of them away from my current mice just in case they carry something nasty with them. I've heard that 2 weeks are the minimum length of time to quarantine, right?


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