# Biggest ears



## Jack Garcia

(I originally posted this on another forum. Sorry for those of you who've seen it twice!)

Here you can post pictures of your mouse or mice with the biggest ears.

Here's mine. She's a PEW I bred. She's about 6 months old.





































Large ears are a requirement on a show mouse, but the placement ("set") and how they're carried are also important, as are the smoothness and the absence of tears, holes, or ragged edges. That said, ears make up only one part of a winning mouse (which this mouse isn't, it's just that her ears are kinda big).


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## Megzilla

Wow! Lovely ears!


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## Jack Garcia

Aww! Thanks. 

Jenny (WNTMousery) breeds mice with bigger ears (it's just that I take pictures more often, haha), and some of SarahY's doves also give my mice a run for their money!

I would love for people to post pictures of their mice with large ears. It's probably the most noticeable feature on a mouse.


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## WoodWitch

Wow, those _are_ pretty huge


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## kerryann

wow they are massive, but must say GORGEOUS!!!


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## JustMouse

Jeez. I would post the mouse I have with the biggest ears but that would be... disgraceful compared to ANY of the outstanding ears on this forum... especially that beauty, Jack! 
Give us a couple of years and we'll get back to you


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## Lottiz

:lol: a bat!!! so cute :love1 . I love HUGE ears


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## Jack Garcia

Thanks, guys!


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## katytwinkle

hope this link works!!! this is "teabag" our biggest eared mouse

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2 ... 1145567003


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## Jack Garcia

Awww! So cute! 

For facebook pictures, if you want to post just the picture, here's a trick.

View the picture in Firefox, then right click over the picture and select "Copy Image Location." You can paste this in a forum and put the IMG tag around it, and voila!, facebook pics posted to a forum.


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## katytwinkle

cheers  although my facebook has changed!!!  and for some reason it wont let me do it that way.....grrrrr!!!!!


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## countrygall721

I would love to have such a cute big eared mouse like yours


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## SarahY

Here's mine:



















Those are big ears indeed Jack, and the edges are nice and smooth. This doe of mine had smooth edges when she was young but unfortunately they messed up when she got older, as you can see in these pictures.

Sarah xxx


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## katytwinkle

Sarah! the mouse i posted isone that George got from Tratallen, any chance its a decendant of the one you posted?! they look identical!!!


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## WoodWitch

Yes, the Sire was a Blackthorn Dove.


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## Jack Garcia

I love your ears, Sarah (doesn't that sound weird?)!

As mice get older their ears naturally get tattered, I think. It's kind of like the skin on people. As you age, it sometimes gets thinner and more delicate. Our challenge is to breed the ears bigger and bigger, while stretching the skin to be thin, while keeping the ears free from tears and tattering.


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## SevenlevelsofDante

I am fascinated by how huge their ears can be! I never knew...


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## Jack Garcia

SevenlevelsofDante said:


> I am fascinated by how huge their ears can be! I never knew...


When I first saw a show mouse (which now seems like it was back in the Dark Ages, lol), I had the same reaction. Show mice are so beautiful. The bodily changes you see have taken place over a hundred years of unending selective breeding, and large ears or a proper body shape or nice bone structure or a nice, close-to-the-skin coat represent all that hard work to me. Without many excellent breeders making excellent (and difficult) pairing choices for the past century (and part of the one before that), we wouldn't have the mice we do today. We owe a lot of debt to them. I am very thankful at how far mice have come compared to many other small animals, which haven't been bred nearly as long (like gerbils, for example).


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## katytwinkle

agreed!!! nice monologue!!!


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## WNTMousery

WNT Nickel









WNT Lian (Nickel's daddy)









Lian again









Lian once more


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## Jack Garcia

Nickel looks like an alien peering out over the edge of his spaceship.


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## SevenlevelsofDante

These are all such beautiful mice! I initially joined the forum to get some help with my current surprise litter, but I'm seriously considering breeding and keeping up with the fancy now. Show mice are so stunning. I have some background in rabbit breeding, but I like this better. Smaller, quicker, and mice are a million times more affectionate and entertaining!


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## Jack Garcia

I strongly recommend anyone with the desire to take up breeding show mice. Of course I'm biased, but I personally have found them a million times more rewarding than petstore-derived mice (although both can make great pets), because the goal of breeding for show is to match a set standard which as a whole, the mice naturally want to veer away from.

For example, mice are naturally small-eared, cobby-bodied, unobtrusively colored, fast, jittery, anxious little creatures. Show mice, on the other hand, are bred to be large-eared, racy-bodied, brightly colored, slow, calm, docile animals. That's a huge difference and it's part of the "challenge" for me, to breed as far away from "wild-type" as possible. Really, if you think about it, breeders of chihuahuas or poodles have done the same thing with wolves. 

After so many generations of being feral (or in pet stores) and receiving no selection from humans, the animals revert in large part back to their wild type (such as dingos, Carolina dogs, or many petstore/feeder mice). Show mice (and pedigree dogs) require a certain kind of upkeep to keep them in existence, which I love. Some of my lines of mice can be traced back decades. I wouldn't be surprised if some folks in England today can trace their mice directly back to Maxey himself!


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## Erica08

I'm a fan of the WNT mice their ears seem to more proportional to the rest of the head.


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## Jack Garcia

They're great, aren't they? Jenny is an excellent breeder. From the original stock she got a few years ago, she has kept her mice up to par for longer than anybody in this part of the country. She really does deserve kudos for her work!


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## WNTMousery

Thank you, Erica! The set is too low on the male, but I'd much rather have too-low than too-high.


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## Jack Garcia

Set too-high they look like rabbits and set too-low they look like handlebar ears, but sometimes they're set too-low by virtue of the fact of being so big (thus being slightly heavier), which is easier to work with, in my experience.


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## EarnBigGlobal

Jack Garcia said:


> (I originally posted this on another forum. Sorry for those of you who've seen it twice!)
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> Here you can post pictures of your mouse or mice with the biggest ears.
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> Here's mine. She's a PEW I bred. She's about 6 months old.
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> Large ears are a requirement on a show mouse, but the placement ("set") and how they're carried are also important, as are the smoothness and the absence of tears, holes, or ragged edges. That said, ears make up only one part of a winning mouse (which this mouse isn't, it's just that her ears are kinda big).


Those are HUGE!! Congrats!


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## SarahY

EarnBigGlobal, please can you post a message in the 'Introduce Yourself' forum before posting further, as this is a forum rule 

Sarah xxx


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## geordiesmice

Where I live it is very hard to get good quality show mice offspring, I wish I could.The only Mice I have with large ears are my fuzzy hairless ,the female has huge ears lol I laugh every time I look at her but such a lovely placid mouse so is her offspring they have large flappers too lol


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## SarahY

Where abouts are you geordiesmice? I'm sure someone will be able to help!

Sarah xxx


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## Lottiz

SarahY: I really want some of your mice....doves, dutches and rosettes :drool. 
I think I have to take a collecting trip to GB!!!! :love1


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## Jack Garcia

geordiesmice said:


> Where I live it is very hard to get good quality show mice offspring, I wish I could.The only Mice I have with large ears are my fuzzy hairless ,the female has huge ears lol I laugh every time I look at her but such a lovely placid mouse so is her offspring they have large flappers too lol


Large ears on a fuzzy hairless mouse are often an illusion. The lack of fur makes them look bigger than they'd be on a furred mouse.


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## The Boggit keeper

Congrats to Jack, Sarah Y and WNT on your fantastically huge-eared mice, they're adorable! 
Here are a few pics of my girls- i'm a sucker for a big-eared boggit! :lol: I can't take any credit for them though, they were bred by Phil from Seawatch Stud. 

Ivory Satin-Lunar

















Silver- Floss

















Stone- Rocky

















And finally, I thought i'd show you one of the four does that I kept from a litter out of Poppy, a B.E Cream a collected from Phil recently. The babe is definitely becoming darker, I think she'll be Stone,(she looks just like Rocky when she was young) but she has a good sized pair of ears


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## WNTMousery

Lovely ears, Boggit Keeper.


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## zigable

Some awesome ears here! Mine have pretty pathetic ears in comparisson


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## Jack Garcia

Love them, Boggit!


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## moustress

'Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars...'


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## Seawatch Stud

I have to say that Im not 100% behind the "huge" ear thing. I breed blacks that have large but more proportionate ears, and I much prefer them like that. Many other varieties have slightly smaller ears than the large pale selfs ( my own included) etc featured here. But I guess in the end ours is not to reason why, ours is simply to breed to standard.


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## WNTMousery

Here is a very poorly-bred black. He is from total outcross for improving the type of pet fuzzies.


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## countrygall721

Aww, all these mice have such wonderful big ears :lol: 
WNTmousery I love your little guy! He has such a lovely pose


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## Jack Garcia

Thanks! 

I sometimes have trouble judging my own mice in terms of ear size. I tend to notice head shape and tail set before ears because I think ears are the easiest things to "fix" if they start to go down hill but often if you lose a good tail set in a population of mice, it's gone for good without outcrosses. Many (though thankfully not all) of my mice are not very good in tail set. :/


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## icedmice

ICED Rum 'n' Cola.

OK nowhere near as impressive as your giant eared specimens but best I've bred using Aussie stock.



















Gonna take one or two more generations to have mice like yours  .


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## WNTMousery

Those ears are definitely nice, given what you have to work with. Is he angora?


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## Jack Garcia

I agree!


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## icedmice

No that's a standard coat, and it's a doe  . Our standard coats need work too because they tend to have excessive guard hairs.
We also struggle with poor tail sets, silvering, size, obesity, unwanted recessives ...and the list goes on.

We don't officially have "show type" mice. I have noticed a trend in my own stock being significantly better than the average pet store mouse, which is promising.

To date we have no recorded angoras only longcoat (long hair) mice. I believe I've read elsewhere longhair and angora mice have two seperate genes resulting in a longer coat, Is this correct?


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## icedmice

If I cheat...I can technically say this is the biggest eared mouse I've produced:









It's a plains rat/mouse, a native rodent indigenoius to inland Australia. It's a member of the "false mouse" family.


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## Jack Garcia

That's so interesting! I want one!


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## icedmice

They are so awesome! They are everything we want mice to be except you need a basic mammal keepers licence to have them even in Australia!

They eat very little, drink very little and don't pee much so that don't have a mousey pong.
They have an appoximated 5-7 yr lifespan in captivity (assumed similar to spinifex hopping mice). Have small litters of 2-4 with wide gaps between so you can quite safely keep a mixed colony without them overcrowding in two weeks.
Males aren't super aggressive and can be kept together. They are quite large, somewhere between a rat and mouse in size.

They aren't "hand tame" so to speak but a couple of my youngsters will come up and investigate your hand. I've been bitten once and it was barely hard enough to break the skin but they aren't persistant biters by nature.
They just lack variety, all of them have a similar colour to a blue agouti fox mouse.

If I could Jack I'd definately swap a really nice colony for a couple "show type" elephant eared mice like the ones pictured. You'd have loads of fun with these guys.

EDIT: Oh yeah and they aren't prone to respitory infections and other nasty health issues. Nature already took care of all the hard work.


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## Jack Garcia

In a case of convergent evolution, we have similar kinds of rodents in the deserts and plains of California. That's why gerbils are banned there, because they could outcompete the "false mice." Very awesome-looking animals!

The way that many (or most) color mutations arose in mice was just by persistent breeding. Pied, albino and white-bellied agouti occur to varying degrees in nature so I'm sure that even after a few hundred or thousand litters of these were bred you'd have a couple more mutations to work with.


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## Roland

icedmice said:


> To date we have no recorded angoras only longcoat (long hair) mice. I believe I've read elsewhere longhair and angora mice have two seperate genes resulting in a longer coat, Is this correct?


Yes, go (Angora) on chromosome 5 and lgh (longhair) on chromosome 8. I think the mice with very long hair in the US could be go/go lgh/lgh, but this is an assumption only.

Regards, Roland
Chilloutarea Mousery - Tricolor , Splashed , Merle , Recessive Red


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## icedmice

Thought so,

Cheers Roland. 
I've been secretly admiring your mice BTW  . You should start up a fan club  .


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## countrygall721

Those are so cute!  I love them :lol:


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## Roland

icedmice said:


> Thought so,
> 
> Cheers Roland.
> I've been secretly admiring your mice BTW  . You should start up a fan club  .


 :lol:


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## Roland

The best ears of my mice are different, but big too:


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## The Boggit keeper

Aww, Roland, they're cool-they're almost like bat ears!


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## setterchick

Awww very cute ears!!! I love the last one!!!


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## Luc86

Wooow they look great!!! I dream of mice like that


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## jessierose2006

I have to say i have never in my life seen mice with such humungous ears. They all remind me a furry miniature dumbos.

I Love Them! They look SO CUTE!


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## countrygall721

What CUTE big ear'd meeces you have there Roland! :lol:


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## minibears

they are soooooo nice, i want big eared mice


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## Roland

I have done pics of the p/p Spl/* with ears at 10 and 2 position:


















Chilloutarea Mousery - Tricolor , Splashed , Merle , Recessive Red


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## countrygall721

Oh my big ears! :lol: 
She is beautiful! She is picture perfect for sure! :lol:


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## webzdebs

gorgeous! I hope to attain ears as big as these in the future


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## mouser

then how will you ever find hats to wear?


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