# How long do your mice typically live?



## grrrlcrimson (Dec 20, 2013)

I have 4 show bred fancy mice that I keep as pets.

I got them all at the same time from the same breeder, and the oldest one is a little over a year now. She's starting to show signs that I imagine indicate an RI.

I live with my parents and there's no space that I can quarantine her outside of the room the others are in, which I understand won't do much good anyway.

*
I saw in another post on here that someone referred to their mouse with an RI who was about one and a half years old as "- quite old" and someone said the RI was probably related to her age.

This had me wondering, how long do you typically expect your mice to live? *

I feel so sorry for the little critters. It's been going on long enough that I imagine if the others were going to get it, it's already happening. Trying to find a vet in the area who will look at mice but can't get any calls back from them... and I'm not certain that treatment is feasible at this point anyway. I wanted to consider their age while I try to figure the rest of this out too. I did separate her from the rest for a solid day when I first started noticing it, but only on the opposite side of the room, and when I realized that won't actually prevent the spread I thought they'd all be happier together again anyway.

Thanks for any help, sorry this turned into a bit of a ramble.

*My real questions is just: How long do you typically expect your mice to live?*


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## Miceandmore64 (Jul 16, 2013)

Hey! I was mouse owner of the one and a half year old mouse with RI. She was put to sleep. I have pet type mice not show mice and they generally live 1 and a half- 2. Or I even had some who were put to sleep at 2 and a half but could have made it to 3 ( but they were in pain)


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## PPVallhunds (Jul 26, 2010)

Id say 1-2 is average. Some can live past that just as some won't live to a year.


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## andypandy29us (Aug 10, 2012)

I have my stud buck who has retired and is now 3 years and 4 months ........  but most live about 2 years as pets ....


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## madmouse (May 19, 2012)

There is absolutely no science behind this, just my personal guesstimation... But I like to imagine a week in human time as a year in mouse time (quite a loose approximation that does not apply at all to developing mice). At a year old a mouse is then 52 "years", females should most definitely retire from breeding. After a year old, a mouse with a poor diet or poor genetics may suddenly croak (as some humans will past the age of 50). At 1.5 real years, a mouse is about 78 by this reckoning, it will be more susceptible to and less likely to bounce back from illness, injury, stress. Like I said, this isn't based on anything at all, I just use the 1 person-week = 1 mouse-year to explain to pet keepers why their mouse seemed to grow old and die at 1.5yrs when they read online a mouse should live for 2-3yrs. Many mice can live for two years with excellent care, just as many people could live to be 104 if they had the strict dietary and environmental control that we have over mice, but not all of them will and it doesn't necessarily mean that there was anything wrong with their breeding or care.


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