When a family’s cat wouldn’t stop scratching around one spot in the house, clearly interested in something there, they decided to investigate — and discovered a tiny baby mouse, barely even a day old. Unfortunately, the baby’s mother was no longer around, and the family knew that without the proper care, she probably wouldn’t make it.
They alerted the RSPCA, who came out to save the small mouse, who they named Penny since she was the size of a dime. They entrusted her to Pawz for Thought, a company that specializes in caring for mice. They were first concerned since she was so young and lacked a mother to look after her. They first placed her in an incubator and fed her goat’s milk on a small cosmetics brush during the first night.
They knew Penny’s best chance would be to try and get another mouse to care for her. Luckily, the rescue had a mouse who had just had babies, so they decided to introduce her to Penny.
“It was really her only chance of survival,” Trish Storey of Pawz for Thought told The Dodo. “I took Penny and wrapped her in some of the nest material from the litter and then took four of the babies and placed them in the bedding with her. I put them in the nest material back into the cage, and the mother came immediately to inspect. One by one, she took her own babies back to the nest and finally took Penny.”
Everyone at the rescue was holding their breath, praying the mom mouse would accept Penny as one of her own — which she did, thankfully. As the days passed, the mother began to treat Penny as if she were one of her own children. Penny thrived despite the fact that she was younger than her new adoptive brothers, and everyone was overjoyed it worked out that way.
“We did not disturb her at all for over a week, but when we looked in, we could see Penny among the other babies,” Storey said. “Much smaller but doing well. The risk had been that the mother might reject her or that she would be pushed out by the older babies, but that had not happened.”
When Penny was first found, no one was sure if she would make it or not. Now, she doing so well thanks to her rescuers and her wonderful adoptive mama, who stepped up and gave her all the love and care she needed.
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