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All released by the canal, a good 5 miles away.
I’m pretty sure this is illegal, same with grey squirrels.
It is. And apparently condemns them anyway cos they can't establish a nest and find food or avoid predators
Still got no sense of scale in those pics tho. Funny coloured rat tho.
two pages, we are all beyond help.
Legal to release brown rats. Illegal to release squirrels. You're right that most will die anyway, but they have some chance of survival where we put them.
That's a lot of ratchets left lying about every day according to the guide, do folk from Northern England still stick them down their trousers as a pub sport/pastime along with gurning ?
sorry - old links broken - have deleted and will repost
Moot point on the release of brown rats or normal mice. Technically OK to release but illegal to cause suffering and putting them into a new area where they will have no knowledge of areas, possibly established populations, competing for food *might* be considered as causing suffering.
Read that as FACT and then seems you can release, but only into the environment they're already in. Which begs the question, why trap it to then release it back into your own garden!
Dat fing is rat.
Huh. I always thought field mice were smaller than house mice (hice mice?). Google has edjukated me.
Anyway, I still vote for rat. Either that or it is a squirrel after all, with a shaved tail.
Still got no sense of scale in those pics
+1
Some scale please. Can you put it on your hand, or next to the cat or something?
Shame there’s nothing for scale, that would make it easy to identify. It could be a young rat, but it could also be an adult mouse. I had a rat living under my shed for a while, a few years back, we’d be sitting out on the patio, and there’d be a little nose and whiskers poke out, then it would shoot out and grab a suet pellet the birds had dropped and shoot back under again, taking about five seconds. <br />It disappeared after a while, it either died from natural causes, or one of the neighbourhood cats got it. Never seen another one around since.
Unless that yellow thing is a waste bin, I’d be inclined to say house mouse.
I’ve been hesitating to post cos I’m gonna start sounding shouty, but I’m not I promise 😂
If it’s a rat then it’s got the biggest head a rat has ever had relative to its body. The pictures do make scale tricky
If it’s a rat it’s got the most beautiful, almost field mouse like colouration I’ve ever seen… they’re called brown rats for a reason.
If it’s a rat it’s got the smoothest, hairiest tail I’ve ever seen on a rat.
If it’s a rat that’s the biggest ****ing piece of kitchen roll in the world.
If it’s a house mouse its ears are way too small.
It’s a field mouse. And OPs friend has overreacted on the size description. Fair enough. Some big girl mice out there that can give quite the shock. But it ain’t a rat.
And probably useful info to add: distinction between field mouse and house mouse is important.
House mouse bloody loves living in your cavity walls, ceiling/floor voids, eating your food in the cupboard. When caught needs ferrying a long way from home before release. They’re the ones that have developed that reputation for being problematic.
Field mouse is more like wtf is this indoor place about get me out of here! Catch in a humane trap and just let em get on with it in the field.
The comparison to hamster size is possibly misleading. Hamsters are little round fat things. Mice are long thin things especially with the tail. In what sense is it bigger than a hamster, and how big was the hamster anyway? I don’t know a lot about hamsters but we had one once and it seemed pretty titchy.
We’ve had plenty of mice and rats (both tame, and wild in the garden) and I’ve never found it hard to tell apart.
Here’s my/our little guest out for a snack… 😁
PLOT TWIST!
The cat's caught another. But buggered off with it.
Just asked my cat and she says it’s definitely an eagle. She wouldn’t lie because she can’t talk and doesn’t actually exist. Hope that helps Cougar?
Plot twist #2. I caught 2 with the exact same colouration in our loft last night. They were definitely nice.
And we slept a lot better without the scratching and gnawing.
Based on second set of pics I'm swapping from Team Rat to Team Mouse.