Spiney Care Guide

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Spiny mice are best housed in plastic terrarium or glass tank with a wire mesh lid. The terrarium and especially the lid has to be escape-proof and gnaw- resistant, as an escaped spiny mouse may be rather hard to catch. When you're about to buy a terrarium for your spiny mice, check that the tank is escape proof. 2-5 spiny mice can be housed in a 20 gallon or 4-8 in a 40 gallon terrarium.

Terrarium shouldn't be placed in draughty place or in direct sunlight. Choose a place where you can most easily feed your spiny mice, change their beddings and, of course, play with them. Take care, that other pets you have, do not get to your spiny mice. You should clean up the tank approximately once a week, depending on how many mice you have and how large the tank is. For beddings, use high quality products such as aspen, hemp, or kiln dried pine. You can give your mice hay in addition to other beddings. Do not use hamster nesting cotton or long "eco-fibres", as your mice can get tangled by their throat or legs.

Main diet for spiny mice is rat/mouse lab blocks with a 23% protein content. These blocks should never be the green ones made for rabbits or guinea pigs.

The main thing to bear in mind with feeding is to have enough food available. Spiny mice are very active animals and therefore eat a lot. Give your spiny mice water to drink, from a water bottle. Water should be changed daily, on hot weather even more often.

Make sure to take extreme caution with additional snacks and seed mix. Spiney mice are highly prone to obesity so seed mix with the sunflower seeds removed, dried meal worms, and dried crickets should be feed sparingly. No millet or other sprays as they include a high fat content.

Along with beddings, spiny mouse needs drinking bottle, food bowl, and a nest box in their abode. All kinds of cardboard boxes (coffee, tea, biscuit etc) make excellent and cheap nests. Spiny mice love to chew holes in them, too. At summertime you can give your spinies willow branches or branches of nontoxic trees, gathered from areas without pollution. Especially in early summer your spiny mice will love them.

Spiny mice are very active, so you can give an adult spiny mouse a running wheel. The wheel has to be atleat 8 inches in diameter. They also do well with plenty of climbing ropes and levels.

Things to include in your enclosure: 

Cork logs

Climbing ropes 

Bird ladders 

Wooden nesting box

Food bowl 

Water bottle

Wooden platforms 

Nesting materials 

8in - 10in wheel 

Cardboard tubes 

Rope ladders 

Ceramic hide 

Baked and processed branches from outside or preprocessed branches from the pet store 

Chew sticks and toys 

Unlike fancys who are genetically tame, spinies must be handled on a regular basis, especially at young age. However, spiny mice aren't aggressive by nature and with a little effort they make wonderfully tame and calm pets. A timid animal should be lifted from the tank my forming a "cup" with both hands, taking the mouse in there. When you have your spiny mouse in your hand, you can scratch or pet it gently, talking in a soft voice. When you have just recently got your spiny mouse and it is still timid and maybe even a bit nervous, do not try to scratch it at once. Let your new pet get to know your hands, getting it to trust you. When your mouse gets trusty, it will take scratching calmly. 

NEVER lift a spiny mouse by its tail, do not even hold the mouse from the tail -- even by the base of the tail. The tail is very fragile and gets easily broken.

Be careful when handling your spiny mice so that it won't jump down from your hands -- they may not understand you're holding them high from the ground. Falling down from a high place may be extremely dangerous to your spiny mouse.

Spiny mice love to live in a group. Three males or three females love living together as well as if the animals were of the opposite sexes. You can best house together three spiny mice, who are either all young (that is 6 week olds or slightly older) or where some of the mice is young and the others adult. Getting three adult spiny mice, previously unknown to each others, may be hard. However, it depends on their personalities. You should be careful when introducing spin mice; change the beddings and nesting boxes, wash all other toys and monitor the situation closely. You can also use a cage designed for introducing hamster couples together (cage with dividing wall). There may, however, occur fights -- even bloody ones in spite of all your careful actions. Adult females may have difficult time accepting any new spiny mice in their territory.