Something random that came into my mind as I study genetics Posted by Bubbly89 , Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 4:59 PM, in

As I read through my Genetics and the presentations and saw the pictures of the white mice, they reminded me of the "pet" I once had - a white mouse as well. An albino to be exact. I use the "" because initially it wasn't supposed to be my pet. It was for my brother's Form 6 dissection of mice.

My brother bought a pair of white mice to breed enough number for his experiment. The female mouse had only one hand. Super cute and a bit intriguing as I looked at how it worked its way through everyday stuffs like eating with just one hand and doing a lot of stuffs with one hand. Then, the day finally came when she actually gave birth but then like all first timers, my brother didn't know how to handle them. In the end, only one survived.

The one which survived became "the apple of my eye". I know, the phrase seems a bit crazy and out of place. But it did bring me a lot of joy and happiness. We named it "JuneJoe" which was actually the combination of my brother's teachers because he didn't like them. Well, anyway, because it was really a cute handsome fella (hahahaha.. it's a male), I always wanted to touch it when it grew enough to prevent itself from being eaten by his mom if she sensed my scent.

The first time I carried it out from the cage, with the mother looking away, it was chaos. As soon as I grabbed him out of the cage, he ran up my arm and was like super crazy. After that, I could see that it was scared so I put it back. Ever since then, I kept on calling it Junejoe everytime I came home from school and took it out until it gotten used to me.

Because the cage that we put the mice in was a "three-storey" kinda cage, so there were a lot of space for them. But they rarely stayed at the higher levels because I guess it's too exposed. My mom allowed the cage to be put inside the house that time because she thought that the baby was too young to withstand the environment outside. So, as soon as I came home everytime from school, and just when I stood in front of the front door and could get a perfect view of the cage, I would call "JuneJoe" and everytime the mouse responded. It would ran up to the highest level in the cage and was like franctic to see me. Lol!!! Oh, how I miss it!! And everytime I would just simply called out its name even though I could not even see the cage, I could hear the mouse like climbing super clumsily and quickly to the top. Sigh........

And what was the fate of the poor poor JuneJoe? Well, my brother brought another pair of male baby mice which were a bit bigger than JuneJoe. So, we put the already quite grown up JuneJoe with the other two baby males in another "two-storey"cage and the cage was put outside. Can you imagine how heartbroken JuneJoe was? And because the cage was at the back of the house, I visited JuneJoe less often. It got bullied by the other bigger males. But even so, everytime as soon as I stepped outside to the back of the house, JuneJoe would greet me like always, by climbing to the highest level. It was really a heartwarming thingy. Seriously.. I wouldn't have gotten through the struggles in school without these pet that I had last time.

So, what happened to JuneJoe? Well, I made my brother to promise me that he wouldn't use him for dissection. On dissection day, he was in a rush and just simply took two mice from the cage. And when he was drowning them, he said one of them was super obedient and didn't struggle at all but just simply stood there while being drowned. I know it sounded weird and stupid as well. In the end, we realised that it was JuneJoe because the one left behind didn't respond to me and the reason for the mouse that was being drowned to be so calm was because I think that it was thinking that my brother was playing with it. Damn it!! Sigh....

So, a tribute to the white mice, sacrifised for the greater good of students... Lol!!!