Illegal Pets: Dillan the Field Mouse

College students can barely take care of themselves, much less their pets. This hasn’t stopped a few brave souls though—read their horror stories, their delights, and that one time they brought their mouse to Lowell Lecture Hall in a Starbucks cup. Read the first post in this miniseries here:

Flyby: When or how did you first get your pet?
Pet owner: I caught him outside of Annenberg. It was cold already. Football season. I was coming out of Annenberg at 7 p.m. and I saw him scurry by the bike racks out of corner of my eye and jumped at him. I’ve always had this predator instinct to chase things...and put them in a cage to keep them. It was me duking out a mouse for like ten minutes.

Eventually Dillan stopped. I had a greasy Ziploc bag that I had used to steal chicken from Annenberg. So I put my hand in it and I creeped over to him and I was a body’s length away. It was long enough so I could lunge. So I did that, real swift, then I did the pooper-scooper motion to get him inside of the bag.

I was headed to acapella rehearsal, it started at eight, it was 7:49 p.m. and I had the mouse in a Ziploc bag. I didn’t have time to go to my room before rehearsal and I was afraid he was going to chew through the bag, so I found a Starbucks cup in a trash can on the way to Lowell Lecture Hall and put him in there and took him to rehearsal.”

Flyby: How easy was it raising a pet? How did you find time to take care of them?
Pet owner: He was really easy to take care of. I would take sunflower seeds and all the things that you put in your oatmeal at breakfast. Harvard actually paid for Dillan’s food.

When I brought him into the room my roommates were disgusted. I had to sit down and do a CDC search and figure out what diseases he could possibly carry. My roommates were like ‘Get this rat out of here,’ and I was like ‘You can pry this rat out of my cold dead fingers. I am keeping this mouse.’

It was a big debate whether they had the right to tell me what I could have in my own personal space. I have a double, so in order to keep the mouse, my roommate had to agree to actually keep him. His girlfriend loved Dillan, so when she joined my side, he had to join my side, too. We bought him a cage, my roommate and his girlfriend went to Petco and bought a little cage and a little running wheel and some bedding. It was actually kind of scary because at night the only thing he would do was gnaw on the bars on the cage. He would always try to escape. Whenever he did anything, he was trying to escape.

Flyby: Was it hard keeping your pet a secret?
Pet owner: I didn’t try. I told everyone. I told my proctor. I’m pretty sure my Dean knows, too.

Flyby: Who did you like more—your roommates or your pets?
Pet owner: I liked my mouse better than the one roommate that didn’t like my mouse. Since he was the enemy of my friend, he was my enemy.

Flyby: How’d you lose your pet?
Pet owner: He escaped. The first time he got loose—it happened twice—I  blamed my roommate. I made enemies in the entryway. My entryway-mates plotted to kill Dillan. It was me protecting my child at that point. Then, the night I was leaving for Thanksgiving break. I heard a noise near the heater. He was living inside the heater in my room. It took me 3 hours to get him. I chased that mouse all around that room. I got him the first time and put him back in the cage, but when I got back after Thanksgiving break, he was gone. I never saw him again.

Next up in this series: "It rolled over on its back and the hedgehog had eaten out its face and brains."