Rodent

“ If we contrast the fearless disposition of the harvester with the timidity of the hare or rabbit, we observe that in respect of emotions, no less than in that of intelligence, the order Rodentia comprises the utmost extremes.
The so-called 'prairie-dog' is a kind of small rodent, which makes burrows in the ground, and a slight elevation above it. The animals being social in their habits, their warrens are called 'dog-towns.' Prof. ”

“ The squirrel, together with the mouse and rabbit, form part of that large family known as rodents. The word 'rodent' means 'gnawing.' This is helpful to remember when we are drawing these animals, for it explains at once the characteristic shape of the teeth, mouth, and head. ”

“ Some persons profess to think that the Rodents called Rats are beautiful animals; and I presume that, prejudice apart, the sleek skin, the sharp head, the long, slender tail, and the keen look of their bright black eyes, ought to be attractions; but those who have been annoyed with these animals as I have been, can scarcely regard them with anything but dislike. Overspreading the whole world as they do, it is no wonder, where they are not vigorously checked, and where food is abundant, their numbers should amount to something frightful. ”

“ The rodents, psychologically considered, are, of all orders in the animal kingdom, most remarkable for the differences presented by constituent species. For while the group contains many animals, such as the guinea-pig, whose instincts and intelligence cannot be said to rise above the lowest level that obtains among mammalian forms, it also contains other animals with instincts as remarkable as those of the squirrel, intelligence as considerable as that of the rat, and a psychological development as unique as that of the beaver. ”

“ The great order Rodentia—rats, mice, rabbits, porcupines, squirrels, beavers, etc., derives its name from the Latin verb rodere, to gnaw, or eat away (something) , and is characterized by the great development of the front (incisor) teeth, by means of which rodents get their living by biting off, or gnawing through, the plants and woody stems on which they feed, or which they use in constructing their dwellings. All are primarily vegetable eaters, yet none will refuse a meal of flesh when opportunity offers to get it, and some are decidedly carnivorous, especially as to fish. ”

“ The rodent’s head and front part of its body is pure black, while the other half is snow white, excepting a black line running along the center of its back to the tail. The rat is still in captivity, and the owner has been offered ten dollars for it. ”

“ I then resolved to hold my job just as politicians and policemen do.
“‘Foxy and I have come to an understanding with our rodent friends, and with a little care on their part, we have managed to avoid all suspicion that we are not attending strictly to business.
“‘Once in a while I pick up a dead rat or mouse in the alley somewhere, and leave him91 around where the old man is sure to notice him—see? Sometimes a strange rodent blows in here, and forgets to bring his pull with him, and we nail him to the earth in great shape. ”

“ After you have put out this charitable notice nary a rodent will you catch. We will now show how most simple people, after catching a lone specimen, give themselves "dead away," to speak classically, to all the rats there are in the neighborhood. ”

“ The rat and mouse cannot be considered as domestic animals, but they have been transported by man to many parts of the world, and now have a far wider range than any other rodent; for they live under the cold climate of Faroe in the north and of the Falklands in the south, and on many an island in the torrid zones. ”

“ Further, the most superficial study would at once convince us that, among the orders of placental mammals, neither the whales, nor the hoofed creatures, nor the sloths and ant-eaters, nor the carnivorous cats, dogs, and bears, still less the rodent rats and rabbits, or the insectivorous moles and hedgehogs, or the bats, could claim our Homo as one of themselves. ”

“ They agree in many other respects which distinguish them as a separate natural order of the mammals called the rodentia. Again we find a highly aberrant form in the flying squirrel, which leads toward an order with another plan of body. This animal is a true rodent, which lengthens its leap from branch to branch by means of a fold of skin stretching between its fore and its hind limbs. ”

“ As instances of the rapid increase of rodent families we may note that the mother rat has several litters of young each year, and ten or twelve at a litter. The fieldmouse has twelve little ones a year, but all of the same litter. ”

“ And similarly, though less obviously, is this the case with the instinct of storing food for winter consumption, which is more prevalent among the rodents than in any other order of mammals—rats, mice, squirrels, harvesters, beavers, &c., all manifesting it with remarkable vigour and persistency. Here we probably have a case of similar organisation and environment determining the same instinct; for the latter [354] is not of sufficiently general occurrence among all species of rodents to allow us to suppose that the species in which it does occur have derived it from a common ancestry. ”

“ Small rodents—rats and mice—were so numerous that they worked great havoc. We ran over our traps thrice daily and always found all of them filled. At dusk short-eared owls came to the vicinity and perched on the mounds from which they could swoop down and capture the mice that teemed in the stubble below. ”

“ Among examples of European rodents we may mention the very destructive rats, mice and voles, which practically feed everywhere at man’s expense; and the hamster, an Asiatic form which reaches as far west as the Rhine, and stores large quantities of corn and other food in an elaborately made burrow. ”

“ This is particularly true of the members of the Mouse, Pocket Gopher, and Pouched Rat Families, comprising about three hundred species in all. With very few exceptions, the whole matter of the exhibition of collections of living rodents is something new, and every step is an experiment. ”

“ The hunter, with [Pg 339] his trap and gun, seeks the rodents for fur or for food; hawks, vultures, and owls prey upon them; dogs, cats, and foxes constantly lie in wait for them. Rats also fight among themselves, and prey upon each other, for the victor feasts upon the vanquished. Rats are also hunted for their skins, as thousands of dozens of kid gloves have been first on the backs, not of kids, but of rats. ”

“ Whilst man is busy killing off the carnivora and the birds of prey, these natural checks to the multiplication of the Rodents are being missed seriously, and Rats, Hamsters, and Voles prove a serious menace to man's agricultural produce, and the Rat to his health owing to its instrumentality as a carrier of disease.
A distinctive character of the Rodents, additional to the chisel-teeth and the absence of canines, is the possession of hairy linings to the mouth, the external skin being continued into the sides of the mouth behind the upper front teeth. ”

“ And so it has come to pass that, though the rodents are mostly plant-eaters, while their associates are insect-eaters, yet, as both are trying to conceal themselves, and get their food by stealth, they have acquired curiously similar external forms, weapons, and habits of life, with the one exception of their teeth and the manner of eating their food. ”

“ Rodents, or Gnawers, are rats, hares, rabbits, beavers, marmosets, squirrels, in fact all the creatures which nibble. To nibble, if you do not exactly understand the word, means to chew with the points of the teeth. The rodents have no other way of eating but by filing, if one may so say, their food with the points of two incisors with which both the jaws are provided; these incisors are very long, much longer even than those of the hedgehog. The next time you see a rabbit at table, ask to see the head ”

“ Darwin, in his "Journal of a Naturalist," as to the animals never coming to the surface, that the little rodents were commonly to be seen near their holes about the time of dusk, and that they invariably retreated to the burrows on the near approach of a human being. ”

“ Hardly less familiar than our domestic animals, are our hares, rabbits, mice, squirrels, and their allies, which together form an "order" called Rodentia from the gnawing habits of its members which nourish themselves on vegetable substances. This order of rodents is very rich in species, and consists of many genera grouped in several distinct families—such, e.g., as the family of mice and rats (Muridæ) , of squirrels (Sciuridæ) , of guinea-pigs and spine-bearing porcupines (Hystricidæ) , &c. ”

“ Rodents include by far the greater number of species, and have the widest distribution, of any of the orders of terrestrial mammals, being in fact cosmopolitan, although more abundant in some parts, as in South America, which may be considered their headquarters, than in others, as in Australasia and Madagascar, where they are represented only by members of the mouse-group, or Myoidea. ”

“ Rats and mice make their way interestedly in and out of sleeping forms, investigate with deliberate intent the contents of your pack, or perchance make a tentative nibble at an odd toe or so. If anything digestible is found in an overcoat pocket the exasperating rodents do not enter by the obvious pocket-flap, but CHEW their way in from the outside. ”

“ It is true the Rodents take some part of this green food, but then they are small and insignificant compared to the large Rhinoceroses, Elephants, Hippopotamuses, Oxen, Antelopes, Goats, Pigs and Sheep, which roam over wide spaces, and are even less restricted than the flesh-eating animals, for they live in the open air or the thick jungle, never in caves and holes, and their young ones are born wherever they may happen to be, and in a few hours run by their mother’s side, so that young and old wander together wherever food and shelter is to be found. ”

“ As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man. ”

“ We have frequently torn off the roof of such nests suddenly, but have only been able to catch sight of the rapidly moving mother and trace her for a short distance along a run, so unhesitating and rapid was her flight. Like all our Rodents with the exception of the Hares, the young are naked and blind at birth, and there may be five, six, or seven in a litter. Those shown in the photograph, though their eyes were not open, had beautiful coats of short fur. ”

“ THE PICAS AND THE CALLING HARES. These Rodents differ from the Hares and Rabbits in having ears of moderate length, and in the nearly equal development of all their limbs. They are principally inhabitants of Siberia and the north of Europe; their voice is sharp and piercing, and they are destitute of any tail; they are all of small size, none of them exceeding the dimensions of a large Rat. ”

“ It is true that they often turn their attention to very poor fodder. A splinter of wood, a straw, a mere nothing suffices to maintain the play of their indefatigable incisors. Remember, children, the expressive term rodents (which means gnawers) , applied to a whole class of animals akin to the rabbit and the rat; remember their curious incisors, for we shall have occasion to speak of them again hereafter. For the present let us finish our examination of the rabbit’s teeth.
“The canines are lacking; in their place the jaw shows a bar or, in other words, a large open space. ”

“ It is clear that the Rodents and Insectivores do not hold their place in the world by strength or audacity. Both lowly groups, of simple structure and with comparatively feeble brains, they have chiefly escaped destruction from higher forms by means of their nocturnal and burrowing habits or arboreal lives, and the marvelous rapidity with which they breed, combined with their power of sleeping without food during ”

“ The animals of the order Rodentia are only occasionally carnivorous. All possess long incisors furnished with strong chisel-like edges, and with these they are able to gnaw their food, from which circumstance the name is derived. ”

“ The distribution and life habits of rodents and the general consideration of their relation to agriculture, forestry, and grazing, with special reference to the carrying capacity of stock ranges, is a subject that has received attention for many years from the Biological Survey of the United States Department of Agriculture. ”

“ The Rodents are a very large assemblage of usually small, sometimes quite minute, creatures, embracing an enormous number of living generic types. They are distributed all over the world, including the Australian region, and, being small and often nocturnal, and by no means particular in their diet, have managed to thrive and multiply to a greater extent than any other group of living mammals. ”

“ And amongst the Mammalia, beginning with small Rodents, which quickly reach maturity, produce large litters, and several litters in the year; advancing step by step to the higher mammals, some of which are long in attaining the reproductive age, others of which produce but one litter in a year, others but one young one at a time, others who unite these peculiarities; and ending with the elephant and man, the least prolific of all, we find that throughout this class, as throughout the rest, ability to multiply decreases as ability to maintain individual life increases. ”