Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by earth-tattoo 28 days ago
That's exactly what I want: immortal mice!
2 comments

You joke, but rodents make great pets, because they are very social and have a range of personalities, but most only live a few years. I knew someone with a pet retired lab rat, and it lived much longer than the average fancy rat, but even then, it didn't even live half as long as the average cat or dog.

If we could breed or treat rodents to live longer, we could keep low-resource pets without as much loss.

There is an excellent "This American Life" episode on rats. The first act is about a guy who keeps rats as pets. It's a sweet story.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/transcript

That's a surprisingly underused plot for a sci Fi horror film.

Considering the grand total of experiments we've ran on the little guys, I'm kinda surprised we haven't bred Mousezilla yet

Or Pinky & the Brain
The Secret of NIMH
See also: “Flowers for Algernon”