i wanna keep this mole

i caught a mole today and i wanna keep it. what do they eat, and what do i need to know?

 

I think that the mole would be much happier if you released it. It is kind of unfair that you are planning to keep it as some kind of object. Moles dont belong on tanks or cages. They belong free underground, and you are probably stressing the it out.

Set Mole Free!

 

i agree, the stress of capture on a small wild creature like a mole would probably be enough to kill it even if you were able to provide its fave diet.

i had a mole when i was a kid (my dad found it in an old tree that he was cutting up for firewood), and it died within a couple of days of being captured. it was very sad.

 

yeah, let it go...I can't imagine a mole being a very good pet anyways.

 

Here are a few links on the subject of pet moles:

http://www.musicforpets.com/pet_rev.html

http://www.angelfire.com/grrl/paghat/molepets.html

 

Please dont keep it. That would be cruel to catch an animal and remove it from its wild existence only to cage it up and keep it for your entertainment. And it probably will die just from shock alone. Dont be mean....let it go now.

 

you dont keep wild animals.

and besides moles prefer the dark...so..it's not like you could take it outside in the sun and play with it.


let it go and go get yourself one of the many domestic species out there if you need a pet so bad.

 

i would hardly consider this cruel or whatever you guys are talking about. Do you guys have pets? whered you get them? o a pet store, that makes it all better? ive seen some fucked up shit about how pet stores get those animals in that store! arg! and i plan on building a large glass habitat for him in the next few days. full of dirt and worms and brub with one glass wall so i can see his fortress. graven, thanks for the links, everyone else, im keeping it, so you can help or not. im keeping it.

 

check your library and see if they have anything on caring for a mole too. i wonder if you could give it some rescue remedy in its water to help with stress. RR is homeopathic, so i dont think it would probably hurt it.

 

Your just being selfish and you know it. Get a cat or a dog that would enjoy your company. Have some empathy for that poor mole, and realize that it is a real living creature. Not some object you can have in your room because you think it is "cool". Shame on you for holding it as prisoner, stressing it out, and thinking that its yours. The mole does not care about you at all, and would rather be living free. Not in some wannabe glass tank that is sorry excuse for life.

 

Crackhead, did you read the links that Graven sent you? There is enough information to hopefully dissaude keeping mole. Think twice. If you were a mole would you rather be free, or stuck in some boring tank.



As a member of the family Talpidae, the mole has certain character flaws that make domesticity difficult if not impossible. In the wild, these tiny bulldozers dig up a storm. They have razor sharp teeth and claws and have been known to travel distances of 30 miles underground at an average speed of 69 miles per hour.

Moles are not affectionate animals. They do not respond well to cuddling or stroking. They also do not respond well to harsh light, especially not heat lamps. I sure found that out the hard way. I put my mole under a halogen lamp for about four hours whilst I prepared a special astringent to clean his filthy body. After all, moles do live underground and who wants a dirty pet. Anyway, after all of this the mole seemed a little disoriented and not surprisingly temperamental.

Having said that I can recommend that you do not allow your children to play with an angry mole. You never can tell what a bloodthirsty animal will do.

Being suitably unimpressed at this point I decided to see if moles were good at sports. As you can well imagine they are not. Hear me when I say moles suck at Frisbee. Are they blind or something? Regardless, I came to the conclusion that moles do not make good pets. They are bothersome, ugly pests who are not worth your time or money. I give moles a 1 on the Stevenson Scale and that's being kind.

Thanks for reading.


Moles as Pets

by Paghat the Ratgirl





Jessica has a pet mole in the cool old vampire film Let's Scare Jessica To Death. Her pet comes to a sad end. In trial records of jolly old England, one finds that a woman owning a pet mole could well turn out to be punished by hanging, because such a pet was regarded as evidence of witchcraft.

I have a mole in the garden & like her a lot. We named her Mrs. Molesworth. She's a Pacific Coast mole who doesn't tunnel too much (Townsends can create dozens, even a hundred mole-hills, making them hated by many people for digging up gardens & lawns, though they don't really harm plants — but our Mrs. Molesworth has made few hills & two semi-hidden exits. She keeps the slugs & snails down in the yard & is in general a great asset to our woodland style gardens). I would never try to harm her for any reason, nor even to catch her alive, but it's fun to think of her as a kind of unseen pet who leaves sundry small evidences of her activities.

Moles make awful captive pets frankly, but some people do keep them in captivity, & the following notes are taken from various sources here & there.

Moles need to feel the walls of their primary environment, their tunnels. If this can be reproduced for them they can sometimes thrive in captivity, but they're not easy to clean or manage. When their bodies aren't "surrounded" by something they have a panic-response feeling exposed & endangered. They can literally die in one to three days from the constant nervousness from being exposed. They have to feel calm to eat well, & they need to eat almost hourly — skipping even one day of food could be all it takes to do them in, & newly captured moles generally die the first day both of terror & from going hours without food. Full grown adults would probably never adjust to captivity, they'd die of nervousness, but a newly independent juvenile can adjust to a really well prepared environment, & juveniles are usually the only sorts of moles dumb enough to get caught in the first place (adult moles are very clever at never entering live-traps).

They would prefer but don't necessarily require dirt for tunnels — they can survive in set-ups that look like large ant-farms with molded tunnels, the backside being openable to feed them & I catch them if necessarily. Because in the wild underground tunnels are not subject to extremes of temperature, moles do poorly if placed in an environment that gets too cold or too warm or with rapid changes in temperature, & sunlight can quickly kill them.

Though great swimmers, excessive moisture in their environment can kill them. Still, if it were possible to provide one with such an elaborate environment that it could even have a tunnel open into a swimming area, most moles, & especially the eastern mole, would be inclined to swim. Moles' fur is vastly softer than most furry animals. The Olympic mole is usually jet-black & soft as chinchilla, the Townsends can be either jet black or grey. Despite living underground the dirt seems not to adhere to them; they're quite clean.

Moles aren't tolerant of each other — two placed together will result in fights & death. Even in peoples' lawns there is usually only one mole at a time. Sometimes people think they have dozens of moles, but it's usually just one Townsend's mole that makes dozens of hills. When that one's killed, another moves in almost immediately from the surrounding vicinity, so they have to be continuously trapped or killed to control them, but it's still just one mole at any given moment because they just hate each other. The females beat the crap out of the males except when in heat, the males beat the crap out of each other, & the mothers beat the crap out of their own babies as soon as they are weaned. Their territoriality is extreme; they can tell from very far away if another mole has gotten into the tunnel, & will hurry to beat up intruders immediately.

The natural diet of large west-coast moles is worms supplemented with bugs & slugs. The eastern mole is more apt to eat half or more moth larvas & half or less earthworms. Moth larvae are available commercially, two kinds, "butter worms" and "wax worms" — which are not worms of course but moth caterpillars — the waxmoth larvae are best (butterworms smell bad). Very expensive to use as a primary diet, but it would be necessary to have a more than just earthworms. It will be difficult to catch enough worms to feed a mole because they are just terribly piggy — they can eat about two-thirds their weight in worms & bugs each day — a dozen large earthworms every day would be minimal — so you'd have to have an active worm-bin plus have in mind back-up sources so that if the worm-bin under produces, you can get worms quickly elsewhere. If you had to buy all the earthworms & the wax moth larvae, a mole would be a very expensive pet to feed. Some keepers pad out the diet with wet cat food though I don't know how wise that is. If you use no poisons in your garden, any slugs you can catch would do nicely. They'll even eat those big black beetles, so whatever you could find for variety would be a treat, since left in the wild they'd never eat just one or two sorts of things. They will also eat a few seed-pods, soft hominy corn, & funguses — but mostly insects, centipedes, moth & beetle larvae, & worms.

Delicate little shrew moles die quickly in captivity, but the gigantic Townsend's mole & the medium-sized Coast mole sometimes do well. Because they are such extraordinary pigs, they also poop a hell of a lot. Good garden poops worth using as fertilizer, but their environment really has to be very easily opened up for cleaning, which alas risks their nervousness response to intrusions & exposure.

Despite references to them being kept as pets, I suspect they were more only terrarium pets, not "hold & hug" pets, though that might not be out of the question. Since they're extremely crabby toward each they might be toward people too, but I don't know if they are; they're not known to bite kids or dogs even when captured, their teeth are too far back in their long mouths. I saw a nature shown in which moles didn't seem to mind being held around the midriff because it felt like a tunnel to them, the ones in the show seemed harmless, but for all I know they were too petrified to fight. The smallest insectivores are holy terrors & difficult to hold, but that didn't look to be true of larger moles.

The article above is mainly second-hand information; I've never personally attempted to keep a mole. Well, that's not quite true, when very small I took a young live mole away from a cat & attempted to keep it alive in a shoebox, feeding it cat food, but in a day or two it was dead, so that childhood experiment doesn't count. I'm sure from the advice I gleaned for this article, just about everyone will wisely decide not to try to keep a mole for a pet. But if you do seek to attempt such a thing,the following articles & one book, in the Reference section below, include useful information on moles in captivity. You will probably need to ask interlibrary loan for photocopies of the articles.

 

Fine be a stubborn jackass. If you don't want to run the risk of negative opinion don't ask questions.
No point in me adding my agreement to the 'let the little bugger go' faction.

As for your other comments. Who the hell do you think you are?
Not that it's any of your business but Branwen (most beloved animal companion, see sig) came from a rescue centre. I felt she deserved loving more than the pampered creatures in the pet store.

I strongly advise you snap out of this negative judgemental mindset.

TTFN
Sage

PS Does the mole have a gender. Being anal here but I really hate people reffering to animals as it (it implies an object, companion animals are s/he's)

 

You are gonna build him a tank?! Oh well....he must be fucking thrilled!
Thank goodness you came and snatched him away from his home and enviorment because all his life he was really hoping some idiot would come along and confine him to a tank. GEEZ!
It doesnt matter if you built him a tank the size of Shamoo's.....he belongs outside. Moles are supposed to live UNDERGROUND in the DARK. I cant believe you tried to justify it by saying that "other people sell pets in pet stores that have been caught....blah blah"
Yeah, it happens....but that is mostly lizards and exotic animals that could survive in captivity. BESIDES THE FACT THAT IT IS WRONG and you know that but.....so what? Other people have done it so that makes it ok for you to do it? Give me a break! It is only gonna die if you dont release it.
Serioulsy.....if you dont know you are a complete idiot for doing something like this.....then I guess nothing anyone could say could help you

 

crackforkids you're acting like a child, you're 18! I could see having to tell a young kid that "no, you can't keep the mole", but you should know better! It is a wild animal and is meant to remain outdoors. It's purpose in life is not your amusement. There should be a law in your state against keeping wild animals as pets, there is in WI, no native mammals can be kept w/o a license. Grow up. Especially since you know nothing about caring for it.

 

ok. you are all haters.

but im going to let her go cause, your right, i need a cat. my friend who works AT THE ZOO was going to help me take XTRA SPECIAL care of it, cause they have em at the zoo. She knows all about em and shit. and what about the moles and wild animals in the zoo? shoiuld they all be let free?

and i am not "crackhead" i am "crackforkids" big difference..

 

man you're being so negative. anything that I say isn't prolly gonna change your mind, but i feel that I must say. seriously, unless you have a BIG ranch to keep it contained your gonna ruin it's life. i don't understand how you can relate a mole to a dog or a cat. i have two dogs who i love and they love me back. you can't have that kind of bond with a mole, especially it being wild. and about zoo's. they're not all about showing animals. they study them and learn how to help the endangered species. Alot of the animals there have been rescued and can't thrive in the wild. just think about the mole and don't be so self-centered. it's not gonna be a cool pet that you can show to your friends. And not that i wish you any harm, but if the mole attacks you I won't feel bad for you. FREE THE MOLE!

 

lay off the crack man

 

Thanks for letting her go,you will both be better off without eachother

and to answer your question,yes they should all be released..i don't think that any animal should have to live in a cage. (and that includes rabits and birds)

 

I saved a mole once, my cousins dog was tossing it up in the air. Of course it attacked me and bloodied my hand up. They're evil little creatures. I couldn't imagine having one as a pet!