Mice and Honey
Why don’t mice make honey?
———- from Kuddie ofTramping on the Rails in Somewhere, USA
Well, they do, sort of. Mice excrete a clear, odorless liquid that confuses a cat’s sense of smell. This liquid quickly hardens into small cubelets that cats mistake for breath mints. Having a permanent case of halitosis from a constant diet of yucky cat food, cats eat the pseudo-mint and become incapable of smelling or catching the aforementioned mouse. Science, too , has learned a lesson from the resourceful mouse and come up with a synthetic form of this mouse secretion that’s taken by people who work in sewage treatment plants. So you see, mice and men have much in common.
Well, they do, sort of. Mice excrete a clear, odorless liquid that confuses a cat’s sense of smell. This liquid quickly hardens into small cubelets that cats mistake for breath mints. Having a permanent case of halitosis from a constant diet of yucky cat food, cats eat the pseudo-mint and become incapable of smelling or catching the aforementioned mouse. Science, too , has learned a lesson from the resourceful mouse and come up with a synthetic form of this mouse secretion that’s taken by people who work in sewage treatment plants. So you see, mice and men have much in common.