Thank you all, they seem fine.
Neotoma wrote:It's pretty unlikely that a poisoned mouse would just happen to chose your rat cage as the place to die.
It's much more likely that it went in there looking for food, and well, met an unfortunate end. It's not a very nice thought, but rats predate mice in the wild, so it's actually fairly natural behaviour on their part.
As beri says, keep a close eye on them, but it's not likely to have done them much harm. If you're worried about bugs / parasites etc, then by all means take vet advice, but unless they seem ill, you don't need to worry about it being an emergency.
My usual vet will call me back on Monday as he is on holiday.
I think this may be taking enrichment too far! Those chicks freaked me out a few weeks back, so this was not nice!
I think the mouse has been living the house a while and we bunged up all the holes and he/she/they got trapped in. We moved all rat food in to the kitchen on a high shelving unit and all our food is in high cupboards, so the only place for food was probably the rat cage.....
Julie_Ann wrote:Is it possible that they DIDN'T eat the mouse. . .?
Once a mouse got caught in a trap that my grandpa left out. The little mouse had got it's leg trapped in the mousetrap and when my grandpa tried to let the mouse go, it was struggling so hard that it's leg fell off. Gruesome story, I know. . .but the point I was trying to make is that maybe one of your rats grabbed it as it tried to escape back out the cage, and it's leg was pulled off. If there isn't a lot of blood, then maybe that's possible? Is there blood outside the cage?
I hope it's that and you don't need to worry so much
Good luck!
There was just a leg......so unless they all devoured the rest during the day I have no clue, I thought I saw something rush from behind the rat cage and then behind our sofa, I pulled the hole thing out and searched but couldn't find a thing.
There was no blood any where either

I would have expected to find some blood somewhere unless they beat him to death....
I know it is a little horrid, but I want to know if the shadow I saw was a mouse with three legs or my boys ate him.
One of my gerbils ate the other when it passed on when I was younger and I felt really differently about the gerbil then on, but with the rats I think now I am older and wise I now understand that it's not nice, but nature aint always pretty!
We have moved the cage on to a small chest so hopefully this wont happen again and we are going to get some humane traps.