Will This Mouse Get Me Kicked Out Of The Coffee Shop?

This [Dwight Shrute]-esque project will let you try out your taxidermy skills. Apparently you can acquire a ‘wetware’ mouse fresh or frozen from pet stores. We just need to wait until fall when our pantry is visited by the less-domesticated variety.

A travel-sized optical mouse acts as the replacement guts. Some creative dremeling brings the plastic housing down to a more acceptable shape. The furry bits need to be processed using the mouse taxidermy guide before they are fit over the electronics. What you end up with is a creepy peripheral that nobody wants to use.

109 thoughts on “Will This Mouse Get Me Kicked Out Of The Coffee Shop?

  1. My first impression was, “wow, that’s really creepy”, but thinking of all the other things we use fur and hide for, now it just seams hilarious. I wonder if the fur would start coming off after a while though.

  2. Wolf, a properly tanned pelt retains hair pretty well, although the area immediately surrounding the scroll wheel will prove a good stress test.

    I tanned a 1sqft hide at home as an extra credit project for middle school (c. 1974). The pelt was scrap from a local taxidermist. The chemicals provided my neighborhood pharmacist with an excuse to break his routine while looking up the effects of chromium sulfate.

  3. Hmm, looks like something I might do. I’m more likely to craft an artificial mouse since I already know how to do that (and have some old fur coats I’ve being looking to cut up for projects). If I ever feel like learning taxidermy though (I don’t see why people have problems with dead animals, the pig dissection in high school bio just made me want bacon), this would be at the top of my list of things to do.

  4. @StarChaser, 81rdm4n. They’re just bitching because they value the lives of animals higher than that of people, and the mere suggestion that the body of an animal could be used for our entertainment confuses and disgusts them. Never mind all the animal-products in everything we eat, and the food chain. Some idiots will forever refuse rational thought when they see some stupid animal dead.

    1. People’s lives are more important than animals, nobody disagrees with that. But to kill a mouse just to make, essentially, a practical joke, is a bit needless.

      Then again unless you’re a vegetarian, complaining about this is an illogical gut-reaction. But people are full of those. And I am a vegetarian.

  5. so how long until someone builds a robo-kitty-skeleton and stuffs it in their dead cat, giving it creepy eternal life?
    even easier, one of you deer-hunters could reinvent the ball mouse.. make a laser-ball mouse (just a laser mouse packaged neatly inside a deer nut-sack)

  6. Haha, that thing is hilarious. I wouldn’t mind having one of these mice lying around.

    I’m pretty surprised at the amount of disgust this has received, I wouldn’t have expected it from this crowd.

  7. “They’re just bitching because they value the lives of animals higher than that of people”

    animals neutral or kind, people idiots or assholes, so whos life more valuable?

  8. @ Shmoozie: Whoa and it was made by a chick. My mind is blown; there are girls on the internet and they cut up dead mice.

    There are girls out there who are into every single thing you have ever been told girls are not into. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Mostly good IMO, but YMMV. Hint: If you hook up with the one that embalms ex-living-mice to adorn her pointer-mouse, DON’T PISS HER OFF. Just, like, a hint. Hint.

  9. I’d actually enjoy getting kicked out of a coffee house for this hack.

    Folks featured here at HAD are often here for modding and repurposing things many of us wouldn’t (or just didn’t yet) think of. This is no different.

    Taxidermy and/or skinning for fur is a fairly well-respected form of art dating back many, many centuries (except within PETA and some other groups). It’s a way of repurposing an animal hide. And to do it properly takes a fair bit of know-how, patience… just like any hack does.

    Few people feel bad about mouse traps, poisoning rodents/”vermin”, or even using “humane” live traps only to take the whole “family” of captive mice to a watery grave in a bucket!

    So why is this much different?

    BTW: I’m not a taxidermist or even a hunter. I don’t kill for sport.

  10. Personally, the only problem (or biggest atleast) I have with this is that it retains the head and limbs. Using the pelt is one thing, that’s okay (as long as I wasn’t involved in the making of it) but keeping the entire thing is another.

    It’s just disturbing…

  11. @Troel
    low-effort troll

    there’s nothing noble about killing animals specifically for entertainment

    can you get it through your through your thick skull that maybe caring about animals doesn’t have to be a false dichotomy (“caring about animals more than people”)

    one can care about multiple things to the same extent

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