This morning—January 16—my aunt, who rarely gets in touch, sent me a WhatsApp video. I assume this was an act of kindness. My smallest dog has just come through a fairly harrowing surgery, and my aunt, sensing the gravity of that fact from afar, was trying to lift my spirits. The message accompanying the video read: “Sent to me by a friend. She was just walking her dog in Brooklyn. And he met a mouse!”
The video is, by all conventional measures, charming. A pit bull—gentle, curious, wrongly maligned—encounters a mouse. No snapping, no lunging. Just a soft, inquisitive pause between two species whose evolutionary histories have rarely favored such restraint. It’s the sort of clip designed to induce a pleasant euphoria: Look, it says, how kind animals can be. Look how wrong our assumptions are.
For some background: my aunt is not particularly fond of my own pit bull—technically an “american bully”—so I read into her gesture a bit. Her willingness to admire another dog of the same much-misjudged kind, encountered elsewhere and without consequence, struck me as a quiet concession. I took it as sincere. A softening. A reaching out.
She also knows me. She knows of my affection for interspecies relationships, my advocacy for animals, and my particular fondness for rodents. I imagine she expected delight, warmth, and approval, and shared the video with exactly that in mind.
And she wasn’t wrong. I did find the video endearing, in all the ways it was meant to be. It is heart-warming to see a dog behave with such delicacy and tenderness, especially a dog burdened with a cultural reputation for violence. That part of the story lands exactly as intended.
But my dominant reaction wasn’t delight.
It was worry.
“What happened to the mouse?” I wrote back. “That seems like a domesticated mouse.”
Then, as an afterthought—softening my own edge, aware of her intention—I added: “How adorable.”
***
When I enrolled in a master’s program in anthrozoology—the study of human–animal relationships—I was already preoccupied with the uncomfortable questions: how humans relate to animals, how we justify those relationships, and how often we fail to think about animals at all. Discovering anthrozoology felt like relief—an intellectual enclave willing to sit with those imbricated, messy questions. But then, almost immediately, another realization followed.
So little intellectual space, I noticed, was reserved for the animals that live closest to us—the small, the ordinary ones: squirrels, mice, the LBBs (little brown birds) that populate our everyday landscapes. I wrote about this in my application essay, declaring—perhaps a bit defiantly—that I wanted to think about them.
And think about them I have.
Which is why my attention went straight to the mouse.
A mouse behaving like that—approaching a dog, lingering openly in daylight—is not naïve. It is habituated. Familiar with humans. Unafraid. The mouse, too, is gentle, curious, and wrongly maligned. Whether we choose to read it or not, the mouse’s behavior tells a story. Objectively, it suggests a grim prognosis: such boldness rarely ends well for a small prey animal. Subjectively, the story shifts: a pet mouse, once held and fed, discarded when inconvenient. A small life rendered disposable.
That story never seemed to occur to anyone else. Not my aunt. Not her friend who took the video.
“No clue what happened to the mouse. Hadn’t thought about the mouse being domesticated. I’m sure you’re right,” she replied.
Why does no one pause to notice the ethology on display—the abnormal confidence, the misplaced trust? Why is the dog’s gentleness immediately legible, worthy of praise, while the mouse’s situation remains uninterrogated? Why do no corresponding concerns arise? Why is the mouse merely a prop in a story about canine virtue?
***
Part of the answer lies in the kinds of animal stories we have learned to recognize at all. We are, collectively, becoming more fluent in the language of animal injustice. We speak more readily now about suffering and sentience, about histories of domestication and exploitation. We are increasingly willing to tell animals’ stories—to acknowledge their cultural meanings and the hierarchies that shape how we value their lives. We notice interspecies harmony. We applaud the dog for not acting like a predator. But even as our attention expands, it does not always settle evenly. Some lives come sharply into focus, while others remain just beyond the edge of concern.
What of the mouse?
What of the animal whose smallness makes its story easy to overlook, whose familiarity renders it invisible, whose fate feels—somehow—too minor to trouble the frame? If we are serious about telling more truthful stories—about the novel ecologies and particular entanglements in which we now find ourselves—then attentiveness cannot stop at the charismatic or the exceptional, but must extend, patiently and reflexively, to the most unassuming life at the center of it.
The video ends before we find out what happened to the mouse.