An industrious mouse tidies up a retired electrician’s tool shed each night
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
tl;dr; the mouse is nesting
> So this looks really cute and all, but what she's doing is nesting, and once she fills that box with hard stuff, she adds tufts of her own fur and possibly other soft stuff like fiberglass insulation or the stuffing from car seats, then she has her babies in there, all the while peeing all over those parts and causing them to rust and smell like mouse piss for ever more.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/14912316/zardulu-viral...
I could see this going either way; a mouse could probably be trained to do this for a viral video. On the other hand, you can see animals get mental diseases known to occur in humans sometimes as well; an obsessive-compulsive mouse is also plausible to me.
(A disturbing number of "Look at my dog/cat/whatever doing this funny thing!" videos appears to my eyes to be the dog/cat/whatever having a seizure, for instance.)
The gentleman behind the video talks about it here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-bristol-47625284/mo...
> “I don't do animal fauxtography any more,” she told me offhandedly. “So, I've been talking about some of my pieces.”
What over purpose could be served by revealing the deception?
Eve Titus (the author) is listed as a producer on the Disney movie "The Great Mouse Detective", which is derived from her characters.
https://bakerstreet.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Mouse_Detectiv...
On the one hand, it's easy to see that mice rattling around could lead to such stories, but on the other hand, it's difficult to imagine people intimately familiar with mice being very mystified by them. However, if they do things like cleaning up in the night, I can imagine that might give rise to some myths!
Anyone with the slightest experience dealing with rodents knows there'd be droppings everywhere.
"Probably not a teenage mouse." - ha!