What is it with Mice and the colour Red?

Mouse in a hole – carved in sandstone

As the weather gets colder I find the little creatures start to come indoors – when I say indoors I mean the workshop.  I can tell, as they leave little brown tell-tale signs, and also footprints in the stone dust.

Once I came to put my gloves on and found the fingers chewn away, all neatly made into a nest in the palm bit – the gloves were red.  On another occasion I loaded up my trolley with stone and started pulling, only to find the nicely moulded plastic handles chewn away, they are red too.

You can even see the teeth marks where they have gnawed.  It made me wonder why they seemed to chew the red things – there are other items and plastic things, yellow and blue, which they left untouched.  I came up with the theory that mice just like the colour red!

In searching for a better explanation I wondered if I had perhaps had lunch, or filled up the bird feeders with peanuts before using the stone trolley, or my gloves and the mice had detected the smell.  Maybe they were just softish material with which to make a nest.

I was happy to settle with these ideas, but it does not quite explain why later, when my forklift wouldn’t start, I traced the problem back to the wiring – yes, the red wire to the ignition was chewn through!