It is often handy to have doors in the roof of a cage, as in the roofs of the gnawers’ cages, over the rabbit runway, in the illustration.
to the rabbit-house are on top, and open like a door to a bin, as shown in the illustration and in Fig. 26. While we are at the rodents’, or gnawers’, quarters, it is well to remember certain peculiarities about the habits of these animals. Rats, mice, squirrels, and their kind, will invariably seek a crack, angle or corner to commence work for a hole; knowing this, it is well to protect all such places by pieces of metal or tin, and none of the little fellows will make his escape, unless the door is left open.
Rabbits will seldom gnaw out, but if they have an opportunity they will tunnel out.
To prevent diggers from escaping, allow your wire-netting to extend a foot and a half underground, below the footboard.
need not be more than three feet high. It is not shown in the illustration, but may be built as described and shown in Figs. 23, 24, and 25, after which a roof of wire-cloth must be added.
Into this house you put your turtles, frogs, toads, lizards, and snakes, and as most, if not all, of these require water in considerable quantity, it is well to have a tank for their use. But as every boy does not know how to build the tank, he may learn by following the directions in the following chapter, describing a back-yard fish-pond.
Be careful to set the tank level and pack it around with good hard earth. It is well to sod the ground on three sides, and cover the earth on the remaining side with clean sand and gravel.
There should be a strip of land at least two feet wide all around the tank, as a runway. When this is all arranged spread a layer of sand all over the bottom of the tank, fill it with water, and place the cage over all. You should have
or some similar covering, for the cage, to be used when your sand is in danger of being washed away by a downpour of rain.
Everything is now ready, and you can turn loose in the enclosure
of frogs, toads, lizards, and snakes, and they will soon make themselves at home. You must not be surprised if your pets in this cage feed upon one another. I once owned an old bull-frog who would attempt to swallow anything that moved, with the exception of snakes. This frog swallowed two live mice in one day, but he did not get hungry again for two weeks.[5]