Can I try and teach pet mice simple things at home or do you need specialist equipment?

Question: Can I try and teach pet mice simple things at home or do you need specialist equipment?
- Keywords:
  equipment,
  mice,
  teach
Asked by sarahjonolan to MarthaNari on 16 Jun 2015.
- Martha Havenith answered on 16 Jun 2015:
  
  Hi Sarah,
  yes you absolutely can! What you need most is a feel for ‘how mice think’ – how you can communicate what things you want or don’t want them to do. For example, direct punishment doesn’t work well on mice, it just freaks them out and stops them from paying attention. But they don’t like working for nothing – so if they do a wrong thing and you make them wait around for a while without getting rewarded, they’ll learn not to do that pretty quick. Another thing is that rewards for ‘good’ behaviour have to be given right after the good action, in a super-obvious way (that’s what the clicking noise is for in the videos below). Here are a few fun videos of people training pet mice at home:

Question: Can I try and teach pet mice simple things at home or do you need specialist equipment?