My memorable scary story of the millenium eve  I woke up late on the 31st of December 1999 and I decided to clean the rat cage before going out to celebrate the millennium with my friends. My rats live in three stories cage with woolly hat to sleep in, paper tube, and various other things together with a bedding material. It's a shredded tissue paper that rats use to make a little nest for themselves. The rats were asleep in the woolly hat, so I thought I pull out the bedding since it becomes soiled often and needs replacing regularly.     And there was this purple string like thing tangled in the bedding. I wondered to myself “how did it get there?” So I picked it up, it was about 5cm long and it had a little pink foot attached to it. It certainly was a part of rodent's anatomy. Ahhh! It was a tail. I was so shocked that I could not even scream of the shock.     The first thing I thought to myself was that one of the rats somehow managed to trap a   foot and a tail somewhere in the cage and managed to bite it off because it was so painful and it was the only way to free itself. Another possibility that crossed my mind was that the rats got into fight and bit part of the body off. In either way, I thought it is not going to be pleasant experience finding out what happened so I needed to prepare myself to check the rats in the hat. Breath in, breath out....       I thought I better check the extent of damage on the remaining first so I know what to expect from my rats.  I really thought I've lost one of the girls. So I pulled out the tail and found that it had about 6cm strip of gray fur attached to it. "???" My rats are albino, not gray. What was going on?! My housemate who heard my scream came along, had a quick look at it and suggested that it is a part of a mouse! I don't own a mouse though. Now the questions were 1)How did it get inside the rats cage? The gaps between the bars were not wide enough for even a mouse to pass through. 2)Where did the rest of the body go? This was turning into a murder mystery behind a locked cage bars. Two murders but no body. The rats could not have eaten it because when I tried to give the rats some hamburger, they refused to even sniff it. In fact this was the reason that made me so sure that they were vegetarians.      Well, my assumptions were proven to be wrong. I soon found out they do eat meat, I also discovered a part of the metal bar of the cage was pushed open slightly, probably by the brute force that rats were trying to pull the mouse in. And the rats must have eaten the remaining because there was no trace of the remaining body. It's not very often a part of a dead mouse land on the rats cage. This poor mouse, probably a wild resident in my house smelt the millenium celebration feast I prepared for my rats and decided to help himself to it, only not to realise my rats would be helping themselves to him... Since then, no mouse has ever approached anywhere near my rats cage. I felt so sorry for the victim hungry mouse. I don't think my rats will never make any wild life friend...       However, despite the traumatic ordeal I was a little bit proud that my rats somehow managed to preserve their natural instinct despite they lived in the artificial environment all their lives.