

I was awakened a few nights ago by a mouse rooting around the trashcan in my bedroom. I'm dealing with the infestation separately, but it struck me as a little curious that a mouse would be in there at all. I'm virtually certain there wasn't anything food or food-like in there (other than maybe an old teabag). It was mostly old mail, a couple of paper towels, and tissues I had expelled various bodily fluids into. Not 15 feet away there's a whole box of carbohydrates sitting right on the floor, and when I checked, it had been briefly nibbled on, but for some reason this mouse left that bounty to root around in my soiled tissues.



This isn't the first time this has happened, although I admit that I haven't always been this diligent about keeping food out of my bedroom trash when I've lived with mice. I've never carefully inspected what's been chewed on after discovering a mouse in there, so I guess I don't know they're going straight for the tissues I've used to clean myself up with, but they have historically loved getting into my trash as much if not more than they've loved going after my nearby food. There was also an incident from a long time ago when I was a younger and much grosser person where I ejaculated into a sock, dropped it on the floor, and forgot about it for weeks, but when I finally cleaned that up, the sock had clearly been chewed on, while another clean sock nearby hadn't.



I suppose it's also possible that the same items that make for good semen collectors are also the sort of things that mice might want to chew unrelated to what substances have been sprayed onto them. I'm mostly just wondering if there's any chance this is an actual thing instead of something I 100% made up. I guess it seems plausible to me right now that the mice are seeking out semen since there is some protein content there, and it does have a relatively distinctive smell that I can imagine attracting a mouse, but I (clearly) know nothing of rodent biology, and this is something that I am, for reasons that are hopefully obvious, unwilling to seriously delve into Google results for.

Thanks to some crummy apartments I've lived in over the past few years, I've had some experiences that have led me to believe mice are attracted to/trying to eat my semen, thankfully when I am far away from it and them. Is this remotely plausible or am I galloping headlong into some weird combination of projection, pattern-matching, and narcissism?