wipeable for easy cleaning

I put new flooring in my rats cage today.

They have this really annoying habit you see, of just peeing and shitting right at the top of the cage. They sleep in a hammock in the upper part of the cage. Obviously, like most animals, the don't like sleeping in their own filth. However, aparently they don't mind eating, playing and walking around in it. During the day when they are sleepy, they climb out of the hammock, do a little pee, and maybe a poo, right on the top shelf of the cage. Of course since the cage is made of a mesh, this tends to just fall on whatever is below - their exercise wheel, food or even their cagemate (if he isn't passed out in afore mentioned hammock).

So, in the interests of the smell and their health, I fitted the three shelfs with some lino I found in the basement. Its the same stuff we have in our bathroom, minus the huge stains created rather artistically by years of water damage. So now rather than urinating and defecating all over the cgae, they just do it on the plastic flooring, where it can be easily cleaned up with something like a rat sized Swiffer WetJet. Not that they would use it if they knew how - lazy little bastards...

Now I know how my mother felt when I was a kid and I'd miss the toilet bowl. Or how she felt when I was a drunk 22 year old and I'd miss the toilet bowl. Cleaning up another creatures own waste products really is a special form of intimacy, that you only share with a select few people in your life. Unless you are a nurse. My friend Sheila cleans up shit and piss all the time (apparently its a bit easier than cleaning someones face up after it has been grated on the pavement during a biking accident). My mom has probably cleaned up enough faeces and urine to fill a football stadium in her long career as a nurse, Which is probably why she didn't balk at my own wasted aim.

And why I did when forced to clean it up with a horrible hangover.