Our cat loves playing with the little toy mousies. He only likes the ones with real mouse fur, though. This raises the question, where do they get the real mouse fur?
I’m pretty sure that the ones my cat plays with are made with rabbit fur.
I hate to think of a company killing a bunch of bunnies to make toys for cats! And yet I keep buying them.
From mice!
Rabbit fur is a little easier to come across, since people eat rabbits–there’s no other use for their skin once they’ve been slaughtered.
Have you seen ones that actually say “Real mouse fur,” or are you just extrapolating from “real fur?”
I believe that mousehide is too thin to cure in such a way that the furs would be usable – not to mention the production problems involved in using such small units. Stitching several delicate skins together to make one mouse-sized toy would be silly.
I skinned a shrew and tanned its hide once. I have a hard time imagining the result being used for much besides a little rug for a dollhouse.
I’ve found some of each, actually.
Clearly, you are using the wrong species of mice.
The toys are much smaller than regular mice (about 1" by 1/2"). I can’t find any packaging to confirm I’m remembering correctly on the wording, though.
Clearly you guys need to visit a science lab. I worked down the hall from one. They went thru hamsters and mice and guinea pigs, well let’s just say a lot of them. Though I don’t know the answer to your question, if there was a way to remove the fur that would be a good place to look
I would think it would have less to do with availability of hides with fur as it would be the factor that Larry Mudd brought up, about thickness of skin and curability.
I have a BIL who did extensive work with lab animals during his post-doc years, and I’ll have to ask him, but my guess is that because the animals were used for drug studies, they weren’t going to let anyone have the remains afterwards! I’m sure they were destroyed.
And there are a whole lot of dead rabbits from pregnancy tests.
Nice try, but no. These days, pregnancy test come in a little box (“I opened the box and a little rabbit hopped out!” says Zyada. 
), and the woman just pees on the little test strip.
Meanwhile, don’t forget the Gray Mouser and his friend Fafhrd, created by Fritz Leiber. The Mouser always wore a mouse-skin cap he had hunted himself with his rather wicked throwing knife. (Even if you don’t take that as good evidence for the usability of mouse skins, the series is one of the best fantasy epics ever.)
That is the do-it-yourself home urine test.
But at a doctors office, they will do a blood test, taking a sample and shipping it off to a lab for testing. It use to be a the rabbit test, which did involve killing the rabbit & checking it’s body. That testing is pretty much 100% accurate. But now many doctors do use a blood HGC quantative or qualatative test. This is simpler & faster, and probably approaches 99% accuracy. That is good enough in most cases.
Well, yeah, but the rats and mice on Nehwon get pretty big…they ran Lankhmar for a while, IIRC… 
First of all, the rabbit always died, whether the woman was pregnant or not. urine, not blood, was injected into the rabbit, then the rabbit was sacrificed to examine it’s ovaries. However, the “rabbit test” was scraped for the more accurate and less expensive and complicated blood test that measures human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). In the early '70s NIH developed a urine assay for hCG, making way for home testing.
Blood assay for pregnancy is still done, (no rabbits involved) in some cases to rule out complications and non-viable situations such as, ectopic and moler pregnancies, both of which cause abnormally rapid increases in hCG.
We all know that real mice are arranged upon a rack, so when played in the correct order they will squeak ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’. They need the fur on to still squeak, and once played are pretty much unsuitable for any other use.