I’m not sure whether I should admit to the following, but this morning I found little scatterings of murine faeces and could detect a musky yet strong smell of ammonia in the storage area where we keep our dog and cat food. Not nice. In case you haven’t guessed, we got mice.
Odd that these little critters should be so brave as to venture into the part of the house in which the cat spends some of its time and although he is getting on in years, he does still have the legs for a chase (especially when the dog slips her lead and chases him out of the door. Anyway, traps have been bought and placed, droppings have been removed and traces of murine urine have been mopped up (with a cotton bud) and the whole area disinfected.
I got to thinking about that word I used just now. Murine. The “ine” suffix means just means “of”, “like”, or “referring to”, while the “mur” was derived from “mus” then “mur” for mouse in an originating Indo-European language and thence to Latin – “murinus” meaning of mice. The root gives rise to the scientific group name for both mice and rats Muridae or sub-family Murinae. Others words of similar structure include porcine (pigs), bovine (cattle), ursine (bears), ovine (sheep), equine (horses), and of course feline and canine, but not supine.