Russia's Federal Guard Service (the Russian equivalent of the American Secret Service) has apparently placed an ad on a government website for 3200 "white, female, laboratory mice... between sixteen and eighteen grams" to be delivered by the end of the year. This ad has generated a flurry of international media speculation
. Why, everyone wants to know, does the Russian Guard Service want these mice?
One theory is that the mice will be used for experiments -- perhaps to test substances such as the radioactive poison polonium210. This seems plausible.
However, the mainstream media
is leaning toward the theory that the mice will be fed to the falcons used to keep crows away from the Kremlin. This doesn't make any sense to me at all. Why specially order white, female lab mice if you're just going to feed them to birds?
Emil Steiner of the Washington Post's OFF/beat news
writes: "The story seems too ridiculous to be real. And yet almost everyone writing about it seems to take at face value that the guard wants these mice." Steiner also raises the question of why the Guard Service would have placed a public ad in the first place. Surely it has the means to discreetly find 3200 mice.
I'm guessing we might never know the answer to this mystery.