Books like Norman the Doorman

Why mice?Why has so much children's literature been about mice? Why Mickey and Jerry and Fievel and their animated brethren? How in the world did such vermin ridden filth become cute?It's not like they are endangered and we need to generate our usual, oops-too-late-false-sense-of-urgency. It's not like Coca Cola is going to be pony-ing up their tax write off money to "Save the Mouse." It's not like they mice make good pets: they can't fetch your slippers or roll over; they don't have a charmingly arrogant aloofness; they are skitterish and too fast and bite without provocation. Moreover, it's not like mice help us humans out like the over-villified spider or the creppy crawly lizards and snakes that control our rodent population. I suppose they are good in labs, though, as subjects to inject cancer into.Mice do bring us plenty of fun diseases: bubonic plague, salmonella, typhus, leptospirosis, tapeworms, rat bite fever, hantavirus, and lyme disease. So I suppose they are good for something. Can we all just agree that mice are nasty little beasts? Cause if we can, I think it is time to go back to my question: why mice?I don't want to read about little heroic mice who somehow defeat their nasty predators. I want those noble predators to eat the mice, or kill them with their broomstick, or poison them in the night, or scare them witless in the deep prairie grass. I want mice to become the villains of a piece, not the poor, misunderstood, protagonists that we should just leave in peace. And I don't want any more mice -- like that Norman the Doorman -- spreading their poop and mouse dander all over the artwork my super rich friends have gone to great lengths to collect and preserve in the local museum. Get out of the suit of armour, Norman. Stop giving museum tours to your dirty little, Victorian accoutred friends. Stop pretending that paintings of Swiss cheese are a valid form of artistic expression, even ironically (was Andy Warhol a mouse? Hmmm.) Stop dazzling pretentious art critics with your mouse trap sculptures. Just stop trying to be human, for the love of Zeus. Be a mouse and die in the mouth of a cat already.Okay, enough. Can we just have a moratorium on Mouse lit and move on to some other beast. Some beast that is actually misunderstood. Like the glorious Sloth -- the perfect metaphor for the computer generation. Or how about the Armadillo? Is there a cooler looking beast that it? No more mice, I say!And don't even get me started on rats.