A New Model of Empathy: The Rat

[bendtheski]

My wife introduced me to rats about 10 years ago. Before that time I viewed rats the way most people do; in the wild; vermin, in captivity; for experiments or feeders for reptiles.

It didn't take long for the little fur bags to burrow into my heart though, and now after a decade, and probably close to 100 adoptions, I can attest to the findings of this experiment and more. Rats not only exhibit traits of empathy, but also mourning, affection, playfullness, jealousy, and even separation anxiety.

They really are amazing little creatures, and while I wish they lived longer, there is a whole lot of joy packed into their brief 2-3 year life-spans that has never made me regret getting to know a single one. Every one is unique, and as such, some leave a bigger void than others when they pass.

Of course rats are not for everyone, but they do make great pets, especially for the kiddos. As a highly social species, it's recommended that they be adopted at least in pairs, preferably of the same sex, unless you want to pay for neutering or spaying. Rats are able to reproduce by 5 or 6 weeks old, and it's not unheard of to adopt an already pregnant female who is by all appearances still a baby. Females tend to be busier, but easier to introduce new cage mates. Males tend to be lumps, which makes them easier to handle as they fuss less, but they can be aggressive towards each other, and especially new cage mates, as they try to establish who's going to be alpha. You don't want to get between two sparring rats, any more than you would cats or dogs.

Anywhoo, I thought this was an interesting article, and paints the rat in a bit more positive light than how they're often perceived.

Current BTS household rat population: 18; 12 boys, 6 girls. Who wants to do a sleep-over?
"Eek a rat" and Spartacus.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...jfO_story.html
By David Brown, Published: December 8, 2011E-mail the writer

At the very least, the new experiment reported in Science is going to make people think differently about what it means to be a “rat.” Eventually, though, it may tell us interesting things about what it means to be a human being.
In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.


(Science/AAAS) - The presence of a rat trapped in a restrainer elicits focused activity from his cagemate, leading eventually to door-opening and consequent liberation of the trapped rat.




The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat.
The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.

“There is nothing in it for them except for whatever feeling they get from helping another individual,” said Peggy Mason, the neurobiologist who conducted the experiment along with graduate student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and fellow researcher Jean Decety.
“There is a common misconception that sharing and helping is a cultural occurrence. But this is not a cultural event. It is part of our biological inheritance,” she added.

The idea that animals have emotional lives and are capable of detecting emotions in others has been gaining ground for decades. Empathic behavior has been observed in apes and monkeys, and described by many pet owners (especially dog owners). Recently, scientists demonstrated “emotional contagion” in mice, a situation in which one animal’s stress worsens another’s.
But empathy that leads to helping activity — what psychologists term “pro-social behavior” — hasn’t been formally shown in non-primates until now.

If this experiment reported Thursday holds up under scrutiny, it will give neuroscientists a method to study empathy and altruism in a rigorous way.

Do age and gender affect empathic behavior? Will a rat free a rat it doesn’t know? Is more help offered to individuals an animal is related to, either directly or as a member of the same genetic tribe? What are the genes, and their variants, that determine whether one animal helps another and how much? Answering those questions becomes possible now that there is an animal “model” for this behavior.
“The study is truly groundbreaking,” said Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University who has written extensively about empathy. What is particularly interesting, he said, is there appears to be no clear cost benefit trade-off going on.
“We are entering a distinctly psychological realm of emotions and reactions to the emotions of others, which is where most human altruism finds its motivation.”

Jeffrey S. Mogil, the McGill University neuroscientist who showed emotional contagion in mice in 2006, said that “what is amazing about this is that it shows empathy in such a robust way. This is not something that rats would otherwise be doing.”

A major question that needs to be answered next is whether the free rat liberates the captive one to relieve its own stress or the stress of the other animal.
“It’s more likely to be the former,” Mogil said. “But even if it is the former, I’m not sure that’s so different from humans.”

(Science/AAAS) - The presence of a rat trapped in a restrainer elicits focused activity from his cagemate, leading eventually to door-opening and consequent liberation of the trapped rat.




In the new experiment, the pairs of rats were put in the experimental condition for an hour a day for 12 days. (They had previously spent two weeks together in a cage and knew each other.) The rat opened the door to the trapped rat’s cage by chance the first time, usually freezing in fright when it fell over noisily. In an average of seven days, however, it had learned to open the door intentionally and was no longer spooked when the door fell over.

In 13 percent of the sessions, the trapped animal gave an alarm call, but vocalized distress was clearly not necessary to put the free rat to work. When the cage was empty or occupied by a rat doll, the free rat sometimes opened it, but over the course of days lost interest in doing so.

After liberation, the rats nuzzled and explored the experimental arena. But when the setup was changed so that the captive exited into a different area, the free rat still opened the door for the captive one.
When a cage with five chocolate chips was added to the arena, the free rat opened it, too. That animal consumed all the treats if the other cage was empty. But if it contained a captive rat, the free rat shared the chocolate about half the time, letting its compatriot have 1¹/₂ pieces on average.

“To actually share food — this is a big deal to a rat,” Mason said. “I didn’t think they would do that.”
Mason sees two processes at work. The first is one animal’s ability to identify and share another animal’s stress. But equally important is the ability to control the “acquired” stress and keep from becoming overwhelmed. But that was something not every rat could do. All six female rats in the experiment learned to open the captive’s cage, but seven of 26 males never did.

“I don’t think it’s because they didn’t have empathy. I don’t think they had the ability to down-regulate their own stress and act on the empathy,” she said.

Mason thinks that empathy and altruism evolved with females caring for helpless offspring. Natural selection favored those maternal traits, which then became generalized to both sexes. They helped forge social bonds that aided the survival of individuals and groups. She suspects the behavior is “sub-cortical” — closer to a reflex than a thought, and driven by ancient parts of the brain. De Waal, who in 2009 wrote a book called “The Age of Empathy” whose cover featured a chimpanzee shaking hands with a man, agrees up to a point.

“It is an intelligent response, but the motivation is, as in humans, an empathic process that is fairly automatic,” he said.
Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University who wrote an accompanying commentary in the journal, said that many people still doubt that animals have emotional lives that can be studied.

“Some skeptics are bound to say that this interpretation is a bit far-fetched,” he said in an interview. “What this provides is reasonably good evidence for empathy, and a model system to study the underlying processes further.”

[SB]

Good for rats. Had the hamster as a kid, took care of it till it died which was a bummer but taught me the lesson of life and death. Rock on little dudes.

[userA]

every cabin in the mountains has varmints, congrats for being able to co-habituate with the lil fuckers.
b

[Mazderati]

[AK47bp]

But don't they leave shit everywhere or where you able to train them?

Your insight makes me feel bad about how I fed them to my old python. I'd buy the largest rats I could find (about the size if the one in your pic or bigger) the big buck teeth started puncturing my snake during the strangulation process. So I started clubbing the rats or banging their heads off the bathtub before throwing them into the tub to disorientate them enough to not fight back.

I feel like a dick now.

[iceman]

Hey Pythons gotta eat too.

[bendtheski]

But don't they leave shit everywhere or where you able to train them?

Your insight makes me feel bad about how I fed them to my old python. I'd buy the largest rats I could find (about the size if the one in your pic or bigger) the big buck teeth started puncturing my snake during the strangulation process. So I started clubbing the rats or banging their heads off the bathtub before throwing them into the tub to disorientate them enough to not fight back.

I feel like a dick now.

They're semi litter box trained, but yeah, they pretty much shit where they want, which is why they live in cages, plus, while our one dog is cool with them, our Scottie, Duff I'm pretty sure would treat them like a toy and try to remove their stuffing, so shitting around the house is kept to a minimum.

We have a friend who did the same stunning trick to feed her python, so not surprised to hear. A fully conscious adult rat can inflict some serious damage if it feels threatened, so I guess I don't blame you for the clubbing. Lots of people don't get rats as pets, just like a lot don't get snakes.

Since we've had so many, we've run out of ideas for names, so I've started using TGR screen names. OK, actually just one, and I'm not telling who the lucky little attention whore is.

[Huck_Schmuck]

I had two girls, "Lilly & Rosie" for around 2 years. Had to give them up when I moved to Canada. Awesome pets.

[skiing-in-jackson]

During my childhood I lived in suburban & urban areas back east, -but I never saw a rat.

I was in Paris at about age 12. My family was waiting a few hours for a train- to Lourdes, I think. My older brother had to visit the W/C and none was readily available. A French station master adamantly would not open a vacant train to let my brother take a shit- as it would fall down to the tracks in the station.

He finally relented and my brother's turd fell down onto the tracks. It was a pretty solid little log. The first rat I ever saw in my life- the minute the turd hit the ground- ran out and picked it up in his mouth and ran off. I laughed for days.

Also:

This is a great book the Teton County Library has in their collection:

Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top

It is an enjoyable read and is well written. I'd recommend it to anybody wanting to to learn about rats- very funny.

[iceman]

Since we've had so many, we've run out of ideas for names, so I've started using TGR screen names. OK, actually just one, and I'm not telling who the lucky little attention whore is.

Say hi to little Spook for me.

[Tippster]

Hey Pythons gotta eat too.

No doubt. We used to do the same thing for the Reticulated Python we had in our group house in college, but would play with the rats for a couple days first. Then Johnny (AKA "The Henchman") would take the rat from us and go into the next room, hit it with this big dowel we had for "protection," and feed it to the snake. That fucking thing ate so well we had to convert a closet for its home - I think when the owner graduated and moved home it was ~13ft!

I would have no problem with having a rat as a pet (you keep them in a cage/terrarium when you're not playing with them, just like a Guinea Pig) but they're nocturnal, and that's a deal-breaker for me.

I'd much rather have a rat than any other rodent, including rabbits.

[bendtheski]

Say hi to little Spook for me.

He's a lot less needy than his namesake.

[bendtheski]

I had two girls, "Lilly & Rosie" for around 2 years. Had to give them up when I moved to Canada. Awesome pets.

We had a Siamese Dumbo named Lilly who was ruby eyed. We've had a few ruby eyed that seem to have very poor vision, and sway slowly from side to side, apparently trying to focus. We just adopted a hairless, ruby eyed, top eared female named Sinead (after Sinead O'Connor, who Andrew Dice Clay once referred to as "that cute little bald chick") who does the same thing.

I think Alaska, and maybe a few other states have a ban on keeping rats as pets too. I hope you found them a good home. We once had to donate some albino boys to Petsmart, that I never felt good about, and have adopted from them as well, but usually try to go through a breeder. Pet shop rats can be great, but it's usually better if they're handled and socialized almost from birth, which most responsible breeders will do. It's anyone's guess how much human interaction pet shop rats get before they're adopted, but usually it isn't much, so they spook pretty easily at first.

Our boy spook was dropped on the floor by the Petsmart chick, because he was freaking out about being handled which earned him his name. Couple of fear-poops on top of it. I felt bad for him and took him home, and he's calmed down considerably. I've never been bitten, but my wife has a couple of times, so a panicing rat is something I approach with due caution. Just looked up a quick statistic that says a rat's bite can measure as high as 7000 psi vs 5000 psi for a crocodile. Different bite radius, and obviously a croc can inflict much more damage, but anyone who's seen Monty Python's Holy Grail can attest to the damage a little rodent can inflict.

[bendtheski]

Say hi to little Spook for me.

I had forgotten about this thread. Spook died about a month ago. He was one of the friendliest boys we've had, in spite of his shyness when we first brought him home.

RIP Spooky

[Viva]

Rats are cool, even the "bad" ones. I did have issues with rat allergies, as did many of my former co-workers, however. Didn't really have mouse allergies, but those little fuckers stunk- mouse piss is vile!

[Huck_Schmuck]

I had forgotten I had posted in this thread.

I was about to post TLDR, but then I saw my post. I guess I did read it.

Brought a little tear to my eye thinking about Lilly & Rosie. Smart as fuck those little fuckers.

[stompinlines]

Anyone care to enlighten me with the pros of having a pet snake?

[Harry]

^^ they eat rats.

[narc]

My sister has had loads of these. For such small animals their personalities were often amazingly different. They would make me marvel at their intelligence (quickly knowing their way to their cage from any room in the house) and stupidity (toppling over their food bowl and falling down by standing on the edge of it). They are quite entertaining to watch explore and react to things; they do funny things like assume everything is solid and then scare themselves when it moves and makes a noise. Giving them oversized/awkward food items was also amusing watching them try and find ways to transport it. Ours used to eat the (bland) leftovers from dinner which they enjoyed much more than the dried food, the would react like it is the last meal they would ever have.

I have never come across a non-abused pet rat that has bitten either, they touch your skin with their teeth and test if you are food but that is it and are usually pleased to see you and be let out. I'll never understand why kids are bought hamsters which are usually nocturnal, stupid and bad tempered.

[TurxSki]

^^ they eat rats.

...and they are pretty to look at.
And if you forget about them they will likely still be alive when you remember.

...so yeah, Mammals are all very similar to each other. No surprise.
Yeah all mammals feel emotions. It's what we have in common