Rats Are Us

A happy rat seen celebrating on April 4th

 

 

I.

 

Apparently, one of the things that neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp discovered in the late 1990s was that rats laugh and enjoy being tickled. Their laughter may not be what we would recognise as such - consisting as it does of ultrasonic chirps undetectable by the human ear - but laughter is what it is. 

 

We already knew that these intelligent and social animals liked to play, but we didn't know just how much they enjoyed it - literally squealing with joy and giggling with delight.    

 

 

II.

 

Apparently, rats also have a sense of time; possessing memories of past experiences and the ability to think ahead. This enables them to learn cognitively complex skills and, despite having brains much smaller than ours, there are some tasks in which they can outperform humans. 

 

Perhaps most surprising, however, is the fact that rats seem to feel empathy: "Since the 1950s and '60s, behavioural studies have consistently shown that rats are far from the egoistic, self-centred creatures that their popular image suggests." [1] 

 

In fact, rats do not wish to harm one another, feel distress when they witness other rats suffering, and will actively try to help rats that are trapped. In short: rats know what it is to care. But many people - including many scientists - simply don't want to face up to this fact, despite there having been a lot of (cruel) research since 2011 into rodent empathy [2].

 

Why? Because rats "are seen as cheap and disposable research tools" which are conveniently not covered by any pesky animal welfare legislation; "scientsts can legally do whatever they want to them" and hundreds of millions of rats are exploited and killed in labs around the world each year (so many in fact, that there is no official statistic). 

 

The justification is always the same: we wish to advance human knowledge and alleviate human suffering by discovering new drugs and therapies. 

 

But, of course, this ends justify the means defence is questionable from an ethical perspective when it comes to animal experimentation. Unless we are Nazis, we don't carry out horrific and deadly experiments on other human beings. And nor do we now inflict pain and suffering on fellow primates, such as chimps, having recently (and somewhat reluctantly) recognised them as thinking, feeling agents - just like us. 

 

But then, so are rats, it turns out; they too are sentient beings that love and laugh: "It is only our moral short-sightedness and relentless anthropocentrism that have prevented us from taking them into account."

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Kristin Andrews and Susana Monsó, 'Rats Are Us', Aeon (2 March 2020), ed. Sam Dresser. Click here. All quotes in the above post (and in note 2 below) are from this essay by Andrews and Monsó. 

[2] As Andrews and Monsó write:

 

"Scientists are now tinkering with rats' empathy in order to find ways of treating human psychopathologies. In some cases, rats are given treatments that temporarily disable their empathic capabilities, such as anxiolytics, paracetamol, heroin or electric shocks. In other cases, the harm is permanent. Rats are separated from their mothers at birth and raised in social isolation. In some studies, their amygdalae (the brain area responsible for emotion and affiliation) are permanently damaged. The explicit goal of this research is to create populations of mentally ill, traumatised, emotionally suffering rats."