Rats Are Wonderful Creatures...

Mundo Patitas posts: · In the 90s it was discovered that rats laugh. When they play or are tickled, their ultrasonic laughter reveals the enjoyment they experience, generating emotional bonds and actively seeking out their playmates to repeat the experience. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Rats don’t just live in the present, they can also relive past experiences as well as mentally and in advance plan a route they will follow in the future. When they make a bad decision, they exhibit behavior that looks very similar to remorse. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Since the 1950s, experiments have shown that rats have a great capacity for empathy. They refuse to push a lever that would feed them if doing so also electrocuts a rat in an adjacent cage. They would rather starve than watch another rat suffer. In another experiment it was seen that they make great cognitive and skill efforts to free others trapped in tubes, or who are more inclined and act faster to help a drowning rat if they have experienced it themselves. Rats also help other trapped rats even when they can escape and avoid the situation, which many humans wouldn't do instead. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Rats are empathetic and care about others, while we continue to subject them to experiments that cause them pain, fear and distress. All of this with the explicit aim of creating populations of mentally ill, traumatized and emotionally suffering rats. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The logic behind these studies is paradoxical: rats are similar enough to us to serve as models for human psychopathologies, but different enough to be beyond any ethical consideration.