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I’m always mildly concerned about how shocked people are about animals being conscious beings with feelings. Do people really think we are mentally that different from other animals with brains?
To be fair, with academic types running experiments like this, the question is usually more along the lines of “At what point does instinct become empathy as we would recognize it?”, and depending on how high the criteria is set for empathy there, the level of premeditation may be geniunely surprising in some animals.
Yes, they really do.
The rats don’t live in a system that exacerbates and encourages the worst excesses of the worst people. The rats that don’t help are our billionaires.
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You might be curious to find that in many animal species studied, from pack animals down to ants, there is always a large percentage that contribute nothing and are a net-drain on the larger life-structure or colony. Humans and all other forms of life seem to share this commonality.
You don’t gotta out yourself like that bud
Ok, but let’s say they is a toy train and it splits into two tracks and put the rat at the lever.
Rats. Can’t use the term as an insult anymore considering they’re more human than we are.
Seems that’s an insult to the rat.
Meanwhile humans, when put thru the same experiment, realize they can make the human in the unpleasant box pay $ if it wants out. They then learn to create more boxes for more profit.
I dont believe this is inherent. It’s not human nature. Its social conditioning as a result of living in a capitalist society.
In a capitalist society, yes. Absolutely a lot of people would do this. But even then, its not everyone.
I live in capitalism but i would certainly not force someone to pay me to let them out of a trap. Especially if they were suffering. And i would never befriend someone that would.
I would think they were a cunt.
you must suck at capitalism then and would literally never be able to chair a publicly traded company maximizing profits, no matter the cost, for shareholders then. (i say lovingly)
If I’m ever told that I belong on a board of directors at a company, I’m going to Luigi myself. I would have deserved it
I really dont mind sucking at capitalism.
That’s like saying “you suck at giving people cancer” or saying “you are terrible at being a complete dildo”
Yeah. I am fine with that.
And i would never befriend someone that would.
My problem here: many of us are friends with one of the other person that thinks investing money in the stock market is a good idea and taxes for the rich is bad. Those people are already forcing others to pay to get out of a trap, they just have a few middle men.
Meanwhile, humans are stuffing other animals into cages to see what happens.
and then murdering them. good point.
ironic that experiment on empathy done by scientists doing mouse experiments.
This comes to my mind:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JFCgz959ARY
Couldn’t this be explained by the “tit-for-tat” hypothesis? That selfless behaviour is learned in communal animals, and that its implied it will be you who need help next time?
There is a bat species that I think feeds on blood, and they share the food they managed to get in a night, if a bat refuses to share one night then the next time they get left out of the sharing.
I like the one where they gave rats a lot of food and space (rat paradise) and let them breed till they were crawling over eachother till there wasnt enough food for them all. When most of them died and food was available once more, the remainders stopped eating and all the rats died.
Rats are interesting but I think the guy that programmed them left in some bugs.
rats are strange little critters. incredibly clever, but you’ll never know what they’ll use their smarts for
The owners use their captured public education and for profit media to turn us on one another and make us monsters.
They tell us avarice/greed, a well known character deficit and social blight for thousands of years is instead virtuous rational self-interest.
They force us to compete against one another rather than cooperate with one another as the basis of our economy, when an economy is meant to be a lowly tool of society for the explicit use of maximizing the efficient, equitable distribution of goods and services for the benefit of the citizens of the society. Our tail wags the dog. We are slaves to economic growth/metastasis we as a society do not benefit from.
The problem is that the sociopaths, mentally ill people literally incapable of empathy, something most humans have a strong need to exercise, that are among us quickly game society using their mental deficit as an advantage to take more than they need and manipulate others into elevating them, then manipulate those below them into fighting one another perpetually to stay on top.
Humans are social creatures. We’ve been conditioned to act as monsters, condemning our fellow humans literally dying in our streets of exposure and capital defense force brutality as “lowering our property values.”
This isn’t natural. It’s why our nation’s mental health is basically its own apocalypse of mass depression, anxiety, and never ending trauma. We are strongly discouraged from supporting one another, as we’re supposed to do the impossible, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, then claim we did it alone. That’s the American delusion. 🇺🇸
This really resonates with me. You are an excellent writer.
The part about empathy is so real. A lack of empathy is a real advantage in today’s world, unfortunately. I think empathy should be one of the most important values a society should strive for, and we decided to make a society that rewards sociopathy instead.
Thank you, sincerely.
I know my comment history is basically the same points rehashed over and over as applied to the symptoms of the day we’re experiencing, but it helps me feel like I’m holding onto sanity in an insane society to describe the core rot as I see it, and I appreciate your kind words.
After observing all of the animals I’ve ever lived with, I’ve come to the opinion (unsupported, I suppose, by any real evidence) that empathy is an important part of being alive. I think every living being has empathy, and humans just got quite good at beating it out of other humans to the point where displaying psychopathic traits became something culturally celebrated.
We’ve been trained to be this way, and we need to reverse that trend.
I wonder about this in animals all the time. Like, many animals seem to really enjoy being loved on and getting scritches, have a relationship with their owner or caregiver, are happy to see them and snuggle up… but in the wild they might be mostly solitary, only interacting with their own kind for mating and maybe raising young. Yet they’re often very different from the (eat sleep reproduce survive) basic wild animal when given the opportunity. They have personalities, happiness, etc.
Rats, in specific, do what those studying them have described as laugh when being petted/tickled. It’s ultrasonic, so we can’t hear it, but other rats can hear it when a rat is enjoying themselves.
https://www.science.org/content/article/tickled-rats-reveal-brain-structure-controls-laughter
A lot if it is selection bias. Humans prefer animals that show those traits. We instinctively understand how they are thinking/feeling, and that makes us more comfortable with it.
It’s also worth noting that complex mental pathways take a long time to evolve. Nature tends to play with there tuning, rather than strip it out when unnecessary. Most solitary creatures had ancestors that formed groups. There’s no reason to risk breaking useful instincts. They just get overriden by newer ones.
The Washington Post still has the article up:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-new-model-of-empathy-the-rat/2011/12/08/gIQAAx0jfO_story.html
And here’s the science article that prompted it:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1210789and here’s an old archive.org copy of it before the Washington Post started blocking the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140114012833/http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-new-model-of-empathy-the-rat/2011/12/08/gIQAAx0jfO_story.htmlDon’t think there has ever been much dispute of a rat’s intellect
A lot of animals are better at solving “prisoners dilemma” situations than us. Most animals would rather work together for the greater good but I guess they haven’t heard of capitalism.
Why do you say the rats are better than us? Humans can be observed doing the same in similar circumstances.
That’s clearly not the point of the post.
The post title says exactly:
The rat bastards are better than us
It’s a sarcastic humor that even a rat is compassionate about others. We all know that humans do it too ( some people, at least ).
Calling them “bastards” is completely uncalled for
