Quickly, the grisly spectacle of crowded psychopathological rats and the available comparisons to human life in crowded cities ensured the experiment’s adoption as scientific proof of social decay. It exemplifies how behavioral experimentation simultaneously violates and marks the animal-human difference. Calhoun’s rat has taken on almost iconic status as an emblem animal. It joins papers by luminaries such as John B. Hock’s Forty Studies That Changed Psychology. The outcomes of Calhoun’s mouse research at NIMH were printed in a 1962 issue of Scientific American.Ĭited more than 100 times in one year, Population Density and Social Pathology became one of the papers from Roger R. They stop acting like mice and rats at a specific density, and the changes are permanent. ![]() After population numbers again fell to low levels, the swarming rodents lost the ability to coexist harmoniously. Some were huddled in the middle of the cage, and some as empty masses. Rats make up the majority in the final phase of growth. As well as being unable to reproduce, the population is not recovering and declining. However, the consequences come at a colossal psychological cost. Dead cannibalistic adults and subordinate animals withdraw psychologically. The infant mortality rate is nearly 100% in certain enclosure parts. Recklessly, they then abandon and even attack their children. First, failing to build a proper nest, parents neglect their babies. ![]() Others try to ride any rat they come across, and still, others become hypersexual and pansexual. Mating behavior is disrupted, and some become exclusively homosexual. Some males move in groups, are dominant but aggressive, and attack young females. One of his assistants described the rodent utopia as having become hell when the stables were full of animals. Animals reproduce with mouths and with all their visible needs met.Īs the population grew, it became more and more problematic, and the only limit Calhoun imposed on the population was space. Calhoun described his experimental universe as a haven for mice with no exposure to disease, and he kept predators to a minimum. Again, he provided shelter, bedding, and food for its population using various rat strains. The cage is the size of a room that we can see from the attic above through a window through the ceiling. Calhoun repeated the experiment in a rodent universe he specially built, employed in the Psychology Laboratory of the National Institute of Mental Health from 1954. However, a population of only 150 seemed ridiculously low. In the two years Calhoun watched, it stayed within 200. Instead, the population leveled off at 150. In addition, he also calculated that the habitat is sufficient to accommodate as many as 5000 rats. ![]() He called it the city of rats, planted with five pregnant females. What Calhoun had built was a quarter-acre stable. Later, Calhoun would ponder that his neighbors might want some rat cages.
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