The more we learn about rat and mice social behavior, the more human-like they seem, raising difficult ethical questions about their use in medical trials and other experiments.
ISSAM AHMED: ‘A group of neuroscientists in Germany spent several weeks hanging out with rodents in a small room filled with boxes, finding the animals were surprisingly adept at the cross-cultural childhood game — even though they weren’t given food treats as a reward.
Instead, the rats appeared to genuinely enjoy both finding their sneaky human companions and being caught by them, as shown by their joyful leaps (what the Germans called “freudensprung”) and ultrasonic giggles that previous work has found is a sign of happiness.
The researchers’ paper was published in the influential journal Science on Thursday, and beyond the cuteness factor (or creepiness, depending on one’s perspective), it offers new insight into play behavior, an important evolutionary trait among mammals.
“When you work a lot with rats over the years, you see how intelligent these animals are and how social,” co-author Konstantin Hartmann from the Humboldt University of Berlin, where the other members of the team are also based, told AFP. “But it was still very surprising to us to see how well they did,” he said…
The scientists suspect though that the rats were motivated not just by this interaction but that they also liked to play for the sake of play itself. The animals would let out high-pitched giggles three times above the human audible range and would execute so-called “joy jumps” during the game — both associated with feelings of happiness…
The more we learn about rat and mice social behavior, the more human-like they seem, raising difficult ethical questions about their use in medical trials and other experiments. “I think, being aware of the cognitive abilities of an animal is really important,” said Hartmann, adding it was always important to judge the value of the expected outcome against the use of animals’. SOURCE…
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