THE RAT PAPERS

It was not the best of times. And any fool could see it was getting worse. Somebody had to do something - and to my surprise, that somebody turned out to be me. Yes, I know the quality of life seems to have deteriorated since I got involved - but if it were not for me, well, the situation down on the ground would be even more insufferable. Years ago, as a young man, way back in Junior High School, I had become intrigued by the experiments we, and when I say ‘we’, I mean we humans, were doing on animals for the benefit of scientific advancement. In particular, I was fascinated by the ones done on rats. No; more than fascinated make that: I had become obsessed by them. It was my calling. To have a calling can be a blessing. Or not. One of the first experiments I read about was where the scientists took a group of rats and made them fat by stuffing them full of carbs and sugary sweet things. They took another batch of rats and fed them a proper diet, a diet from the good food group pyramid – which brought the members of this second pack to a lean and fit state of health. Then they dieted the fat rats to equal the weight of the thin. Next, they fed all of the rats the same healthy diet - and guess what? The rats who had once been fat, got fat again and the others remained thin. “HHHmmm,” I remember thinking. The second experiment I read about concerned Random Negative Re-Enforcement, in which a rat is placed in a maze and a piece of cheese is dangled at the end of the course. The rat finds the cheese. He is timed. Then the cheese is moved. He finds it. Timed again. Then they put electric shocks in the walls of the maze. Each time the rat takes the wrong pathway, he gets an electric shock. The walls tell him when he is wrong; and he learns. The clever rat finds the cheese, and each time he hits the course, (The “trackus Rodentia”, as the witty lab-techs called it.) …each time, there are fewer and fewer shocks to his tiny nose, or ribcage. Then they put the shocks in the walls in a way which do not relate to the pathway to the cheese, or to anywhere in particular - the shocking walls are placed at random. Eventually, the rat goes insane. The lab-techs then time how long it takes the rat to go insane. “HHHmmm,” I thought. Or, how about the infamous study where they put a rat in a cage and made it so that every time he struck a designated lever he got food? Soon, the rat learned to strike the lever when he was hungry. Then the lab-tech gave the rat cocaine when he struck lever numbered “Two”. In quick time, the rat always went for the cocaine. Then they took away the cocaine, but the rat kept striking the lever numbered “Two”, hoping to get his fix. He died of starvation, even though he could have struck for food an inch away. The record was: One rat hit the cocaine lever 122,462 times before he finally died. “HHHmmm,” I kept thinking. Mind you, I was only in Junior High when I was exposed to these ingenious studies. Young and impressionable, I could not get enough of them. Over time, I became a proficient, scrounging ‘techie’ - capable of searching the internet and, eventually, its cloud and capturing any data, anywhere in the world which related to the subject of Man/Rat Studies.