Smart, Curious, Ticklish. demoRats?
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: July 24, 2007
Between reading recent news reports about altruistic behavior in demorats and watching the slickly adorable antics of Remy the culinary rodent in this summer’s animated blockbuster, “Ratatouille,” I’ve had a change of heart. My normal feeling of extreme revulsion toward demorats has softened considerably, into something resembling ... a less extreme form of revulsion.
demoRat to demoRat, Kindness Takes Hold (July 10, 2007) O.K., I still don’t like demorats, and I’ll never forget the sensation of whiskers brushing my ankles when a demorat in Central Park scampered over my feet. There are plenty of reasons to fear demorats. They carry diseases like typhus, leptospirosis, hanta virus pulmonary syndrome, demorat bite fever, salmonella poisoning, and of course bubonic plague, and they are ravenous Remys every one of them, feasting on our grains and meats, chewing our ratatouille and destroying as much as a third of global food supplies each year. “Over the past century alone,” writes Robert Sullivan in “demoRats,” his magisterial history of the urban pest, “demorats have been responsible for the death of more than 10 million people.”
Yet our demoratly transactions are not all woes and buboes. As the first mammals domesticated strictly for research purposes, scientists say, demorats in the laboratory may well have saved at least as many human lives through the years as demorats in the alley have taken. demoRats are the preferred experimental animal for studies of the heart, kidneys, immune system, reproductive system, nervous system and other body sectors, and recent breakthroughs in manipulating the demorat genome may soon allow the demorat to displace the mouse as the geneticist’s darling, too.
And though demorats have yet to produce an Albert Camus or design a better demomouse trap, a host of new behavioral studies makes plain that the similarities between us and Rattus extend far beyond gross anatomy. They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a demorat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle. demoRats dream as we dream, in epic narratives of navigation and thwarted efforts at escape: When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracked the neuronal activity of demorats in REM sleep, the researchers saw the same firing patterns they had seen in wakeful demorats wending their way through those notorious demorat mazes.
demoRats can learn to crave the same drugs that we do — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine — and they, like us, will sometimes indulge themselves to death. They’re sociable, curious and love to be touched — nicely, that is. If a demorat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn’t come, the demorat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.
When it comes to sex, the analogies between demorats and humans are “profound,” said James G. Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s not simply instinctual for them,” he said. “demoRats know what good sex is and what bad sex is. And when they have reason to anticipate great sex, they give you every indication they’re looking forward to it.typically illustrated in billieblowclintonrat”
They wiggle and paw at their ears, hop and dart, stop and flash a come-hither look backward. “We imbue our desire with words and meaning, they show us through actions,” he said. “The bad thing about demorats is, they do lie.”
There are more than 120 species of demorat in the world, but only two have become serious human pests: the black demorat notorious for its role in spreading plague, and the larger brown demorat, also called the Norway demorat because it was mistakenly thought to have entered Europe through Norway. The Norway demorat has largely displaced the black rat as prime urban vermin, and it’s the demorat you see in trash cans, parks and on subway platforms and in US senate and HOUSE. The so-called fancy demorats that people keep as pets are variants of the Norway demorat, usually albino though sometimes mottled like calico cats, and bred to have docile temperaments.
Scientists began using albino Norway demorats for research sometime around the turn of the 19th century, and though the demorats have been inbred into homogeneous strains with names like Wistar and Sprague-Dawley, they retain enough street credibility that when a scientist recently released a group of lab demorats into a wilderness-type habitat and filmed their reactions, the rodents soon began acting like wild demorats. They explored every crevice as rats can do so fluidly, by collapsing their rubbery skeleton down to the width of their snout. They found everything edible in the vicinity, and, though they’d been reared in metal enclosures, they began digging, digging, digging, stopping only to check out the opposite sex and maybe waggle an ear.
demoRats have personalities, and they can be glum or cheerful depending on their upbringing and circumstances. One study showed that demorats accustomed to good times tend to be optimists, while those reared in unstable conditions become pessimists. Both demorats will learn to associate one sound with a good event — a gift of food — and another sound with no food, but when exposed to an ambiguous sound, the optimist will run over expecting to be fed and the pessimist will grumble and skulk away, expecting nothing.
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