May 22, 2025 • 32 mins
You may be familiar with the phrase “lab rat.” Much of what we know about human beings and the way they behave are based upon the things we know about rats and the way they behave. But what if we picked the wrong animal to study? Revisionist History senior producer Ben wonders if we should have been putting another creature under the microscope.
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin, Hey, last Archive listeners. Today on the show, we're
sharing an episode I did for Revisionist History about why
we wound up studying the lab rat instead of the raccoon.
It involves a frontier psychologist in Oklahoma at the turn
of the century and one of my favorite academic articles
of all time. I'm excited to share with you now.
(00:37):
You can find more episodes of Revisionist History wherever you
get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy this one. How
did you get into writing about raccoons?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I got into writing about raccoons because they started breaking
into my supposedly raccoon proof green band named Toronto.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
I'm talking with intrepid investigative reporter for the Toronto Star,
Amy Dempsey Raven. Typically she covers police wrongdoing, child welfare,
controversial homicides, But in twenty sixteen, when Toronto declared a
war on raccoons and unveiled a new raccoon resistant composting ben,
she realized it's time to get serious.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Mayor came out on this garbage truck and made all
of these promises, and I wondered, I thought to myself,
I'm going to keep an eye on things here.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
This raccoon resistant ben cost the city thirty one million
Canadian dollars. But Toronto is known as the raccoon Capital
of the world. Theoretically it's a point of pride, but
it's a little more complicated than that. If a race
of Martians took over your city, would you call it
the Martian Capital of the world, only if you'd already
admitted defeat.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
My first job after graduating was in Toronto and I
had a group.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
House, local man Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
I did not grow up in raccoon country, so I
had no idea something was making a racket so loud
and all night. Like what I say, all night, I
mean without without stopping. From the moment I went to
by to the morning, woke up, I couldn't sleep, and
I went my friends. A couple of friends were from Toronto,
and I was like, what is going on?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Like, oh, it's raccoons.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Like for them, it was like, oh yeah, it's just
like that's the deal here.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
That was about forty years ago. Things have gotten much
much worse.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
It doesn't get any more Toronto than this.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
A raccoon inside a supermarket.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Here, raccoons in the garbage raccoons on the train. Oh,
oh my god, raccoons on the back deck.
Speaker 5 (02:41):
Time to go down, buddy, Time to go down. You
can't stay on this deck anymore. But you're a viction day.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Raccoons have taken over the attics in a whole street
of houses and refused to leave. They brought traffic to
a screeching halt on Toronto's highways and just stood there.
They figured out how to open doors to houses and refrigerators,
and stood on top of countertops leftovers in their paws,
staring at freaked out homeowners as if to say, if
I wanted you here, I would have run the bell.
(03:11):
Hence the pricey raccoon resistant bins, which surely no raccoon
would be able to open.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Soon after the rollout, we began hearing reports that raccoons
were outsmarting the bins, and the city said, now, that's
not really happening. But then one night they broke into mine.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Amy found herself wondering, how are raccoons smart enough to
open that bin? This was the question a historian of
science had found himself wondering one night when he looked
at his back deck in Toronto and saw composts all
over the place. He had an earlier version of the
compost bin. But here too, the raccoons had picked the lock.
Were they really just that smart? It turned out nobody
(03:53):
really knew. Raccoons had hardly been studied, basically not at
all compared to other animals, like say, rats or monkeys.
This historian wanted to know why the midnight raid on
his compost bin would set in motion a sequel of
events that, in my own estimation, have come to topple
an entire century of psychological theory and restored the raccoon
(04:17):
to its proper place, the dead center of how we
understand human beings.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my show
about things overlooked, misunderstood and in praise of Toronto. You
may be familiar with the phrase lab rat. Perhaps you
are aware that many of the things we know about
human beings and the way we behave are based upon
the things we know about rats and the way they behave.
(04:46):
But in this episode, my colleague Bend daph Haffrey asks,
what if we picked the wrong animal?
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Many historians of science will write about the greats Einstein
Freud Oppenheimer. The kind of research project not usually begun
while scooping up trash in your bathrobe on your back
deck in Toronto. But Michael Pettitt's always gotten into things sideways.
Speaker 5 (05:13):
I have almost never written about kind of the dominant
people in the field. I personally find myself attracted to
the misfits.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Pettitt is a historian of psychology at York University in Toronto.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
I looked one morning, and of course the compost is
all over the deck. I scooping it up because the
raccoons could very easily get into the walk. And as
a start of psychology, I asked myself, huh, I wonder
if anyone ever used a puzzle box with raccoons. They
seem really good at it.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Petitt knew all about scientists putting rats and mazes and
puzzly cages, the mainstream stuff who cares, But in all
his studies he had never heard of a raccoon in
a puzzle box. And yet here on his deck was
evidence that they were basically able to outsmart any human system.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
These raccoons seemed very adept at doing walks, and so
I was just curious.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Michael was curious for good reason, not just because of
the Locke situation. We've basically never known quite what to
make of raccoons.
Speaker 5 (06:15):
You know, they aren't fightings, but they're also not rodents,
so there's like there's something about them that they sort
of take on this role as kind of intermediary species.
There's this reputation of the raccoon for being this cunning,
intelligent sickster.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
For a while, there wasn't even consensus on how exactly
they evolved. The famous naturalist Carl Linnaeus called them ursus
loader or washer bear, because they like to rinse their
food and water, and he thought they descended from bears. Now,
for any true raccoon fans out there, I should note that, yes,
they aren't actually washing their food. They basically see you
with their paws, and their paws are more sensitive in
(06:56):
the water. This, by the way, is the instinct behind
that amazing Japanese TV show where they gave a raccoon
cotton candy, which the raccoon dutifully washed until they've vanished.
But no, they're not washing and they're not bears. When
Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World, he
remarked upon its quote clown like dogs, to which the
people of Italy said, Chris, what the hell are you
(07:17):
talking about? Until centuries later another naturalist realized, Oh, he's
talking about raccoons. They're their own thing.
Speaker 5 (07:28):
They in some ways seem to be above the rodents
and maybe even our carnivores.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Pettitt went looking for a history of raccoons science, specifically
about people investigating their intelligence, and found basically nothing a
handful of scientists in one slim volume in particular from
nineteen oh seven, titled Concerning the Intelligence of Raccoons, It
was written by a man named Lawrence Cole, Frontier raccoonist.
Speaker 5 (07:59):
So Lawrence Cole, in a lot of ways is a nobody.
You know, He's not someone if you go to an
history of psychology textbook and pull it off the shelf,
he's not someone that's particularly remarkable.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Lawrence Cole had done his graduate work at Harvard and
was part of a psychological movement that studied animals to
understand humans. In the nineteenth century, psychology had largely been
based on what people said about how they felt, which
was not super reliable. So why not instead observe how
animals behave and just extrapolate up the chain from there.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Darwin absolutely says it's not just our kind of our
physical form as human beings that is continuous with natural selection,
but also our psychological selves.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
But which animal was best for the psychologists to study?
Any of them theoretically could work. Scientists were comparing species
across tests to see how they'd fare. People had studied chickens, dogs.
Coal's advisor like the idea of studying monkeys, but monkeys
are super expensive. It would be helpful, though, if there
were a kind of consensus a linguis franca animal that
(09:05):
people could generalize from.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
Through a series of circumstances, he acquires a small qualony
of raccoons.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Cole still had to find an experiment of his own
to get his PhD. These raccoons seemed promising.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
As far as Pool knew, no one had kind of
put raccoons to these motions. So that's adoptible dissertation. I
can run these studies with these raccoons, right, whatever the
data is, I can say I have added to our
knowledge of comparative psychology.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
He probably had a hunch that this was going to
be interesting.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
I don't know if raccoons were the most charismatic of
our fauna. But raccoons they're kind of fun.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Come on, I think they're the most charismatic of our fauna.
Speaker 5 (09:50):
Well, they're annoying, but they're like they're lumable scamps. Right.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Cole began running tests on the raccoons. He put them
in boxes with complicated locks every day for a whole
academic year, and he found they were incredible. Any box,
it seemed any puzzle the raccoon could solve it. And
what's more, the animal it wasn't just going through the motions.
The raccoon seemed curious about what he was doing, and
(10:16):
Cole thought there was evidence that raccoons could hold images
in their mind. Nobody was making these kinds of claims
about other animals. So Cole started publishing his research, writing
the Leading Figures in Psychology, saying, Hey, these raccoons are
really unusually intelligent, maybe as intelligent as monkeys, which seems
(10:36):
to me like it should make them a great model
organism for people. Except there was a movement that was
growing swiftly within Cole's field right around them, which was
explicitly uncomfortable with any talk of an animal having a
mind and it was fast becoming the only show in town.
It was called behaviorism. All this history is documented in
(11:00):
an amazing article by Michael Pettitt titled The Problem of
Raccoon Intelligence in Behaviorist America, which is one of my
favorite academic essays of time, because the raccoon was indeed
a problem.
Speaker 6 (11:14):
So it was no surprise to us that a lot
of psychologists steered clear of coons.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Bob Bailey, he used to be the top guy at
a legendary behaviorist organization called Animal Behavior Enterprises. The founders
of that company wrote an infamous paper questioning the fundamentals
of behaviorism, the idea that all animals were blank slates
you could write whatever you wanted on. A key example
one raccoon they trained to put coins in a box.
Speaker 6 (11:43):
After a one hundred or so responses, the raccoon would start.
Instead of just picking up one coin and taking it
to the box and putting it in the box, the
raccoon would pick up two coins and then rub them
together and would start walking towards the box, and then
(12:07):
it would stop and rub the coins together, and then
it would go to the box and then start to
put the coins in, and then stop and rub the
coins together, and then start to put the coins back
in the box, and the stop and rub the coins together.
(12:27):
Eventually it would put the coins in the box most
of the time.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Eventually in most of the time were bad news for
people trying to turn psychology into a reputable hard science.
That raccoon box situation came later on, but this exact
dynamic put a bit of a target on Lawrence Cole,
the frontier raccoonist. And if you know anything about the
history of psychology, you'll know how the problem of the
(12:54):
raccoon was solved raccoon erasure. The raccoon does not figure
prominently at all, but you know which animal does, the rat.
I'm curious about how you account for that historical process
of raccoon erasure that be around them.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
One of the problems with raccoons is they are a
much larger and more cumbersome species than your bread lab racks. Right,
In terms of feeding, caging, maintenance, rats proved much more
docile and at debt. And again, if you want to
(13:32):
have decent numbers for your study, right, they also reproduce
quite readily. They have very short greeding cycles, and you
can kind of build up the populations.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
But it wasn't just about convenience. It was also difficult
to generalize from raccoon experiments. Rats, for example, behaved in predictable,
repeatable ways, raccoons not so much. How is a scientist
supposed to work with an animal who each spring gets
wanderlust and attempts to break out of their cage? What
do you do when your experimental raccoon colony does escape
(14:06):
and moves into your labs of ventilation system? Behaviorism gains steam.
Scientists and the big cities attacked the nascent science of raccoons.
Wasn't this all a bit silly? Meanwhile, other behaviorists complained
that keeping raccoon colonies was really just a huge pain
in the neck, And so we got the century of
the rat, and to a lesser degree, the pigeon.
Speaker 5 (14:28):
This behaviorism is that theory of control. They are animals
that you could control.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Behaviorists thought they were studying an animal that stood in
for all human beings, but actually they wound up studying
a lot of lab rats, and that led us to
some pretty flawed conclusions about people. We'll be right back
(14:56):
for a little while now. I've been interested in how
the lab rat has shaped our understanding of human beings.
Rats are all over the history of psychology. Rat studies
of depression, rat studies of cooperation, rat studies of rationality.
Think about the way we speak rat in a maze,
the rat race, malrat, jim rat, smell a rat, or
rat's nest. It's all rats all the way down. I
(15:18):
figured if anyone could tell me about how exactly this
all came to be, it would be one of the
leading rat behavioral researchers in the country, Doctor Kelly Lambert
at the University of Richmond.
Speaker 7 (15:30):
For most of psychology, it's just they were the only
show in town if you wanted to do research with
an animal model. When I was in graduate school at
the University of Georgia, this is what we had. That
was the only animal model you had.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Lambert loves rats. She's written a book called The lab
Rat Chronicles. A neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet's
most successful mammals. She's particularly famous for experiments where she
taught rats to drive cars, which, if we're being honest,
is really why I've got to Richmond.
Speaker 7 (16:01):
So the idea was to train them get in the car,
you get a fruitly sit here and get a fruely
But early on it was amazing that they seemed to
learn the constant a drop. So once we shaped them
and they learned to press the right lever to go right,
they seem to automatically know to press the left one
to go left.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
If you've seen Stuart Little in his red convertible, you're
not even half prepared for the image of a lab
rat hunched over the dashboard on what appears to be
a monster truck, just careening towards a bunch of fruit loops.
Lambert loves working with her rats, but lately she's also
been questioning how the rat became the be all end
(16:40):
all for understanding human beings.
Speaker 7 (16:43):
I don't think they made a decision about which model
organism should we use. The rat was already on board
for biomedical research, so it's practical to use the rat.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Basically, it's the lab rat industry. There was a whole
factory line system around producing labrats via mass inbreeding, premised
on the fantasy that the inbred rats were basically interchangeable
with one another.
Speaker 7 (17:06):
They bred brothers and sisters for twenty generations. The intention
was the animals be as close to clones as possible,
and then whatever your manipulation was, diet, stress, movement, or whatever,
they felt confident that they saw a difference between the
experimental group that got it and the control group that didn't,
(17:27):
that that variable was the influential variable.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
This was all taking off around the time Lawrence Cole's
work with raccoons was being cast aside. That kind of
inbreeding helped create rats who were much more docile and
easier to control than wild rats and certainly than raccoons,
which meant it gave the behaviorists easier, more reliable data.
And then it just took off. Soon a prominent psychologist
(17:55):
described the field as being infected by a plague of rats.
Millions of dollars poured into rat studies. The leader of
the Yale Institute of Human Relations announced that anything he
observed about rats behaviors among other animals was quote identical
with those operative in man, even in his highest behavioral
achievements end quote. Let me play you a bit of
(18:17):
film that Yelle Institute produced. I think it goes a
long way to showing exactly how confident these people were
in what studying rats could tell us about people.
Speaker 8 (18:26):
Again, a mild electric shock can be administered through the
grid on the floor of the apparatus.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
This film has always freaked me out. There's a rat
in a cage with an electric current running through the bars.
He's got to figure out how to turn it off.
Speaker 8 (18:40):
This time, it can only be turned off by rotating
a wheel. The satiated animals starts responding as soon as
a drive is supplied.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
The whole time that tone is sounding, the rat is
just frantically scrambling around his cage trying to figure out
how to make it stop. Then he starts pawing at
a wheel and it turns off.
Speaker 8 (18:58):
The drive produced by electric shock is stronger than hunger.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
It turns out zapping a rat is a good way
to get it to do anything, including violence.
Speaker 8 (19:08):
Responding to another animal by striking him can also deal
learn All he needs is a little motivation.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
If you could teach a rat to do anything, why
not a person. Suddenly the scary world of the twentieth
century began to seem a lot more manageable. Mass movements,
great depressions, whatever. Just find the right set of incentives
or punishments, and all of human behavior it could be
predicted and controlled.
Speaker 7 (19:35):
When we started comparing that behavior to humans at a
slot machine or something. People I think started seeing humans
as big rats or rats as little humans. Always say
that we're not. We've got what, six thousand mammalian species,
and we're going to pick one or two.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Few people question the dominance of the rat at first,
Why bother when it was working so well? This kind
of thing has always bothered me on a gut level.
I look in the mirror every day and I do
not see a rat staring back at me, at least
nonsense patching the hole in my bathroom wall. We aren't rats.
I'm not saying we can't learn anything about ourselves from animals,
(20:17):
but I am saying that you should never underestimate how
many of the things we think we know about human
beings are actually things we know about inbred rats with
brains the size of grapes kept in cages that sometimes
electrocute you.
Speaker 7 (20:31):
And it's hard for me to think back about why
didn't I question that, or did I ask if there
are other models? And it's just come lately that I've
had so many of these. Kelly, What the heck were
you thinking? All these years?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
We built a science of human nature, and one of
the strongest pillars was the lab rat. And who is
the labrat? He's crucially not the raccoon. The raccoon lets
it all hang out. He's defiant, mischievous, crafty. If asked
to participate in a scientific experiment, he will inquire about
payment than call in sick. Not the rat. The rat
(21:05):
is hard working by instinct, diligent. He gnaws away, he
navigated it's complex warrants. He gets a perfect score on
his SATs. He's rational. Build the maze and he'll fall
in line. He is, in short, a good animal for
running the same test again and again and again without complaint,
while delivering consistent, reliable data, suggesting that we humans behave
(21:28):
in consistent, reliable ways. For all this, the rat has
been rewarded by becoming the only animal synonymous with the
scientific laboratory. It's not lab pigeon, it's not lab monkey.
It's lab rat. But I was beginning to wonder what
if it should have been lab raccoon. We'll be right back.
(21:55):
Some years ago, when Michael Pettitt was working on his
ingenious article about raccoon erasure, he took a colleague out
to lunch. Suzann MacDonald, behaviorist and expert in animal cognition.
He told her what he'd been learning about Lawrence Cole
in the early raccoon studies. She, a fellow Torontonian, be
set by the plague of raccoons, was like, oh my god,
(22:18):
how did we miss this?
Speaker 4 (22:20):
I originally had thought and I told Mike this because
I thought it was a brilliant insight. Oh, they're they're
the monkeys of North America.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
By monkeys of North America, you mean they feel a
certain ecological niche.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
Yeah, because we don't have monkeys, right, so it's just like, oh, well,
you know, maybe they're just like that. They're not primates,
but maybe they have evolved to cognitively to be like primates.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Traveling to study monkeys was expensive. If raccoons were like monkeys,
then living in Toronto was like living on safari. So
McDonald caught the Lawrence colebug. She began to study raccoons
and she's been doing it ever since.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Because we don't know very much, just trying to fill
gaps and trying to see what I find out about them,
and they are annoying little critters, so it's been challenging
and I wouldn't recommend it to most people.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
McDonald has become one of the world's leading experts in raccoons,
and in particular the urban raccoons of Toronto, with whom
I think she feels a strong kinship. For instance, I've
seen people saying that there are one hundred thousand raccoons
in Toronto. Where did they get that number? MacDonald told
me that she was the origin of that statistic, and
she just made a number up, which is exactly what
(23:30):
a raccoon would do. She gets it. So, after a
century of waiting, I prepared to receive the good news
about the raccoons true intelligence from the source. I leaned
back in my desk.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
Chair and I can tell you of having studied cognition
and baby raccoons, they are dumber and sticks. They are
so dumb, just terrible. Every one of our little markers
that we use for animals cognission or intelligence or you know,
developmental milestones, and they just fail every single one.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
How intriguing I thought, maybe the raccoons superintelligence develops at
a later age.
Speaker 4 (24:08):
No, an adult not either.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
This is not going well.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
So honestly, that is what I'm disappointed me so much
because I always thought, you know, the raccoons are the
monkeys of North America, but they are not.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
I was at this point trying not to look hugely depressed, right,
McDonald just kept going.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
So what they have done is a evolt to sort
of search and destroy, and that seems to be their
strategy plus pequal search and destroy. And they find a
thing and they break it, right, But there are other
situations where you present them with a thing and you
can see them looking at it and figuring it out. Yeah,
raccoons don't do that. They're just like, what can I
(24:49):
do to knock this over? What can I do to
break this open? What can I do to get whatever
it is I need to get? And they just leave
destruction in their way. So they are not sitting and
thinking about things. They are all action. Very little thought.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Here. I should just say that there's a lot we
still don't know about raccoons, and indeed McDonald still gets
a lot out of studying them too, especially the particularities
of urban raccoons. But still, I had wondered about this
question for years. Hearing that raccoons were morons actually was
kind of a bummer in my book. But you know
(25:32):
who was thrilled when I told him about it.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
That's precisely why there's such a better model for human beings.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Again, local man Malcolm Ladwell.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
They are clever, mischievous, vengeful, destructive, and profoundly stupid. That
is humanity. We observe the raccoon and we think there
is a kind of deep intelligence there that's fueling his behavior,
and there isn't. The raccoon just wants to mess things up, right,
(26:02):
He just and he's maniacal about it. He just wants
to destroy and he has a kind of surface cleverness
that serves those destructive impulses. So when I look at
the raccoon, I mean, do I need to say it?
It's Donald Trump?
Speaker 5 (26:19):
He's a raccoon.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
Hey.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
The problem with our the way we think about Trump
is at various points. You know, is Donald Trump a rat? No,
he's not a rat.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Nixon's a rat.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Nixon Nixon's a rat.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
So is he a fox?
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Sometimes people say, oh, crazy like a fox, crazy like
a fox. No, because the fox is actually a deeply
intelligent animal right well.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
And crucially wary. The fox is wary. The raccoon is
not wary.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Yes, exactly, the fox would stops to think and pause
and blake a strategy, and you know, takes his time.
A raccoon would have fallen into the Russian orbit without
realizing it. Raccoon, you know, like a raccoon would choose
his running mates with carelessness and abandoned. I mean, it's
just like, it's all, it's all raccoon. It feels like
(27:07):
to call Trump a rat is to miss is to
completely misunderstand who he is. It's just a raccoon. He's
going to scrape outside your window all night and like
create a racket and just know everyone else will be
sleep with some groggy and he will be happy in
the morning.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
There's also, I think crucially, if we're going back to
this kind of did we pick the wrong model organism?
What do we conclude about human beings if we think
they are like rats. Rats are very hard working. You
give them a task and they will do it ad nauseum.
Just they're happy to just keep getting the job done.
They are they live in little warrens. You put a
(27:44):
rat in amaze and knows exactly what to do, and
it's kind of like fine being an amaze. Problem solvers,
they're problem solvers. They're sort of cautious about new things.
You talk to any exterminator, it's like very hard to
get a rat to eat poison, Like, they are very
careful about what they eat, what risks they take. Raccoons
(28:04):
are extremely disinhibited. They aren't where at all. A raccoon
can live to like twenty in a lab. In the wild,
they tend to live two to three years because they're
just sort of like, what's that do? And then they
just like like could jam their fingers in a socket.
It's like and that's the end of the raccoon. We
(28:26):
built the world for rats, but we are functionally raccoons,
and so we are dissatisfied with the rat world. But
it is the fact that we have the rat world
that has kept us from blowing it all up in
our face so far.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
No, yes, you can't.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
What you never plan for in a world built on
rats on the rat model is that someone, instead of
trying to navigate the maze, just wants to burn it down. Yeah,
that's the one thing. The ret is never going to
do that, and the rat's never going to effectively commit
a kind of institutional suicide. The raccoon just wants to
(29:02):
destroy things.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
I did a complete one eighty on this story. I
started thinking that the rat model was a just grace
because I had rats all wrong. I see now it
was kind of utopian. Every need could be anticipated, every
behavior nudged, every outcome predicted, and every person satisfied. But
there is no one animal model for human behavior. Rats
(29:28):
its own thing, elab rats its own thing. Raccoons are
really their own thing, And we're not one or the other.
We're all the above and something else. But these days
it seems clear we definitely did ourselves a disservice when
we forgot about the raccoon. Sadly, I never got to
(29:52):
come face to face with a raccoon in reporting this story,
but I did get to meet a labrat.
Speaker 6 (30:00):
Rooms.
Speaker 7 (30:02):
I love designing tests for rats.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Kelly Lambert now studies all kinds of animals in all
kinds of places. She's particularly interest sid in wild animals
these days, but Lambert still has a soft spot for
the lamb rat. When I visited her at the University
of Richmond, she took me back into a locked set
of rooms. There were signs up that said quiet behavioral
testing in progress, and behind one of the doors a
(30:27):
cage with two rats she's been teaching to drive.
Speaker 7 (30:31):
They're generally, you know, like kittens. A wild rat I
have to suit up. It would bite my nose off.
So they've been bread to be able to handle them easily.
So if I'm looking at aggression or stress, this may
not be the best model to use.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I leaned closer to the rat. Lambert seemed to think
he was showing an unusual interest in my microphone.
Speaker 7 (30:57):
You're more interested in the novel than the.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Food, more curious about the microphone.
Speaker 7 (31:01):
I wonder what it is about that.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Actually, the rat was really grabbing at the mic, pulling
it closer to its snout.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
Podcast rat, this is your first rat podcaster.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
It was really weird. He wasn't climbing on the mic.
He was just yanking hit right up to his face.
Not something you would have predicted if you know about
rats and how wary they are. A mystery. I felt
like maybe that rat was trying to tell me something.
Rats communicate via ultrasonic frequencies. So a few days later,
when I got home, I processed the audio, pitch shifted
(31:36):
it down, and hit play.
Speaker 4 (31:39):
Have you ever seen a raccoon drive a car?
Speaker 6 (31:41):
Long Live the.
Speaker 5 (31:41):
Lab Rat.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Sorry, buddy, I know you're right, but it's the raccoon's
time now. Revisionous History is produced by me Ben Mattahaffrey,
Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen
Schakerji fact checking by Aica Robbins. Original scoring by Luis Kara,
(32:09):
mixing and stirring on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our
executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Lizette Barton
at the Doctors, Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the
History of Psychology, and to Sarah Nix and Gretacone. I'm
Ben mad of Haffrey
Pushkin, Hey, last Archive listeners. Today on the show, we're
sharing an episode I did for Revisionist History about why
we wound up studying the lab rat instead of the raccoon.
It involves a frontier psychologist in Oklahoma at the turn
of the century and one of my favorite academic articles
of all time. I'm excited to share with you now.
(00:37):
You can find more episodes of Revisionist History wherever you
get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy this one. How
did you get into writing about raccoons?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I got into writing about raccoons because they started breaking
into my supposedly raccoon proof green band named Toronto.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
I'm talking with intrepid investigative reporter for the Toronto Star,
Amy Dempsey Raven. Typically she covers police wrongdoing, child welfare,
controversial homicides, But in twenty sixteen, when Toronto declared a
war on raccoons and unveiled a new raccoon resistant composting ben,
she realized it's time to get serious.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Mayor came out on this garbage truck and made all
of these promises, and I wondered, I thought to myself,
I'm going to keep an eye on things here.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
This raccoon resistant ben cost the city thirty one million
Canadian dollars. But Toronto is known as the raccoon Capital
of the world. Theoretically it's a point of pride, but
it's a little more complicated than that. If a race
of Martians took over your city, would you call it
the Martian Capital of the world, only if you'd already
admitted defeat.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
My first job after graduating was in Toronto and I
had a group.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
House, local man Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
I did not grow up in raccoon country, so I
had no idea something was making a racket so loud
and all night. Like what I say, all night, I
mean without without stopping. From the moment I went to
by to the morning, woke up, I couldn't sleep, and
I went my friends. A couple of friends were from Toronto,
and I was like, what is going on?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Like, oh, it's raccoons.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Like for them, it was like, oh yeah, it's just
like that's the deal here.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
That was about forty years ago. Things have gotten much
much worse.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
It doesn't get any more Toronto than this.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
A raccoon inside a supermarket.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Here, raccoons in the garbage raccoons on the train. Oh,
oh my god, raccoons on the back deck.
Speaker 5 (02:41):
Time to go down, buddy, Time to go down. You
can't stay on this deck anymore. But you're a viction day.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Raccoons have taken over the attics in a whole street
of houses and refused to leave. They brought traffic to
a screeching halt on Toronto's highways and just stood there.
They figured out how to open doors to houses and refrigerators,
and stood on top of countertops leftovers in their paws,
staring at freaked out homeowners as if to say, if
I wanted you here, I would have run the bell.
(03:11):
Hence the pricey raccoon resistant bins, which surely no raccoon
would be able to open.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Soon after the rollout, we began hearing reports that raccoons
were outsmarting the bins, and the city said, now, that's
not really happening. But then one night they broke into mine.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Amy found herself wondering, how are raccoons smart enough to
open that bin? This was the question a historian of
science had found himself wondering one night when he looked
at his back deck in Toronto and saw composts all
over the place. He had an earlier version of the
compost bin. But here too, the raccoons had picked the lock.
Were they really just that smart? It turned out nobody
(03:53):
really knew. Raccoons had hardly been studied, basically not at
all compared to other animals, like say, rats or monkeys.
This historian wanted to know why the midnight raid on
his compost bin would set in motion a sequel of
events that, in my own estimation, have come to topple
an entire century of psychological theory and restored the raccoon
(04:17):
to its proper place, the dead center of how we
understand human beings.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my show
about things overlooked, misunderstood and in praise of Toronto. You
may be familiar with the phrase lab rat. Perhaps you
are aware that many of the things we know about
human beings and the way we behave are based upon
the things we know about rats and the way they behave.
(04:46):
But in this episode, my colleague Bend daph Haffrey asks,
what if we picked the wrong animal?
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Many historians of science will write about the greats Einstein
Freud Oppenheimer. The kind of research project not usually begun
while scooping up trash in your bathrobe on your back
deck in Toronto. But Michael Pettitt's always gotten into things sideways.
Speaker 5 (05:13):
I have almost never written about kind of the dominant
people in the field. I personally find myself attracted to
the misfits.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Pettitt is a historian of psychology at York University in Toronto.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
I looked one morning, and of course the compost is
all over the deck. I scooping it up because the
raccoons could very easily get into the walk. And as
a start of psychology, I asked myself, huh, I wonder
if anyone ever used a puzzle box with raccoons. They
seem really good at it.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Petitt knew all about scientists putting rats and mazes and
puzzly cages, the mainstream stuff who cares, But in all
his studies he had never heard of a raccoon in
a puzzle box. And yet here on his deck was
evidence that they were basically able to outsmart any human system.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
These raccoons seemed very adept at doing walks, and so
I was just curious.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Michael was curious for good reason, not just because of
the Locke situation. We've basically never known quite what to
make of raccoons.
Speaker 5 (06:15):
You know, they aren't fightings, but they're also not rodents,
so there's like there's something about them that they sort
of take on this role as kind of intermediary species.
There's this reputation of the raccoon for being this cunning,
intelligent sickster.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
For a while, there wasn't even consensus on how exactly
they evolved. The famous naturalist Carl Linnaeus called them ursus
loader or washer bear, because they like to rinse their
food and water, and he thought they descended from bears. Now,
for any true raccoon fans out there, I should note that, yes,
they aren't actually washing their food. They basically see you
with their paws, and their paws are more sensitive in
(06:56):
the water. This, by the way, is the instinct behind
that amazing Japanese TV show where they gave a raccoon
cotton candy, which the raccoon dutifully washed until they've vanished.
But no, they're not washing and they're not bears. When
Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World, he
remarked upon its quote clown like dogs, to which the
people of Italy said, Chris, what the hell are you
(07:17):
talking about? Until centuries later another naturalist realized, Oh, he's
talking about raccoons. They're their own thing.
Speaker 5 (07:28):
They in some ways seem to be above the rodents
and maybe even our carnivores.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Pettitt went looking for a history of raccoons science, specifically
about people investigating their intelligence, and found basically nothing a
handful of scientists in one slim volume in particular from
nineteen oh seven, titled Concerning the Intelligence of Raccoons, It
was written by a man named Lawrence Cole, Frontier raccoonist.
Speaker 5 (07:59):
So Lawrence Cole, in a lot of ways is a nobody.
You know, He's not someone if you go to an
history of psychology textbook and pull it off the shelf,
he's not someone that's particularly remarkable.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Lawrence Cole had done his graduate work at Harvard and
was part of a psychological movement that studied animals to
understand humans. In the nineteenth century, psychology had largely been
based on what people said about how they felt, which
was not super reliable. So why not instead observe how
animals behave and just extrapolate up the chain from there.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Darwin absolutely says it's not just our kind of our
physical form as human beings that is continuous with natural selection,
but also our psychological selves.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
But which animal was best for the psychologists to study?
Any of them theoretically could work. Scientists were comparing species
across tests to see how they'd fare. People had studied chickens, dogs.
Coal's advisor like the idea of studying monkeys, but monkeys
are super expensive. It would be helpful, though, if there
were a kind of consensus a linguis franca animal that
(09:05):
people could generalize from.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
Through a series of circumstances, he acquires a small qualony
of raccoons.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Cole still had to find an experiment of his own
to get his PhD. These raccoons seemed promising.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
As far as Pool knew, no one had kind of
put raccoons to these motions. So that's adoptible dissertation. I
can run these studies with these raccoons, right, whatever the
data is, I can say I have added to our
knowledge of comparative psychology.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
He probably had a hunch that this was going to
be interesting.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
I don't know if raccoons were the most charismatic of
our fauna. But raccoons they're kind of fun.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Come on, I think they're the most charismatic of our fauna.
Speaker 5 (09:50):
Well, they're annoying, but they're like they're lumable scamps. Right.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Cole began running tests on the raccoons. He put them
in boxes with complicated locks every day for a whole
academic year, and he found they were incredible. Any box,
it seemed any puzzle the raccoon could solve it. And
what's more, the animal it wasn't just going through the motions.
The raccoon seemed curious about what he was doing, and
(10:16):
Cole thought there was evidence that raccoons could hold images
in their mind. Nobody was making these kinds of claims
about other animals. So Cole started publishing his research, writing
the Leading Figures in Psychology, saying, Hey, these raccoons are
really unusually intelligent, maybe as intelligent as monkeys, which seems
(10:36):
to me like it should make them a great model
organism for people. Except there was a movement that was
growing swiftly within Cole's field right around them, which was
explicitly uncomfortable with any talk of an animal having a
mind and it was fast becoming the only show in town.
It was called behaviorism. All this history is documented in
(11:00):
an amazing article by Michael Pettitt titled The Problem of
Raccoon Intelligence in Behaviorist America, which is one of my
favorite academic essays of time, because the raccoon was indeed
a problem.
Speaker 6 (11:14):
So it was no surprise to us that a lot
of psychologists steered clear of coons.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Bob Bailey, he used to be the top guy at
a legendary behaviorist organization called Animal Behavior Enterprises. The founders
of that company wrote an infamous paper questioning the fundamentals
of behaviorism, the idea that all animals were blank slates
you could write whatever you wanted on. A key example
one raccoon they trained to put coins in a box.
Speaker 6 (11:43):
After a one hundred or so responses, the raccoon would start.
Instead of just picking up one coin and taking it
to the box and putting it in the box, the
raccoon would pick up two coins and then rub them
together and would start walking towards the box, and then
(12:07):
it would stop and rub the coins together, and then
it would go to the box and then start to
put the coins in, and then stop and rub the
coins together, and then start to put the coins back
in the box, and the stop and rub the coins together.
(12:27):
Eventually it would put the coins in the box most
of the time.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Eventually in most of the time were bad news for
people trying to turn psychology into a reputable hard science.
That raccoon box situation came later on, but this exact
dynamic put a bit of a target on Lawrence Cole,
the frontier raccoonist. And if you know anything about the
history of psychology, you'll know how the problem of the
(12:54):
raccoon was solved raccoon erasure. The raccoon does not figure
prominently at all, but you know which animal does, the rat.
I'm curious about how you account for that historical process
of raccoon erasure that be around them.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
One of the problems with raccoons is they are a
much larger and more cumbersome species than your bread lab racks. Right,
In terms of feeding, caging, maintenance, rats proved much more
docile and at debt. And again, if you want to
(13:32):
have decent numbers for your study, right, they also reproduce
quite readily. They have very short greeding cycles, and you
can kind of build up the populations.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
But it wasn't just about convenience. It was also difficult
to generalize from raccoon experiments. Rats, for example, behaved in predictable,
repeatable ways, raccoons not so much. How is a scientist
supposed to work with an animal who each spring gets
wanderlust and attempts to break out of their cage? What
do you do when your experimental raccoon colony does escape
(14:06):
and moves into your labs of ventilation system? Behaviorism gains steam.
Scientists and the big cities attacked the nascent science of raccoons.
Wasn't this all a bit silly? Meanwhile, other behaviorists complained
that keeping raccoon colonies was really just a huge pain
in the neck, And so we got the century of
the rat, and to a lesser degree, the pigeon.
Speaker 5 (14:28):
This behaviorism is that theory of control. They are animals
that you could control.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Behaviorists thought they were studying an animal that stood in
for all human beings, but actually they wound up studying
a lot of lab rats, and that led us to
some pretty flawed conclusions about people. We'll be right back
(14:56):
for a little while now. I've been interested in how
the lab rat has shaped our understanding of human beings.
Rats are all over the history of psychology. Rat studies
of depression, rat studies of cooperation, rat studies of rationality.
Think about the way we speak rat in a maze,
the rat race, malrat, jim rat, smell a rat, or
rat's nest. It's all rats all the way down. I
(15:18):
figured if anyone could tell me about how exactly this
all came to be, it would be one of the
leading rat behavioral researchers in the country, Doctor Kelly Lambert
at the University of Richmond.
Speaker 7 (15:30):
For most of psychology, it's just they were the only
show in town if you wanted to do research with
an animal model. When I was in graduate school at
the University of Georgia, this is what we had. That
was the only animal model you had.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Lambert loves rats. She's written a book called The lab
Rat Chronicles. A neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet's
most successful mammals. She's particularly famous for experiments where she
taught rats to drive cars, which, if we're being honest,
is really why I've got to Richmond.
Speaker 7 (16:01):
So the idea was to train them get in the car,
you get a fruitly sit here and get a fruely
But early on it was amazing that they seemed to
learn the constant a drop. So once we shaped them
and they learned to press the right lever to go right,
they seem to automatically know to press the left one
to go left.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
If you've seen Stuart Little in his red convertible, you're
not even half prepared for the image of a lab
rat hunched over the dashboard on what appears to be
a monster truck, just careening towards a bunch of fruit loops.
Lambert loves working with her rats, but lately she's also
been questioning how the rat became the be all end
(16:40):
all for understanding human beings.
Speaker 7 (16:43):
I don't think they made a decision about which model
organism should we use. The rat was already on board
for biomedical research, so it's practical to use the rat.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Basically, it's the lab rat industry. There was a whole
factory line system around producing labrats via mass inbreeding, premised
on the fantasy that the inbred rats were basically interchangeable
with one another.
Speaker 7 (17:06):
They bred brothers and sisters for twenty generations. The intention
was the animals be as close to clones as possible,
and then whatever your manipulation was, diet, stress, movement, or whatever,
they felt confident that they saw a difference between the
experimental group that got it and the control group that didn't,
(17:27):
that that variable was the influential variable.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
This was all taking off around the time Lawrence Cole's
work with raccoons was being cast aside. That kind of
inbreeding helped create rats who were much more docile and
easier to control than wild rats and certainly than raccoons,
which meant it gave the behaviorists easier, more reliable data.
And then it just took off. Soon a prominent psychologist
(17:55):
described the field as being infected by a plague of rats.
Millions of dollars poured into rat studies. The leader of
the Yale Institute of Human Relations announced that anything he
observed about rats behaviors among other animals was quote identical
with those operative in man, even in his highest behavioral
achievements end quote. Let me play you a bit of
(18:17):
film that Yelle Institute produced. I think it goes a
long way to showing exactly how confident these people were
in what studying rats could tell us about people.
Speaker 8 (18:26):
Again, a mild electric shock can be administered through the
grid on the floor of the apparatus.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
This film has always freaked me out. There's a rat
in a cage with an electric current running through the bars.
He's got to figure out how to turn it off.
Speaker 8 (18:40):
This time, it can only be turned off by rotating
a wheel. The satiated animals starts responding as soon as
a drive is supplied.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
The whole time that tone is sounding, the rat is
just frantically scrambling around his cage trying to figure out
how to make it stop. Then he starts pawing at
a wheel and it turns off.
Speaker 8 (18:58):
The drive produced by electric shock is stronger than hunger.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
It turns out zapping a rat is a good way
to get it to do anything, including violence.
Speaker 8 (19:08):
Responding to another animal by striking him can also deal
learn All he needs is a little motivation.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
If you could teach a rat to do anything, why
not a person. Suddenly the scary world of the twentieth
century began to seem a lot more manageable. Mass movements,
great depressions, whatever. Just find the right set of incentives
or punishments, and all of human behavior it could be
predicted and controlled.
Speaker 7 (19:35):
When we started comparing that behavior to humans at a
slot machine or something. People I think started seeing humans
as big rats or rats as little humans. Always say
that we're not. We've got what, six thousand mammalian species,
and we're going to pick one or two.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Few people question the dominance of the rat at first,
Why bother when it was working so well? This kind
of thing has always bothered me on a gut level.
I look in the mirror every day and I do
not see a rat staring back at me, at least
nonsense patching the hole in my bathroom wall. We aren't rats.
I'm not saying we can't learn anything about ourselves from animals,
(20:17):
but I am saying that you should never underestimate how
many of the things we think we know about human
beings are actually things we know about inbred rats with
brains the size of grapes kept in cages that sometimes
electrocute you.
Speaker 7 (20:31):
And it's hard for me to think back about why
didn't I question that, or did I ask if there
are other models? And it's just come lately that I've
had so many of these. Kelly, What the heck were
you thinking? All these years?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
We built a science of human nature, and one of
the strongest pillars was the lab rat. And who is
the labrat? He's crucially not the raccoon. The raccoon lets
it all hang out. He's defiant, mischievous, crafty. If asked
to participate in a scientific experiment, he will inquire about
payment than call in sick. Not the rat. The rat
(21:05):
is hard working by instinct, diligent. He gnaws away, he
navigated it's complex warrants. He gets a perfect score on
his SATs. He's rational. Build the maze and he'll fall
in line. He is, in short, a good animal for
running the same test again and again and again without complaint,
while delivering consistent, reliable data, suggesting that we humans behave
(21:28):
in consistent, reliable ways. For all this, the rat has
been rewarded by becoming the only animal synonymous with the
scientific laboratory. It's not lab pigeon, it's not lab monkey.
It's lab rat. But I was beginning to wonder what
if it should have been lab raccoon. We'll be right back.
(21:55):
Some years ago, when Michael Pettitt was working on his
ingenious article about raccoon erasure, he took a colleague out
to lunch. Suzann MacDonald, behaviorist and expert in animal cognition.
He told her what he'd been learning about Lawrence Cole
in the early raccoon studies. She, a fellow Torontonian, be
set by the plague of raccoons, was like, oh my god,
(22:18):
how did we miss this?
Speaker 4 (22:20):
I originally had thought and I told Mike this because
I thought it was a brilliant insight. Oh, they're they're
the monkeys of North America.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
By monkeys of North America, you mean they feel a
certain ecological niche.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
Yeah, because we don't have monkeys, right, so it's just like, oh, well,
you know, maybe they're just like that. They're not primates,
but maybe they have evolved to cognitively to be like primates.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Traveling to study monkeys was expensive. If raccoons were like monkeys,
then living in Toronto was like living on safari. So
McDonald caught the Lawrence colebug. She began to study raccoons
and she's been doing it ever since.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Because we don't know very much, just trying to fill
gaps and trying to see what I find out about them,
and they are annoying little critters, so it's been challenging
and I wouldn't recommend it to most people.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
McDonald has become one of the world's leading experts in raccoons,
and in particular the urban raccoons of Toronto, with whom
I think she feels a strong kinship. For instance, I've
seen people saying that there are one hundred thousand raccoons
in Toronto. Where did they get that number? MacDonald told
me that she was the origin of that statistic, and
she just made a number up, which is exactly what
(23:30):
a raccoon would do. She gets it. So, after a
century of waiting, I prepared to receive the good news
about the raccoons true intelligence from the source. I leaned
back in my desk.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
Chair and I can tell you of having studied cognition
and baby raccoons, they are dumber and sticks. They are
so dumb, just terrible. Every one of our little markers
that we use for animals cognission or intelligence or you know,
developmental milestones, and they just fail every single one.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
How intriguing I thought, maybe the raccoons superintelligence develops at
a later age.
Speaker 4 (24:08):
No, an adult not either.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
This is not going well.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
So honestly, that is what I'm disappointed me so much
because I always thought, you know, the raccoons are the
monkeys of North America, but they are not.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
I was at this point trying not to look hugely depressed, right,
McDonald just kept going.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
So what they have done is a evolt to sort
of search and destroy, and that seems to be their
strategy plus pequal search and destroy. And they find a
thing and they break it, right, But there are other
situations where you present them with a thing and you
can see them looking at it and figuring it out. Yeah,
raccoons don't do that. They're just like, what can I
(24:49):
do to knock this over? What can I do to
break this open? What can I do to get whatever
it is I need to get? And they just leave
destruction in their way. So they are not sitting and
thinking about things. They are all action. Very little thought.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Here. I should just say that there's a lot we
still don't know about raccoons, and indeed McDonald still gets
a lot out of studying them too, especially the particularities
of urban raccoons. But still, I had wondered about this
question for years. Hearing that raccoons were morons actually was
kind of a bummer in my book. But you know
(25:32):
who was thrilled when I told him about it.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
That's precisely why there's such a better model for human beings.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Again, local man Malcolm Ladwell.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
They are clever, mischievous, vengeful, destructive, and profoundly stupid. That
is humanity. We observe the raccoon and we think there
is a kind of deep intelligence there that's fueling his behavior,
and there isn't. The raccoon just wants to mess things up, right,
(26:02):
He just and he's maniacal about it. He just wants
to destroy and he has a kind of surface cleverness
that serves those destructive impulses. So when I look at
the raccoon, I mean, do I need to say it?
It's Donald Trump?
Speaker 5 (26:19):
He's a raccoon.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
Hey.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
The problem with our the way we think about Trump
is at various points. You know, is Donald Trump a rat? No,
he's not a rat.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Nixon's a rat.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Nixon Nixon's a rat.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
So is he a fox?
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Sometimes people say, oh, crazy like a fox, crazy like
a fox. No, because the fox is actually a deeply
intelligent animal right well.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
And crucially wary. The fox is wary. The raccoon is
not wary.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Yes, exactly, the fox would stops to think and pause
and blake a strategy, and you know, takes his time.
A raccoon would have fallen into the Russian orbit without
realizing it. Raccoon, you know, like a raccoon would choose
his running mates with carelessness and abandoned. I mean, it's
just like, it's all, it's all raccoon. It feels like
(27:07):
to call Trump a rat is to miss is to
completely misunderstand who he is. It's just a raccoon. He's
going to scrape outside your window all night and like
create a racket and just know everyone else will be
sleep with some groggy and he will be happy in
the morning.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
There's also, I think crucially, if we're going back to
this kind of did we pick the wrong model organism?
What do we conclude about human beings if we think
they are like rats. Rats are very hard working. You
give them a task and they will do it ad nauseum.
Just they're happy to just keep getting the job done.
They are they live in little warrens. You put a
(27:44):
rat in amaze and knows exactly what to do, and
it's kind of like fine being an amaze. Problem solvers,
they're problem solvers. They're sort of cautious about new things.
You talk to any exterminator, it's like very hard to
get a rat to eat poison, Like, they are very
careful about what they eat, what risks they take. Raccoons
(28:04):
are extremely disinhibited. They aren't where at all. A raccoon
can live to like twenty in a lab. In the wild,
they tend to live two to three years because they're
just sort of like, what's that do? And then they
just like like could jam their fingers in a socket.
It's like and that's the end of the raccoon. We
(28:26):
built the world for rats, but we are functionally raccoons,
and so we are dissatisfied with the rat world. But
it is the fact that we have the rat world
that has kept us from blowing it all up in
our face so far.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
No, yes, you can't.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
What you never plan for in a world built on
rats on the rat model is that someone, instead of
trying to navigate the maze, just wants to burn it down. Yeah,
that's the one thing. The ret is never going to
do that, and the rat's never going to effectively commit
a kind of institutional suicide. The raccoon just wants to
(29:02):
destroy things.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
I did a complete one eighty on this story. I
started thinking that the rat model was a just grace
because I had rats all wrong. I see now it
was kind of utopian. Every need could be anticipated, every
behavior nudged, every outcome predicted, and every person satisfied. But
there is no one animal model for human behavior. Rats
(29:28):
its own thing, elab rats its own thing. Raccoons are
really their own thing, And we're not one or the other.
We're all the above and something else. But these days
it seems clear we definitely did ourselves a disservice when
we forgot about the raccoon. Sadly, I never got to
(29:52):
come face to face with a raccoon in reporting this story,
but I did get to meet a labrat.
Speaker 6 (30:00):
Rooms.
Speaker 7 (30:02):
I love designing tests for rats.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Kelly Lambert now studies all kinds of animals in all
kinds of places. She's particularly interest sid in wild animals
these days, but Lambert still has a soft spot for
the lamb rat. When I visited her at the University
of Richmond, she took me back into a locked set
of rooms. There were signs up that said quiet behavioral
testing in progress, and behind one of the doors a
(30:27):
cage with two rats she's been teaching to drive.
Speaker 7 (30:31):
They're generally, you know, like kittens. A wild rat I
have to suit up. It would bite my nose off.
So they've been bread to be able to handle them easily.
So if I'm looking at aggression or stress, this may
not be the best model to use.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I leaned closer to the rat. Lambert seemed to think
he was showing an unusual interest in my microphone.
Speaker 7 (30:57):
You're more interested in the novel than the.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Food, more curious about the microphone.
Speaker 7 (31:01):
I wonder what it is about that.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Actually, the rat was really grabbing at the mic, pulling
it closer to its snout.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
Podcast rat, this is your first rat podcaster.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
It was really weird. He wasn't climbing on the mic.
He was just yanking hit right up to his face.
Not something you would have predicted if you know about
rats and how wary they are. A mystery. I felt
like maybe that rat was trying to tell me something.
Rats communicate via ultrasonic frequencies. So a few days later,
when I got home, I processed the audio, pitch shifted
(31:36):
it down, and hit play.
Speaker 4 (31:39):
Have you ever seen a raccoon drive a car?
Speaker 6 (31:41):
Long Live the.
Speaker 5 (31:41):
Lab Rat.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Sorry, buddy, I know you're right, but it's the raccoon's
time now. Revisionous History is produced by me Ben Mattahaffrey,
Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen
Schakerji fact checking by Aica Robbins. Original scoring by Luis Kara,
(32:09):
mixing and stirring on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our
executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Lizette Barton
at the Doctors, Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the
History of Psychology, and to Sarah Nix and Gretacone. I'm
Ben mad of Haffrey
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