The social rodents experiments | From utopia to hell

natural.cure (39)in #sociology • 7 years ago (edited)

A lot of people are trying to escape the big cities and the life associated with it. More and more individuals feel the need to get away from the crowds and live closer by nature in a community atmosphere.

This is not a weird phenomenon as the crowd is directly associated with the problems of population growth. Issues like mass panic, spreading of desease, political radicalism, aggresion and unruly social behaviour often occur when the population is growing and the density is high.

But we are not the only species that experience these problems. Mice and rats, interestingly, show almost the exact same abnormal social behaviour in a high density population as humans.

We know this, thanks to Jonh B. Calhoun. This man began his rodents experiments in 1947 in his garden where he built an enclosure with space for up to 5000 rats. He provided the animals of everything they needed like food, water, shelter and beddings. The rats were always safe of predators and had a clean environment as it was taken care of by Calhoun. To his surprise, the population levelled of at 150 and never reached 200. Indeed 5000 rats would be tight, but 150 rats in an enclosure ment for 5000 rats is surprisingly low. So why did this happen? At that time, Calhoun must have asked himself the same question...

John Calhoun "Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population"
image source

He later continued his experiments and started to include mice in his enclosure as well. While he was employed at the Laboratory of Psychology of the National Institute of Mental Health, he repeated his experiments and constructed even more elaborate universes. Calhoun built a 16-unit apartment complete with narrow stairwells and congested entrances resembling high rise tower blocks. The eating and drinking places were always provided with enough supplies and easily reachable for every mouse or rat, what Calhoun himself called the 'complete cafeteria'.

Again, Calhoun provided the mice and rats of everything they needed except for an infinitive amount of space. The animals bred rapidly and this became very problematic;

Dominant males became aggressive, some moving in groups,
attacking females and the young. Mating behaviors were disrupted.
Some became exclusively homosexual. Others became pansexual and
hypersexual, attempting to mount any rat they encountered. Mothers
neglected their infants, first failing to construct proper nests, and then
carelessly abandoning and even attacking their pups. In certain sections
of the pens, infant mortality rose as high as 96%, the dead cannibalized
by adults. Subordinate animals withdrew psychologically, surviving in a
physical sense but at an immense psychological cost. They were the
majority in the late phases of growth, existing as a vacant, huddled
mass in the centre of the pens. Unable to breed, the population
plummeted and did not recover. The crowded rodents had lost the
ability to co-exist harmoniously, even after the population numbers once
again fell to low levels. At a certain density, they had ceased to act like
rats and mice, and the change was permanent

Eventually, no rat or mouse stayed alive in the enclosure. The population had completely destroyed itself.

John B. Calhoun in the mice enclosure, he called 'Universe 25'(1970)
image source

This is another experiment from John B. calhoun

My thoughts

If you've watched the video, you heared the woman say;

'Many researchers believe that the human race has reached a crucial point in the exploit phase, a crucial point where important desisions must be made and careful planning implemented, if we are to survive.'

Many will probably have a similair opinion, but I do not agree with this a 100%. I think mother earth has more than enough space for the human race to survive, like we couldn't even imagine. Unlike the rodents, humans can escape from the crazyness in the big cities, where the abnormal behaviour(like in the experiments) is present. And this is what many people are actually doing.

But, I do think these experiments show why humans begin to show specific behaviour in mostly the western society. We often live closely together and do not really have to fight for our life anymore. We are provided with all the basic needs in life and think, as well as told, that we have the 'right' to have certain things. We are getting further and further from reality, by thinking we have the right to live and someone will take care of that. This is just not how the rules in this world work.

John B. Calhoun said this also about his rodents in the experiment.

''The more resources we supplied to the population, the more profound their problems became''

You could say this about the human society as well.

I don't think it is a healthy living condition for us humans to be assured we'll always have everything we need. Maybe this is why we are unconsciously seeking out for problems(we don't really need), which will force us to fight for something and give a feeling of 'surviving'.

On top of that, the most populair concept almost every western activist strives to and believes in is absulate equality of all humans. The rodent expirement shows that in a city-like environment this is just impossible. If we live together in such a large scale and the density increases, we will definitely need to form a hierarchy. Every human is different and we all have our own special qualities. Some qualities are better to be used in leadership, some are better to serve another. This doesn't mean one is better than the other, because one can't come in full capacity without the other. We are one whole and need eachother to maintain a natural balance. As George Orwell said;