Culture and tradition are two seemingly unlikely words to use when talking about rat behaviour but that is exactly what we are going to do in this blog post.

Many people dislike rats, regarding them as vermin and, as such, we wage war on them every day.This persecution has provided a surprising opportunity for another fascinating insight into the lives of sentient animals.

Animals in a group may learn from each other and pass this information on from one generation to the next –  scientists call this ‘cultural transmission’.  However, the behaviour they learn may not necessarily be picked up by a different group of the same species. There are many examples of rats doing just that!

We try to exterminate rats using poisons such as warfarin which makes them bleed to death. But, you can’t fool a rat! In some parts of England rats became impossible to exterminate even with new sophisticated poisons because they learn what is safe to eat by picking up cues from other rats and the environment.

Rats use each other as taste testers, eating food that familiar rats have eaten and avoiding foods that made them sick.  They must know another rat very well and spend time with them to learn that food should be avoided. If a stranger rat is severely ill, a rat will still eat the food because they don’t know them and so can’t pick up on their subtle cues.

In one experiment on a group of wild rats, scientists first observed the rats regularly eating two types of food (X and Y). They then poisoned food X with a solution that made the rats temporarily ill but did not kill them.  The entire colony gave up eating food X even when it was no longer poisoned and this behaviour continued for many generations, long after the rats who were originally poisoned were gone. It is this ability to learn from each other and pass this knowledge on to young rats which keeps them alive and thriving in the face of our numerous attempts at ‘pest’ control.

In another example of cultural transmission in rats, Joseph Terkel found a unique group of rats in Israel who only ate pine cone seeds and he wanted to see if this behaviour was culturally transmitted. The rats were very skilled at stripping the pine cones of their seeds with a  “no fuss, no waste” technique.

When he bred some of these rats, he found that those who had never been shown the special technique of opening pine cones were unable to survive on them because they used too much energy opening them up.  He knew that this behaviour wasn’t genetic because rat pups born to mothers who could strip pine cones effectively were swopped with the pups of mothers who couldn’t.  He found that only the pups that were raised by a mother who knew the pine cone stripping technique learned how to do it.   So the pine cone eating technique was culturally passed from one generation to the next, just as in human society.

Sources:

1. Terkel, Joseph. Cultural Transmission of Feeding Behavior in the Black Rat (Rattus rattus). Social Learning in Animals: The Roots of Culture. Ed. Cecelia M. Heyes and Bennett G. Galef. San Diego: Academic P, 1996. 17-48.
2. Dawkins, M.S. (1998) Through Our Eyes Only. Oxford University Press. Pp 43-52.

Note:

Compassion in World Farming is opposed to any animal experimentation that causes pain or suffering to animals. However, where such experiments increase our understanding of animal sentience, we will report them in the long term interest of all animals.

The humpback whale was on the migratory route around the California coast when she became terribly entangled in crab trap lines. Her life was at great risk.
She was tangled up in weighted ropes up to 240 feet long around her tail, her flipper and even in her mouth. The ropes were so tight they cut into her blubber and caused visible wounds. She was completely helpless  and the weight of the traps was causing her to struggle to keep her blow hole out of the sea.

A rescue team of divers went out to her but she was in such a state  they were  unsure that they stood any chance of saving her. They were at risk themselves, as the flick of a humpback’s tail can kill a human.

But they reported that as they worked to free the unfortunate creature, she did not struggle at all and they were aware of her eyes simply following them around as they worked.

Thankfully, the rescuers were successful but must have been astonished by the whale’s heartwarming response. When she felt herself come free, she began to swim around in circles and then went up to each diver one by one and nudged them. One of the rescuers is reported as saying: “It seemed kind of affectionate, like a dog that’s happy to see you … I never felt threatened. It was an amazing, unbelievable experience.”

Her response makes us think about the common ground that humans can have with animals who might appear so very different from us. A whale-watching expert who helped co-ordinate the rescue is quoted as saying: “You hate to anthropomorphize too much  but the whale was doing little dives and the guys were rubbing shoulders with it … I don’t know for sure what it was thinking, but it’s something that I will always remember. It was just too cool.”

An interesting point about our understanding of these large sea mammals was made by Gould and Gould in their book ‘The Animal Mind’. They suggest that perhaps we have been quicker to appreciate the intelligence and sentience of primates as they are so much more similar to us in their gestures and experiences, and therefore easier for us to read. We may have been slower to understand the complexity and richness of underwater creatures simply because they appear to be so very different to us.

Humpback Whale

Sources:
San Francisco Chronice (14/12/05). Daring rescue of whale off Farallones. Accessed 17/12/09.

Gould, J. L. and Gould, C. G. (1994) The Animal Mind. Scientific American Library, New York.

The importance of the relationship between a ewe and her adopted lamb. Image copyright Compassion/Elli Goodlet.

Janet Taylor of Farm Animal Sanctuary near Worcester told us this touching tale of two sheep. Jasmine was a mature ewe who hadn’t had a lamb for 6 or 7 years. A group of newly rescued sheep moved into the field next to her, including some orphaned lambs, and over the next few days she began calling to one orphan named Alfie. He was calling back to her and eventually Janet decided to put him over the fence to be with her – and see what happened.

Alfie began to try to suckle  Jasmine, as he would have done his biological mother, and Jasmine let him do so. Janet felt that at least this would provide him with the comfort of contact with a ‘mother’ but continued to bottle-feed him. Amazingly, Jasmine began to produce milk herself and was able to feed her newly adopted lamb as her own.

We have heard about a number of female animals who have adopted and fed orphaned youngsters. This even happens across species; for example, pigs are known to have adopted newborn puppies.

This shows the strength of both the maternal instinct and the need to have care from a mother figure. Perhaps all the species we commonly farm have this need but sadly, they are often denied it. In the light of our modern scientific understanding of animal sentience, Compassion in World Farming believes that farming policy and practice must take full account of animal sentience – as is required by European Union law.