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Chapter 1: How did raccoons become a problem in Toronto?
The drive produced by electric shock is stronger than hunger.
It turns out zapping a rat is a good way to get it to do anything, including violence.
Responding to another animal by striking him can also be learned. All he needs is a little motivation.
If you could teach a rat to do anything, why not a person? Suddenly, the scary world of the 20th 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 could be predicted and controlled.
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. I always say that we're not. We've got, what, 6,000 mammalian species, and we're going to pick one or two?
Few people questioned 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 not since patching the hole in my bathroom wall. We aren't rats.
I'm not saying we can't learn anything about ourselves from animals, 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.
And it's hard for me to think back about, why didn't I question that? Or did I ask if there were 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?
We built a science of human nature, and one of the strongest pillars was the lab rat. And who is the lab rat? 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, then call in sick. Not the rat. The rat is hardworking by instinct, diligent. He gnaws away.
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Chapter 2: What was the raccoon war declared by Toronto?
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Some years ago, when Michael Pettit was working on his ingenious article about raccoon erasure, he took a colleague out to lunch, Suzanne MacDonald, behaviorist and expert in animal cognition. He told her what he'd been learning about Lawrence Cole and the early raccoon studies. She, a fellow Torontonian beset by the plague of raccoons, was like, oh my god, how did we miss this?
I originally had thought, and I told Mike this because I thought it was a brilliant insight. Oh, they're the monkeys of North America.
By monkeys of North America, you mean they fill a certain ecological niche?
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.
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 coal bug. She began to study raccoons, and she's been doing it ever since.
Because we don't know very much, just trying to fill gaps and trying to see what I could find out about them. And they are annoying little critters. So it's been challenging and I wouldn't recommend it to most people.
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