#lifegoals

Hire this man

Neurology lab.

High Vibe FreQz Show That too

#lifegoals there my friend life freaking goals

The fact is that just like people, rats can be cute or disgusting. You just have to find the right one for each example.

It's because they're usually only spoken about when they're vermin. Not the cute house pets. I had some mice and they were the cutest little fuckers I've ever seen.

they did cause a plague that killed over 25 million people..

Savvy Jones you mean the one that happened in Europe in the Middle Age? Well, they were not that _clean_...

Savvy Jones It wasnt rats it was peoples poor hygiene and other factors. The biggest problem behind plague that were people themselves.

lil more complicated than that

this is an awesome and very educational comment. thanks for sharing. I only had hamsters once younger and didn't know much about anything, just decided to get then, they eventually ran away. I still don't know how to prepare properly or what I'm doing if I were to get some pet- let say rats. I was also one of the people who think bad things like the adjective nasty of rats. but I don't hate them and its nice to learn these humane qualities about rats. I'm sure rats could think bad things about us until they get to know us too. so it's all a matter of getting to know. I like spiders especially tarantulas. haven't had any but learned some things that opened my mind and peaked my interest about them.

+A Kayfabe I've been wanting rats for a while but we have two cats and I would absolutely hate to stress the poor little rats :( My cats have never killed anything other than flies and roaches but still, I'd be so afraid of what they could do if left unsupervised or just keeping rats around and having them stressed to death. Any advice?

+A Kayfabe Uuugh! I wanna hug you so bad right now!

+A Kayfabe So very true! Mine are actually litter box trained just like my cats. Rats are truly awesome little creatures, and I would never want to be without them.

+Margarita, yes, I think you should not take the risk with the cats. They may have never killed a rodent yet, but playing with one might trigger the instinctive behavior suddenly.

they smell like urin.. they got no blader.

Vinterkorv Actually as they grow they become house-trained and only use their litter if you don't keep them out very long. If you keep their cage clean they clean themselves and smell better than cats. They do have bladders. If you know people with smelly rats it means they're not taking good care of them.

Or you can keep them out longer as long as they have easy access to a recognizable potty. :)

They poop and pee everywhere for a few months, then they train themselves and wait until they get back to their cage. Surprisingly dog-like.

Tickling is torture ....

@@hannahdyson5603 If that was true in this case, then you would predict that the rat would learn that the investigator's hand is associated with unpleasant "torture," and shy away from it, engage in defensive threat postures, or even bite. But in fact, the opposite happens--the rats pursue the hand, seeking out more tickling. It doesn't seem to be torture with these animals.

@@hannahdyson5603 it CAN be. It isnt always.

@Hannah Dyson What?? Do you know about conditioned aversive behavior?

@Hannah Dyson This is about these particular rats in this particular experiment. It isn't about your feelings about "most people." Stick to the subject and quit trying to deflect onto your personal tangents.

Matan Koplin-Green :')

Aw :) that's nice

LOL, I love your sense of humor

Grooming you :)

One of my girls would give me two kisses after every tickle session. Then she started adding two before, once she learned the word so she knew it was coming. :)

Those licks are saying a lot 'no no please no this tickles please stop!' Or that's what I think my rats are saying when I tickle them.

They are clean and super friendly. They r amazingly smart to. My one rat, Demon, used to love jumping off the top of door frames onto my back. She looked like a flying squirrel

Bryan Becker Very smart... there's a clip here on KZfaq showing a rat stuck in an inescapable (but humane) mouse box trap near a huge pile of food. When a second rat was brought in, it ran to the food before noticing the other rat that was trapped so it went over to see what was up. After a little bit of squeaking between the two it found the mechanism and freed the original rat. Then they both shared the pile of food. There were a few rats who didn't care about rescuing the trapped rat until they were done eating their fill. Guess this kind of behavior encompasses more than just humans!

These are domestic rats. It's like comparing a wolf and a dog. These are just cute pets, they won't hurt a fly. They are less dangerous than a cat and super cuddly too

yoooo

+Stephen Cosner we really are smarter than we were.

+Stephen Cosner Yeah. I had to hear it!

+John Crocker haha me too! And what an adorable thing to be smarter about! :D

yep

Alladin!! Great movie! 😆

lol sat them down over coffee, they probably just gave them a treat and introduced "the hand" at the same time, if the rat chose to go the hand over the treat it means it likes it more.

Attach a spring to the rat's tail and put your hand out in front of the rat where it can be seen. If the rat struggles to run to your hand, pulling against the spring by a significant amount, then that's a pretty unambiguous indication that it enjoys your hand's company.

a laugh is just an involuntary contraction of the vocal cords that is usually due to some neuronal excitation. Just think of it as a spasm, when you stimulate neurons to a certain degree they can start to fire rapidly generating these spasms. It is true only humans can experience neuronal excitations that are not directly influenced by physical stimuli, like for example we can get generate current flows just by having certain thoughts. But it the mechanism is the same as it was billions of years ago. So laughter is not something that is expressive of higher intelligence but rather just a natural response of nervous and muscle tissues to stimuli.

Very interesting - thank you :) Still don't like the idea of testing on animals anyway whether or not they show a sense of humour we can understand...sigh

Tamsyn van Gelderen well you brought up pharmaceutical studies, is it better for a rat to "suffer" or for a little girl with incurable spinal muscular atrophy, who will be bound to a wheelchair for life starting at age 14? It's a matter of perspective. Also animals don't suffer the same way as us, so it's not as inhumane as we'd imagine.

+VanillaSnake21 - I disagree - anything with a nervous system can feel pain, pretty much everything with a brain can show anxiety, fear etc Only thing is, we as humans don't always know how to translate what we see or hear into human emotions etc...and you cannot tell me that an animal forced to endure shampoo poured into their eyes or to ingest substances till half the test subjects died to prove that maybe it isn't a good idea to eat too much of it (LD 50) - doesn't suffer the way a human might if they were in the same situation. If animals and people have similar systems, they will feel pain or discomfort with the tests that are performed (many just plain torture) - with small differences eg some people have a higher pain threshold than others etc. The point about medical or pharma testing is that to me it makes no sense - what they test animals with aren't things an animal can or would use - they are for humans and some animals don't respond the same way to certain chemicals like we would eg Thalidomide - no problem tested on Guinea Pigs - huge problem used on pregnant humans. There are plenty of humans we could test our products on - rapists, pedophiles, people who offer themselves as guinea pigs (I would do it) then the results would be accurate for our species. Animal testing is archaic and it doesn't work as well as testing on the appropriate species the product is intended for.

Tamsyn van Gelderen Yes of course I agree that the nervous system is the same and they experience pain and discomfort. However you're comparing it what we feel those things as, for example for people pain is usually not the worst part of suffering, it's the mental processes of a person realizing that the pain will go on for a long time and that there is no way to escape it etc. We suffer because we can understand the situation and see ahead into the future. While in animals, the pain response is the same but they are not able to fully understand how that pain effects them, they just feel it in a raw sense. So for example a rat will suffer much much less mental damage as the result of the suffering rather than a person in the same situation. If you're still not convinced then think about a person getting cancer vs an animal, cancer can cause pain, but for a person that's the least of the least of the suffering, it's the mental understanding that there is no way out, for an animal it's just pain. By the way there are no trials allowed that inflict extraordinary pain for long intervals. They could test ld50, which could cause an animal to go into a coma or die but there is no physical pain involved, they're usually fully unconscious by the time the breathing stops etc. And other trials that do cause discomfort and moderate pain, like electroshock are carried out under guidelines. As for the effectiveness of it, I'd say there are many many more similarities than differences, obviously some drugs won't act the same way in animals, but most times carcinogenicity is very similar, birth defects are similar and ld50 could be ballparked. So even if we did agree to test some criminals or something instead, it's just not feasible due the time it takes for lets say cancer to develop in people or for birth to take place etc. They need to test a lot of people for that too, so a study like that would probable span decades instead of a a few months.

Weed.

this was uploaded in 2007. i'm sure they don't spend ALL teh time tickling rats. but imagine ifthey DID, and all the breakthroughs have just been luck and chance? XD lol!

Well, one discovery tends to snowball into other applications. We experiment the idiosyncrasies is rodents, and maybe we'll be able to better understand emotion in animals which might turn into robot animals with realistic AI. Of course, that's a crazy idea, but it could happen, huh?

Why is cancer more important than mental illness?