Latest / Revisionist History / Rat vs. Raccoon

Transcript

Rat vs. Raccoon · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin, How did you get into writing about raccoons.
0:24
Speaker 2: I got into writing about raccoons because they started breaking
0:28
Speaker 2: into my supposedly raccoon proof green ban named Toronto.
0:33
Speaker 1: I'm talking with intrepid investigative reporter for the Toronto Star,
0:36
Speaker 1: Amy Dempsey Raven. Typically she covers police wrongdoing, child welfare,
0:41
Speaker 1: controversial homicides, but in twenty sixteen, when Toronto declared a
0:45
Speaker 1: war on raccoons and unveiled a new raccoon resistant composting ben,
0:49
Speaker 1: she realized it's time to get serious.
0:53
Speaker 2: Mayor came out on this garbage truck and made all
0:57
Speaker 2: of these promises, and I wondered. I thought to myself,
1:00
Speaker 2: I'm going to keep an eye on things here.
1:03
Speaker 1: This raccoon resistant ben cost the city thirty one million
1:06
Speaker 1: Canadian dollars. But Toronto is own is the raccoon capital
1:10
Speaker 1: of the world. Theoretically it's a point of pride, but
1:13
Speaker 1: it's a little more complicated than that. If a race
1:16
Speaker 1: of Martians took over your city, would you call it
1:18
Speaker 1: the Martian capital of the world, only if you'd already
1:21
Speaker 1: admitted defeat.
1:23
Speaker 3: My first job after graduating was in Toronto, and I
1:27
Speaker 3: had a.
1:27
Speaker 1: Group house local man, Malcolm Gladwell.
1:31
Speaker 3: I did not grow up in raccoon country, so I
1:33
Speaker 3: had no idea something was making a racket so loud
1:37
Speaker 3: and all night. Like when I say all night, I
1:40
Speaker 3: mean without without stopping. From from the moment I went
1:44
Speaker 3: to bed to the morning. I woke up, I couldn't sleep,
1:46
Speaker 3: and I went my friends. A couple of my friends
1:49
Speaker 3: were from Toronto, and I was like, what is going on? Like, oh,
1:51
Speaker 3: it's raccoons. Like for them it was like, oh ye,
1:53
Speaker 3: it's just like that's the deal here.
1:57
Speaker 1: That was about forty years ago. Things have gotten much
2:01
Speaker 1: much worse.
2:03
Speaker 4: It doesn't get any more Toronto than this.
2:06
Speaker 5: A raccoon inside a supermarket.
2:08
Speaker 1: Here, raccoons in the garbage, Raccoons on the train, Oh god,
2:14
Speaker 1: raccoons on the back deck.
2:16
Speaker 4: Time to go down, buddy, time to go down.
2:19
Speaker 5: You can't stay on this deck anymore that your viction day.
2:24
Speaker 1: Raccoons have taken over the attics in a whole street
2:26
Speaker 1: of houses and refused to leave. They brought traffic to
2:29
Speaker 1: a screeching halt on Toronto's highways and just stood there.
2:33
Speaker 1: They figured out how to open doors to houses and
2:35
Speaker 1: refrigerators and stood on top of countertops, leftovers in their paws,
2:39
Speaker 1: staring at freaked out homeowners as if to say, if
2:42
Speaker 1: I wanted you here, I would have rung the bell.
2:46
Speaker 1: Hence the priceya raccoon resistant bins, which surely no raccoon
2:51
Speaker 1: would be able to open.
2:52
Speaker 2: Soon after the rollout, we began hearing reports that raccoons
2:56
Speaker 2: were outsmarting the bins, and the city said, now, that's
3:01
Speaker 2: not really happening. But then one night they broke into mine.
3:06
Speaker 1: Amy found herself wondering, how are raccoons smart enough to
3:09
Speaker 1: open that bin? This was the question a historian of
3:12
Speaker 1: science had found himself wondering one night when he looked
3:15
Speaker 1: at his back deck in Toronto and saw composts all
3:17
Speaker 1: over the place. He had an earlier version of the
3:20
Speaker 1: compost bin, but here too, the raccoons had picked the lock.
3:24
Speaker 1: Were they really just that smart? It turned out nobody
3:28
Speaker 1: really knew. Raccoons had hardly been studied, basically, not at
3:32
Speaker 1: all compared to other animals, like say, rats or monkeys.
3:36
Speaker 1: This historian wanted to know why the midnight raid on
3:42
Speaker 1: his compost bin would set in motion a sequence of
3:44
Speaker 1: events that, in my own estimation, have come to Topple
3:47
Speaker 1: an entire century of psychological theory and restored the raccoon
3:52
Speaker 1: to its proper place, the dead center of how we
3:56
Speaker 1: understand human beings.
4:00
Speaker 3: Him Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History, my show
4:03
Speaker 3: about things overlooked, misunderstood and in praise of Toronto. You
4:08
Speaker 3: may be familiar with the phrase lab rat. Perhaps you
4:12
Speaker 3: are aware that many of the things we know about
4:14
Speaker 3: human beings and the way we behave are based upon
4:17
Speaker 3: the things we know about rats and the way they behave.
4:21
Speaker 3: But in this episode, my colleague Ben the daph Haffrey
4:24
Speaker 3: asks what if we picked the wrong animal.
4:33
Speaker 1: Many historians of science will write about the greats Einstein, Freud, Oppenheimer,
4:38
Speaker 1: the kind of research project not usually begun while scooping
4:42
Speaker 1: up trash in your bathrobe on your back deck in Toronto.
4:45
Speaker 1: But Michael Pettitt's always gotten into things sideways.
4:48
Speaker 5: I have almost never written about kind of the dominant
4:51
Speaker 5: people in the field. I personally find myself attracted to
4:57
Speaker 5: the misfits.
4:59
Speaker 1: Pettitt is a historian of psychology at York University in Toronto.
5:03
Speaker 5: I work one morning, and of course the compost is
5:05
Speaker 5: all over the deck, on scooping it up, because the
5:07
Speaker 5: raccoons could very easily get into the lock, and as
5:11
Speaker 5: in a start of psychology, I asked myself, Huh, I
5:15
Speaker 5: wonder if anyone ever used a puzzle box with raccoons.
5:18
Speaker 5: They seem really good at it.
5:19
Speaker 1: Petitt knew all about scientists putting rats in mazes and
5:23
Speaker 1: puzzly cages, the mainstream stuff. Who cares, But in all
5:26
Speaker 1: his studies he had never heard of a raccoon in
5:29
Speaker 1: a puzzle box. And yet here on his deck was
5:32
Speaker 1: evidence that they were basically able to outsmart any human system.
5:37
Speaker 5: These raccoons seemed very adept at doing locks, and so
5:40
Speaker 5: I was just curious.
5:42
Speaker 1: Michael was curious for good reason, not just because of
5:45
Speaker 1: the locks situation. We've basically never known quite what to
5:48
Speaker 1: make of raccoons.
5:50
Speaker 5: You know, they aren't finates, but they're also not rodents,
5:55
Speaker 5: So there's like there's something about them that they sort
5:58
Speaker 5: of take on this role as kind of intermediary species.
6:01
Speaker 5: There's this reputation of the raccoon for being this cunning,
6:06
Speaker 5: intelligent trickster.
6:08
Speaker 1: For a while, well, there wasn't even consensus on how
6:11
Speaker 1: exactly they evolved. The famous naturalist Carl Lenaeus called them
6:15
Speaker 1: Ursus louder or washer bear, because they like to rinse
6:18
Speaker 1: their food and water, and he thought they descended from bears. Now,
6:22
Speaker 1: for any true raccoon fans out there, I should note that, yes,
6:25
Speaker 1: they aren't actually washing their food. They basically see you
6:28
Speaker 1: with their paws, and their paws are more sensitive in
6:30
Speaker 1: the water. This, by the way, is the instinct behind
6:33
Speaker 1: that amazing Japanese TV show where they gave a raccoon
6:36
Speaker 1: cotton candy, which the raccoon dutifully washed until they vanished.
6:40
Speaker 1: But no, they're not washing and they're not bears. When
6:44
Speaker 1: Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World, he
6:46
Speaker 1: remarked upon its quote clown like dogs, to which the
6:49
Speaker 1: people of Italy said, Chris, what the hell are you
6:52
Speaker 1: talking about? Until centuries later another naturalist realized, Oh, he's
6:57
Speaker 1: talking about raccoons. They're their own thing.
7:03
Speaker 5: They in some ways seem to be above the rodents,
7:07
Speaker 5: and maybe even are carnivores.
7:10
Speaker 1: Pettitt went looking for a history of raccoons science, specifically
7:14
Speaker 1: about people investigating their intelligence, and found basically nothing. A
7:19
Speaker 1: handful of scientists in one slim volume, in particular from
7:23
Speaker 1: nineteen oh seven titled Concerning the Intelligence of Raccoons. It
7:29
Speaker 1: was written by a man named Lawrence Cole, Frontier raccoonist.
7:34
Speaker 5: So Lawrence Cole, in a lot of ways is a nobody.
7:39
Speaker 5: You know, He's not someone if you go to a
7:41
Speaker 5: history of psychology textbook and pull it off the shelf,
7:44
Speaker 5: he's not someone that's particularly remarkable.
7:48
Speaker 1: Lawrence Cole had done his graduate work at Harvard and
7:50
Speaker 1: was part of a psychological movement that studied animals to
7:54
Speaker 1: understand humans. In the nineteenth century, psychology had largely been
7:58
Speaker 1: based on what people said about how they felt, which
8:01
Speaker 1: was not super reliable. So why not instead observe how
8:04
Speaker 1: animals behave and just extrapolate up the chain from there.
8:09
Speaker 5: One absolutely says, it's not just our kind of our
8:11
Speaker 5: physical formous human beings that is continuous with natural selection,
8:16
Speaker 5: but also our psychological selves.
8:19
Speaker 1: But which animal was best for the psychologists to study?
8:23
Speaker 1: Any of them theoretically could work. Scientists were comparing species
8:26
Speaker 1: across tests to see how they'd fare. People had studied chickens, dogs.
8:31
Speaker 1: Coal's Advisor like the idea of studying monkeys, but monkeys
8:34
Speaker 1: are super expensive. It would be helpful, though if there
8:37
Speaker 1: were a kind of consensus, a linguis franca animal that
8:40
Speaker 1: people could generalize from.
8:42
Speaker 5: Through a series of circumstances, he acquires a small quality
8:47
Speaker 5: of raccoons.
8:49
Speaker 1: Cole still had to find an experiment of his own
8:51
Speaker 1: to get his PhD. These raccoons seemed promising.
8:55
Speaker 5: As far as Pool knew, no one had kind of
8:57
Speaker 5: put raccoons through these motions. So that's adoptrible dissertation. I
9:02
Speaker 5: can run these studies with these raccoons, right, whatever the
9:05
Speaker 5: data is, I can say I have added to our
9:09
Speaker 5: knowledge of compared to psychology.
9:11
Speaker 1: He probably had a hunch that this was going to
9:13
Speaker 1: be interesting.
9:14
Speaker 5: I don't know if raccoons were the most charismatic of
9:16
Speaker 5: our fauna, but raccoons they're kind of fun.
9:22
Speaker 1: I think they're the most charismatic of our fauna.
9:24
Speaker 5: Well, they're annoying, but they're like they're lovable scamps. Right.
9:29
Speaker 1: Cole began running tests on the raccoons. He put them
9:32
Speaker 1: in boxes with complicated locks every day for a whole
9:35
Speaker 1: academic year, and he found they were incredible any box.
9:40
Speaker 1: It seemed any puzzle the raccoon could solve it. And
9:43
Speaker 1: what's more, the animal wasn't just going through the motions.
9:46
Speaker 1: The raccoons seemed curious about what he was doing, and
9:51
Speaker 1: Cole thought there was evidence that raccoons could hold images
9:54
Speaker 1: in their mind. Nobody was making these kinds of claims
9:58
Speaker 1: about other animals, so Cole started publishing his research, writing
10:02
Speaker 1: the Leading Figures in Psychology, saying, Hey, these raccoons are
10:06
Speaker 1: really unusually intelligent, maybe intelligent as monkeys, which seems to
10:11
Speaker 1: me like it should make them a great model organism
10:13
Speaker 1: for people. Except there was a movement that was growing
10:18
Speaker 1: swiftly within Cole's field, right around them, which was explicitly
10:22
Speaker 1: uncomfortable with any talk of an animal having a mind,
10:26
Speaker 1: and it was fast becoming the only show in town.
10:30
Speaker 1: It was called behaviorism. All this history is documented in
10:35
Speaker 1: an amazing article by Michael Pettitt titled The Problem of
10:39
Speaker 1: Raccoon Intelligence in Behaviorist America, which is one of my
10:43
Speaker 1: favorite academic essays of all time, because the raccoon was
10:47
Speaker 1: indeed a problem.
10:49
Speaker 6: So it was no surprise to us that a lot
10:53
Speaker 6: of psychologists steered clear of coon's.
10:58
Speaker 1: Bob Bailey, he used to be the top guy at
11:00
Speaker 1: a legendary behaviorist organization called Animal Behavior Enterprises. The founders
11:04
Speaker 1: of that company wrote an infamous paper questioning the fundamentals
11:08
Speaker 1: of behaviorism, the idea that all animals were blank slates
11:11
Speaker 1: you could write whatever you wanted on. A key example,
11:15
Speaker 1: one raccoon they trained to put coins in the box.
11:18
Speaker 6: After a hundred or so responses, the raccoon would start.
11:25
Speaker 6: Instead of just picking up one coin and taking it
11:28
Speaker 6: to the box and putting it in the box, the
11:31
Speaker 6: raccoon would pick up two coins and then rub them together,
11:36
Speaker 6: and would start walking towards the box, and then it
11:42
Speaker 6: would stop and rub the coins together, and then it
11:47
Speaker 6: would go to the box and then start to put
11:50
Speaker 6: the coins in, and then stop and rub the coins together,
11:55
Speaker 6: and then start to put the coins back in the box,
11:57
Speaker 6: and stop and rub the coins together. Eventually it would
12:04
Speaker 6: put the coins in the box. Most of the.
12:08
Speaker 1: Time, potentially, and most of the time were bad news
12:11
Speaker 1: for people trying to turn psychology into a reputable hard science.
12:16
Speaker 1: That raccoon box situation came later on, but this exact
12:20
Speaker 1: dynamic put a bit of a target on Lawrence Cole,
12:23
Speaker 1: the frontier raccoonist. And if you know anything about the
12:26
Speaker 1: history of psychology, you'll know how the problem of the
12:29
Speaker 1: raccoon was solved raccoon erasure. The raccoon does not figure
12:33
Speaker 1: prominently at all, but you know which animal does, the rat.
12:39
Speaker 1: I'm curious about how you account for that historical process
12:42
Speaker 1: of raccoon erasure that begins around them.
12:46
Speaker 5: One of the problems with raccoons is they are a
12:50
Speaker 5: much larger and more cumbersome species than your bread labyrocks right.
12:57
Speaker 5: In terms of feeding, caging, maintenance, rats proved much more
13:05
Speaker 5: docile than a debt. Again, if you want to have
13:08
Speaker 5: decent numbers study right. They also reproduce quite readily. They
13:12
Speaker 5: have very short greeding cycles, and you can kind of
13:15
Speaker 5: build up the populations.
13:18
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just about convenience. It was also difficult
13:21
Speaker 1: to generalize from raccoon experiments. Rats, for example, behaved in predictable,
13:26
Speaker 1: repeatable ways, raccoons not so much. How is a scientist
13:32
Speaker 1: supposed to work with an animal who each spring gets
13:34
Speaker 1: wanderlust and attempts to break out of their cage. What
13:37
Speaker 1: do you do when your experimental raccoon colony does escape
13:41
Speaker 1: and moves into your labs of ventilation system. As behaviorism
13:45
Speaker 1: gains steam, scientists in the big cities attacked the nascent
13:48
Speaker 1: science of raccoons. Wasn't this all a bit silly? Meanwhile,
13:52
Speaker 1: other behaviorists complained that keeping raccoon colonies was really just
13:56
Speaker 1: a huge pain in the neck, and so we got
13:58
Speaker 1: the century of the rat into a lesser degree the pigeon.
14:03
Speaker 5: This behaviorism is a theory of control. They are animals
14:06
Speaker 5: that you could control.
14:08
Speaker 1: Behavior thought they were studying an animal that stood in
14:11
Speaker 1: for all human beings, but actually they wound up studying
14:15
Speaker 1: a lot of lab rats, and that led us to
14:18
Speaker 1: some pretty flawed conclusions about people. We'll be right back
14:31
Speaker 1: for a little while now. I've been interested in how
14:33
Speaker 1: the lab rat has shaped our understanding of human beings.
14:37
Speaker 1: Rats are all over the history of psychology, Rat studies
14:40
Speaker 1: of depression, rat studies of cooperation, rat studies of rationality.
14:44
Speaker 1: Think about the way we speak ratin a maze, the
14:47
Speaker 1: rat race, malrat, jim rat, smell a rat, or rat's nest.
14:51
Speaker 1: It's all rats all the way down. I figured if
14:53
Speaker 1: anyone could tell me about how exactly this all came
14:56
Speaker 1: to be, it would be one of the leading rat
14:58
Speaker 1: behavioral researchers in the country. Doctor Kelly Lambert at the
15:03
Speaker 1: University of Richmond.
15:05
Speaker 7: For most of psychology. It's just they were the only
15:07
Speaker 7: show in town. If you want to to do research
15:09
Speaker 7: with an animal model. When I was in graduate school
15:11
Speaker 7: at the University of Georgia, this is what we had.
15:14
Speaker 7: That was the only animal model you had.
15:18
Speaker 1: Lambert loves rats. She's written a book called The Labrat Chronicles.
15:22
Speaker 1: A neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet's most successful mammals.
15:28
Speaker 1: She's particularly famous for experiments where she taught rats to
15:31
Speaker 1: drive cars, which, if we're being honest, is really why
15:34
Speaker 1: I've gone to Richmond.
15:35
Speaker 7: So the idea was to train them. Get in the car,
15:39
Speaker 7: you get a fruitleate, sit here and get a fruitly
15:41
Speaker 7: But early on it was amazing that they seemed to
15:43
Speaker 7: learn the concept of driving. So once we shaped them
15:46
Speaker 7: and they learned to press the right lever to go right,
15:48
Speaker 7: they seem to automatically know to press the left one
15:51
Speaker 7: to go left.
15:52
Speaker 1: If you've seen Stuart Little in his red convertible, you're
15:55
Speaker 1: not even half prepared for the image of a lab
15:57
Speaker 1: rat hunched over the dashboard on what appears to be
16:00
Speaker 1: a monster truck, just careening towards a bunch of fruit loops.
16:08
Speaker 1: Lambert loves were with her rats, but lately she's also
16:11
Speaker 1: been questioning how the rat became the be all end
16:15
Speaker 1: all for understanding human beings.
16:18
Speaker 7: I don't think they made a decision about which model
16:21
Speaker 7: organism should we use. The rat was already on board
16:23
Speaker 7: for biomedical research, so it's practical to use the rat.
16:28
Speaker 1: Basically, it's the lab rat industry. There was a whole
16:31
Speaker 1: factory line system around producing lab rats via mass inbreeding,
16:35
Speaker 1: premised on the fantasy that the inbred rats were basically
16:39
Speaker 1: interchangeable with one another.
16:40
Speaker 7: They bred brothers and sisters for twenty generations. Their intention
16:45
Speaker 7: was the animals be as close to clones as possible,
16:49
Speaker 7: and then whatever your manipulation was, diet, stress, movement, or whatever,
16:55
Speaker 7: they felt confident that they saw a difference between the
16:59
Speaker 7: experimental group that got it and the control group that didn't,
17:02
Speaker 7: that that variable was the influential variable.
17:07
Speaker 1: This was all taking off around the time and Cole's
17:09
Speaker 1: work with raccoons was being cast aside. That kind of
17:13
Speaker 1: inbreeding helped create rats who were much more docile and
17:17
Speaker 1: easier to control than wild rats and certainly than raccoons,
17:21
Speaker 1: which meant it gave the behaviorists easier, more reliable data,
17:26
Speaker 1: and then it just took off. Soon. A prominent psychologist
17:29
Speaker 1: described the field as being infected by a plague of rats.
17:33
Speaker 1: Millions of dollars poured into rat studies. The leader of
17:36
Speaker 1: the Yale Institute of Human Relations announced that anything he
17:40
Speaker 1: observed about rats behaviors among other animals was quote identical
17:45
Speaker 1: with those operative in man, even in his highest behavioral
17:48
Speaker 1: achievements end quote. Let me play you a bit of
17:51
Speaker 1: film that Yale Institute produced. I think it goes a
17:54
Speaker 1: long way to showing exactly how confident these people were
17:58
Speaker 1: in what studying rats could tell us about people.
18:01
Speaker 8: Again, a mild electric shock and they administered through the
18:04
Speaker 8: grid on the floor of the apparatus.
18:06
Speaker 1: This film has always freaked me out. A rat in
18:09
Speaker 1: a cage with an electric current running through the bars.
18:12
Speaker 1: He's got to figure out how to turn it off.
18:14
Speaker 8: This time, it can only be turned off by ropetaking
18:17
Speaker 8: a wheel. The satiated animals starts responding as soon as
18:20
Speaker 8: a drive is supplied.
18:23
Speaker 1: The whole time that tone is sounding, the rat is
18:25
Speaker 1: just frantically scrambling around his cage trying to figure out
18:28
Speaker 1: how to make it stop. Then he starts pawing at
18:31
Speaker 1: a wheel and it turns off.
18:33
Speaker 8: The drive produced by electric shock is stronger than hunger.
18:37
Speaker 1: It turns out zapping a rat is a good way
18:40
Speaker 1: to get it to do anything, including violence.
18:43
Speaker 8: Responding to another animal by striking him can also be learned.
18:47
Speaker 8: All he needs is a little motivation.
18:51
Speaker 1: If you could teach a rat to do anything, why
18:54
Speaker 1: not a person. Suddenly the scary world of the twentieth
18:57
Speaker 1: century began to seem a lot more manageable. Mass movements,
19:01
Speaker 1: great depressions, whatever. Just find the right set of incentives
19:05
Speaker 1: or punishments, and all of human behavior it could be
19:08
Speaker 1: predicted and can controlled.
19:10
Speaker 7: We started comparing that behavior to humans at a slot
19:14
Speaker 7: machine or something. People I think started seeing humans as
19:19
Speaker 7: big rats or rats as little humans. Always say that
19:22
Speaker 7: we're not. We've got what six thousand mammalian species, and
19:28
Speaker 7: we're going to pick one or two.
19:30
Speaker 1: A few people question the dominance of the rat at first,
19:33
Speaker 1: Why bother when it was working so well. This kind
19:37
Speaker 1: of thing has always bothered me on a gut level.
19:40
Speaker 1: I look in the mirror every day and I do
19:42
Speaker 1: not see a rat staring back at me. At least
19:44
Speaker 1: nonsense patching the hole in my bathroom wall. We aren't rats.
19:48
Speaker 1: I'm not saying we can't learn anything about ourselves from animals,
19:52
Speaker 1: but I am saying that you should never underestimate how
19:55
Speaker 1: many of the things we think we know about human
19:57
Speaker 1: beings are actually things we know about inbred rats with
20:01
Speaker 1: brains the size of grapes kept in cages that sometimes
20:04
Speaker 1: electrocute you.
20:06
Speaker 7: And it's hard for me to think back about why
20:08
Speaker 7: didn't I question that, or did I ask if there
20:10
Speaker 7: are other models? And it's just become lightly that I've
20:13
Speaker 7: had so many of these. Kelly, what the heck were
20:16
Speaker 7: you thinking? All these years?
20:18
Speaker 1: We built a science of human nature and one of
20:21
Speaker 1: the strongest pillars was the labrat. And who is the labrat?
20:25
Speaker 1: He's crucially not the raccoon. The raccoon lets it all
20:29
Speaker 1: hang out. He's defiant, mischievous, crafty. If asked to participate
20:33
Speaker 1: in a scientific experiment, he will inquire about payment than
20:37
Speaker 1: callin sick. Not the rat. The rat is hard working
20:41
Speaker 1: by instinct, diligent. He gnaws away, he navigates complex warrants.
20:45
Speaker 1: He gets a perfect score on his SATs. He's rational.
20:49
Speaker 1: Build the maze and he'll fall in line. He is
20:52
Speaker 1: in short, a good animal for running the same test
20:55
Speaker 1: again and again and again without complaint, while delivering consistent,
21:00
Speaker 1: reliable data suggesting that we humans behave in consistent, reliable ways.
21:06
Speaker 1: For all this, the rat has been rewarded by becoming
21:09
Speaker 1: the only animals synonymous with the scientific laboratory. It's not
21:13
Speaker 1: lab pigeon, it's not lab monkey, it's lab rat. But
21:18
Speaker 1: I was beginning to wonder what if it should have
21:21
Speaker 1: been lab raccoon. We'll be right back. Some years ago,
21:31
Speaker 1: when Michael Pettitt was working on his ingenious article about
21:34
Speaker 1: raccoon or rasure, he took a colleague out to lunch,
21:37
Speaker 1: Suzanne MacDonald, behaviorist and expert in animal cognition. He told
21:42
Speaker 1: her what he'd been learning about Lawrence Cole and the
21:44
Speaker 1: early raccoon studies. She, a fellow Torontonian beset by the
21:49
Speaker 1: plague of raccoons, was like, oh my god, how did
21:53
Speaker 1: we miss this?
21:54
Speaker 4: I originally had thought, and I told Mike this because
21:57
Speaker 4: I thought it was a brilliant insight. Oh, they're they're
22:00
Speaker 4: the monkeys of North America.
22:01
Speaker 1: By monkeys of North America, you mean they fill a
22:04
Speaker 1: certain ecological niche yeah.
22:05
Speaker 4: Because we don't have monkeys, right, So it's just like, oh, well,
22:09
Speaker 4: you know, maybe they're just like that. They're not primates,
22:11
Speaker 4: but maybe they have evolved to cognitively to be like primates.
22:15
Speaker 1: Traveling to study monkeys was expensive. If raccoons were like monkeys,
22:19
Speaker 1: then living in Toronto was like living on safari. So
22:22
Speaker 1: McDonald caught the Lawrence colebug. She began to study raccoons
22:26
Speaker 1: and she's been doing it ever since.
22:29
Speaker 4: Because we don't know very much, just trying to fill
22:31
Speaker 4: gaps and trying to see what I find out about them,
22:35
Speaker 4: and they are annoying little critters. So it's been challenging
22:40
Speaker 4: and I wouldn't recommend it to most people.
22:44
Speaker 1: McDonald has become one of the world's leading experts in raccoons,
22:47
Speaker 1: and in particular the urban raccoons of Toronto, with whom
22:50
Speaker 1: I think she feels a strong kinship. For instance, I've
22:54
Speaker 1: seen people saying that there are one hundred thousand raccoons
22:57
Speaker 1: in Toronto. Where did they get that number? McDonald told
23:00
Speaker 1: me that she was the origin of that statistic, and
23:03
Speaker 1: she just made a number up, which is exactly what
23:05
Speaker 1: a raccoon would do. She gets it. So, after a
23:08
Speaker 1: century of waiting I prepared to receive the good news
23:12
Speaker 1: about the raccoon's true intelligence from the source. I leaned
23:15
Speaker 1: back in my desk chair.
23:17
Speaker 4: And I can tell you, having studied cognition and maybe raccoons,
23:21
Speaker 4: they are dumber and sticks. They are so dumb, just terrible.
23:27
Speaker 4: Every one of our little markers that we use for
23:30
Speaker 4: animals cognition or intelligence or you know, developmental milestones are
23:34
Speaker 4: going they just fail every single one.
23:37
Speaker 1: How intriguing. I thought maybe the raccoons super intelligence develops
23:41
Speaker 1: at a later age.
23:43
Speaker 4: No, an adult not either.
23:45
Speaker 1: This was not going well.
23:46
Speaker 4: So honestly, that that is what I've disappointed me so much,
23:49
Speaker 4: because I always thought, you know that raccoons are the
23:52
Speaker 4: monkeys of North America, but they are not.
23:56
Speaker 1: I was at this point trying not to look hugely depressed,
23:59
Speaker 1: but McDonald just kept going.
24:02
Speaker 4: So what they have done is a evolved to sort
24:06
Speaker 4: of search and destroying. That seems to be their strategy
24:10
Speaker 4: plus pecqual search and destroy and they find a thing
24:13
Speaker 4: and they break it, right, But there are other situations
24:16
Speaker 4: where you present them with a thing and you can
24:18
Speaker 4: see them looking at it and figuring it out. Yeah,
24:20
Speaker 4: raccoons don't do that. They're just like, what can I
24:24
Speaker 4: do to knock this over? What can I do to
24:27
Speaker 4: break this open? What can I do to get whatever
24:30
Speaker 4: it is I need to get? And they just leave
24:33
Speaker 4: destruction in their way. So they are not sitting and
24:38
Speaker 4: thinking about things. They are all action, very little thought.
24:46
Speaker 1: Here, I should just say that there's a lot we
24:48
Speaker 1: still don't know about raccoons, and indeed McDonald still gets
24:52
Speaker 1: a lot out of studying them too, especially the particularities
24:55
Speaker 1: of urban raccoons. But still, I had wondered about this
24:59
Speaker 1: question for years. Hearing that raccoons were morons actually was
25:04
Speaker 1: kind of a bummer in my book. But you know
25:06
Speaker 1: who was thrilled when I told them about it.
25:09
Speaker 3: That's precisely why there's such a better model for human beings.
25:13
Speaker 1: Again, local man Malcolm Gladwell.
25:16
Speaker 3: They are clever, mischievous, vengeful, destructive, and profoundly stupid. That
25:25
Speaker 3: is humanity. We observe the raccoon and we think there
25:27
Speaker 3: is a kind of deep intelligence there that's fueling his behavior,
25:32
Speaker 3: and there isn't. The raccoon just wants to mess things up, right,
25:37
Speaker 3: He just and he's maniacal about it. He just wants
25:42
Speaker 3: to destroy and he has a kind of surface cleverness
25:46
Speaker 3: that serves those destructive impulses. So when I look at
25:50
Speaker 3: the raccoon, I mean, do I need to say it?
25:53
Speaker 3: It's Donald Trump? He's a raccoon.
25:55
Speaker 4: Hey.
25:56
Speaker 3: The problem with our the way we think about Trump
25:58
Speaker 3: is at various points. You know, is Donald Trump a rat? No,
26:02
Speaker 3: he's not a rat.
26:02
Speaker 1: Nixon's a rat.
26:04
Speaker 3: Nixon's a rat.
26:06
Speaker 1: So is he a fox?
26:08
Speaker 3: Sometimes people say crazy like a fox, crazy like a fox. No,
26:12
Speaker 3: because the fox is actually a deeply intelligent animal, right well.
26:16
Speaker 1: And crucially wary. The fox is wary. The raccoon is
26:19
Speaker 1: not wary.
26:20
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, the fox wood stops to think and pause
26:24
Speaker 3: and make a strategy, and you know, takes his time.
26:28
Speaker 3: A raccoon would have fallen into the Russian orbit without
26:31
Speaker 3: realizing it. The raccoon, you know, like a raccoon would
26:35
Speaker 3: choose his running mates with carelessness and abandoned. I mean,
26:39
Speaker 3: it's just like, it's all, it's all raccoon. It feels
26:42
Speaker 3: like to call Trump a rat is to miss is
26:45
Speaker 3: to completely misunderstand who he is. It's just a raccoon.
26:49
Speaker 3: He's going to scrape outside your window all night and
26:52
Speaker 3: like create a racket and just know everyone else will
26:54
Speaker 3: be sleep with some groggy and he will be happy
26:56
Speaker 3: in the morning.
26:57
Speaker 1: There's also, I think crucially, if we're going back to
26:59
Speaker 1: this kind of did we pick the wrong model organism?
27:02
Speaker 1: What do we conclude about human beings if we think
27:04
Speaker 1: they are like rats. Rats are very hard working. You
27:08
Speaker 1: give them a task and they will do it ad nauseum,
27:12
Speaker 1: just just they're happy to just keep getting the job done.
27:16
Speaker 1: They are They live in little warrens. You put a
27:19
Speaker 1: rat in amaze and knows exactly what to do, and
27:20
Speaker 1: it's kind of like fine being an amaze.
27:24
Speaker 3: Problem solvers.
27:25
Speaker 1: They're problem solvers. They're sort of cautious about new things.
27:30
Speaker 1: You talk to any exterminator. It's like very hard to
27:32
Speaker 1: get a rat to eat poison. Like they they are
27:35
Speaker 1: very careful about what they eat, what risks they take.
27:38
Speaker 1: Raccoons are extremely disinhibited. They aren't wary at all. A
27:45
Speaker 1: raccoon can live to like twenty in a lab. In
27:48
Speaker 1: the wild, they tend to live two to three years
27:51
Speaker 1: because they're just sort of like, what's that do and
27:53
Speaker 1: they just like like could jam their fingers in a socket.
27:57
Speaker 1: It's like and that's the end of the raccoon. We
28:00
Speaker 1: built the world for rats, but we are functionally raccoons,
28:05
Speaker 1: and so we are dissatisfied with the rat world. But
28:08
Speaker 1: it is the fact that we have the rat world
28:11
Speaker 1: that has kept us from blowing it all up in
28:13
Speaker 1: our face so far.
28:14
Speaker 5: No, yes, you can't.
28:15
Speaker 3: What you never plan for in a world built on
28:20
Speaker 3: rats on the rat model, is it someone instead of
28:24
Speaker 3: trying to navigate the maze, just wants to burn it down.
28:28
Speaker 3: That's the one thing. The ret is never going to
28:30
Speaker 3: do that, and the rat's never going to effectively commit
28:33
Speaker 3: a kind of institutional suicide. The raccoon just wants to
28:37
Speaker 3: destroy things.
28:39
Speaker 1: I did a complete one eighty on this story. I
28:42
Speaker 1: started thinking that the rat model was a disgrace because
28:45
Speaker 1: I had rats all wrong. I see now, it was
28:48
Speaker 1: kind of utopian. Every need could be anticipated, every behavior nudged,
28:54
Speaker 1: every outcome predicted, and every person satisfied. But there is
28:59
Speaker 1: no one animal model for human behavior. Rats its own thing,
29:04
Speaker 1: elab rats its own thing. Raccoons are really their own thing,
29:08
Speaker 1: And we're not one or the other. We're all of
29:10
Speaker 1: the above and something else. But these days it seems
29:15
Speaker 1: clear we definitely did ourselves a disservice when we forgot
29:19
Speaker 1: about the raccoon. Sadly I never got to come face
29:27
Speaker 1: to face with a raccoon and reporting this story, but
29:30
Speaker 1: I did get to meet a labrat.
29:35
Speaker 3: Rooms.
29:37
Speaker 7: I love designing tests for rats.
29:39
Speaker 1: Kelly Lambert now studies all kinds of animals in all
29:42
Speaker 1: kinds of places. She's particularly interested in wild animals these days,
29:46
Speaker 1: but Lambert still has a soft spot for the labrat.
29:50
Speaker 1: When I visited her at the University of Richmond, she
29:52
Speaker 1: took me back into a locked set of rooms. There
29:55
Speaker 1: were signs up that said quiet behavioral testing in progress,
30:00
Speaker 1: and behind one of the doors a cage with two
30:02
Speaker 1: rats she's been teaching to drive.
30:06
Speaker 7: They're generally, you know, like kittens. I have to suit up.
30:10
Speaker 7: It would bite my nose off. So they've been bread
30:15
Speaker 7: to be able to handle them easily. So if I'm
30:20
Speaker 7: looking at aggression or stress, this may not be the
30:23
Speaker 7: best model to use.
30:25
Speaker 1: I leaned closer to the rat. Lambert seemed to think
30:27
Speaker 1: he was showing an unusual interest in my microphone.
30:31
Speaker 7: You're more interested in the novel than the.
30:33
Speaker 1: Food, more curious about the microphone. I wonder what it
30:36
Speaker 1: is about that. Actually the rat was really grabbing at
30:39
Speaker 1: the mic, pulling it closer to its snout.
30:43
Speaker 7: Podcast rat, this is your first rat podcaster.
30:48
Speaker 1: It was really weird. He wasn't climbing on the mic.
30:51
Speaker 1: He was just yanking it right up to his face.
30:54
Speaker 1: Not something you would have predicted if you know about
30:56
Speaker 1: rats and how wary they are. A mystery. I felt
31:00
Speaker 1: like maybe that rat was trying to tell me something.
31:03
Speaker 1: Rats communicate via ultrasonic frequencies. So a few days later,
31:07
Speaker 1: when I got home, processed the audio, pitch shifted it
31:11
Speaker 1: down and hit play.
31:14
Speaker 4: Have you ever seen a raccoon drive a car? Long
31:16
Speaker 4: Live the Librat?
31:18
Speaker 1: Sorry, buddy, I know you're right, but it's the raccoon's
31:22
Speaker 1: time now. Revision of History is produced by me Ben
31:33
Speaker 1: Mattip Haffrey, Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor
31:37
Speaker 1: is Karen Schakerji, fact checking by Anica Robbins, original scoring
31:42
Speaker 1: by Luis Kara, mixing and mastering on this episode by
31:46
Speaker 1: Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks
31:50
Speaker 1: to Lizette Barton at the Doctors Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings
31:54
Speaker 1: Center for the History of Psychology, and to Sarah Nix
31:57
Speaker 1: and Greta Cone. I'm Bennatip Haffrey
32:09
Speaker 8: O