Meet Stuart Little's cousin. I call him Smarty Pants. Unfortunately, Smarty Pants isn't our pet. He (I assume it's male) fell off the roof and into our aquarium garden. I call it an aquarium garden because the top has an open roof and it sits in the middle of the house surrounded by 3 walls and one glass door. So there was Smarty Pants, trapped inside the aquarium garden since Sunday without a way of getting out. Or so I thought. By the way, the picture on the right is an actual picture of him on top of a ladder.
I never realized rats were THAT smart. Now I know after doing a little reading.
In a famous experiment, Pavlov taught dogs to associate dinner with the sound of a bell. The dogs would salivate whenever a bell rang regardless of whether food was given to them. This indicates that a dog considers a simple association of events happening closely in time to be necessary.
In the new experiment, the rats were also taught to associate a sound with food. But then, instead of just listening to the sound, they were allowed to provoke the sound themselves. The researchers found that when the rats produced the sound themselves they didn't go to look for food. Thus, it is clear that they understood that food is not necessarily associated with the sound. And if they had caused the sound, it was obvious to them that food would not be available - because they weren't the cause behind the distribution of food.
"When it rains, you expect that both your lawn and your neighbor's lawn will be wet," says Michael Waldmann, an experimental psychologist at the University of G�ttingen, Germany, "but if you water your lawn, you wouldn't expect your neighbor's to also be wet. And this is the type of reasoning the rats are using."
Well you guessed it. Today, Smarty Pants ate through the wooden panel of one of the walls and got out. Just as I was placing the rat trap inside the aquarium garden, I saw the wood chips on the floor. That's when I had my "Uh-oh and Oh No!" moment.
Now my mom and I are trapped inside closed doors. Every room we go into, we can't leave the door open anymore for fear that Smarty Pants might get into one of the bedrooms.
If Smarty Pants can just talk, he'd probably say, "Look who's laughing now!"
Well, we'll see! Tomorrow my mom will get in touch with the pest control. Let's see who's laughing by then!
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