Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Do they eat lemon skins that are not on lemons? Can you befriend lemon rat by giving it the lemon skins you’re not going to use after using a lemon for something?
Diane Ozdamar -a french illustrator, graphic designer and photographer from Paris.
As far as I can remember I have always loved rats and any rodent people would call “pest”. When I first got pet rats, I was thrilled to discover they were so clean, smart and affectionate, very far from the nasty dirty rat myth most people believe in. Thus, I decided to rescue and foster abandoned and abused rats until I could find them a forever home. This led me to take pictures of them: finding a home to a rat is not an easy task since they suffer from a very bad reputation and I had to make their cute personalities stand out so people would consider adopting them.
In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.
The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat.
The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.