experiments rather than rats. There are three reasons for this. Republicans are more easily obtained than rats. You don't become so easily attached to a Republican as you would a rat. And finally, there are some thing rats just will not do!

The more we learn about animals' behavior, it convinces me that they have complex emotions and reasoning. I'm sure that dogs do.

http://www.petalk.org/LaughingDog.html

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Pig-Who-Sang-Moon/dp/0345452828/ref=pd_sim_b_4

It's been a fascinating read! He has other books I'm going to check out too.

...at this result. This result is frankly something Kropotkin pointed out over a century ago.

Thanks for the thread, MrScorpio.

They'll play with you and sit on your shoulder for hours just "hanging out"

They are SURE that it's basic instinct for animals to be assholes about everything.

The experiment described below demonstrated that even thinking about being generous made the pleasure center light up. So if Republicans go through life being greedy or thinking about being greedy, where do they get any sense of pleasure? Does selfishness perversely make some people happy? Or are they just unhappy all the time and is that why they seem determined to make other people suffer as well?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701056_pf.html

"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves. . . .

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

I liked this:

The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy.

They live cooperatively.

They don't eat, don't sleep
They don't feed, they don't seethe
Bare their gums when they moan and squeak
Lick the dirt off a larger one's feet
They don't push, don't crowd
Congregate until they're much too loud
Fuck to procreate till they are dead
Drink the blood of their so called best friend

They don't scurry when something bigger comes their way
Don't pack themselves together and run as one
Don't shit where they're not supposed to
Don't take what's not theirs, they don't compare

They don't scam, don't fight
Don't oppress an equals given rights
Starve the poor so they can be well fed
Line their holes with the dead ones bread

They don't scurry when something bigger comes their way
Don't pack themselves together and run as one (2x)
Don't shit where they're not supposed to
Don't take what's not theirs, they don't compare..

The two girls that I have now did get in a big fight the other day with poor Iris getting bitten by Snicklefritz. But after I cuddled Iris for a while, she was fine. Shortly after I put her back in her Maison d'rat, she and Snickle were cuddled up together like nothing had happened.