Even if they have never seen a cat and their parents have never seen a cat, the smell of cat hair fills a young rat with horror. You can easily measure aspects of this. For example, if they smell a cat in the “play chamber,” normally exuberant young lab rats won't play as much, an effect that lasts for five days. (It's just so creepy there.)
Much rat play consists of roughhousing and squeaking. A slightly fearful rat tends to freeze. A more fearful rat tends to run like mad.
Researcher Jaak Panksepp, a student of rat playtime and author of the interesting text “Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions,” suggests that some laboratory research may have been confused by the fact the researchers didn't control their experiments for the possibility that some rats were exposed to the dreadful smell of cats, either experimental subjects or pets. (“How did you do on the maze?” “Not so good. I was freaked out by that horrible smell. You?” “Same. The feeling of impending doom messes with my concentration.”)
Rats are also innately alarmed by the smell of ferrets, and Panksepp worried that he might be confounding his own research by carrying the scent of his dog Ginny. He tested this hypothesis by covering the floor of the play chamber with Ginny's fur. Since she was a Norwegian elkhound, he had plenty of fur to work with. Happily for Panksepp, it seems that elkhound fur doesn't scare rats. They frolicked at undiminished levels of activity. I imagine rats rolling over and over while clouds of fur rise around them, like puffs of dust in cartoons. This “suggests that the ancestors of such domestic dogs did not normally prey on rats in the wild,” Panksepp writes.
Dmitry Guskov
“Elkhound” is the English version of “elghund,” which of course means “moose dog.” Since the job of the elkhound is to find a moose and bark at it incessantly until the hunter can lumber up and kill it, you wouldn't want the dog to be distracted by rats when it should be yammering at moose. Perhaps its wild ancestors were similarly fixated on big game and hence there was no survival value for rats in viewing them with horror.
But what is the view of a naïve young moose? (“That play chamber is much too small!”)
[Leroy Anderson for U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service]
Much rat play consists of roughhousing and squeaking. A slightly fearful rat tends to freeze. A more fearful rat tends to run like mad.
Researcher Jaak Panksepp, a student of rat playtime and author of the interesting text “Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions,” suggests that some laboratory research may have been confused by the fact the researchers didn't control their experiments for the possibility that some rats were exposed to the dreadful smell of cats, either experimental subjects or pets. (“How did you do on the maze?” “Not so good. I was freaked out by that horrible smell. You?” “Same. The feeling of impending doom messes with my concentration.”)
Rats are also innately alarmed by the smell of ferrets, and Panksepp worried that he might be confounding his own research by carrying the scent of his dog Ginny. He tested this hypothesis by covering the floor of the play chamber with Ginny's fur. Since she was a Norwegian elkhound, he had plenty of fur to work with. Happily for Panksepp, it seems that elkhound fur doesn't scare rats. They frolicked at undiminished levels of activity. I imagine rats rolling over and over while clouds of fur rise around them, like puffs of dust in cartoons. This “suggests that the ancestors of such domestic dogs did not normally prey on rats in the wild,” Panksepp writes.
Dmitry Guskov
“Elkhound” is the English version of “elghund,” which of course means “moose dog.” Since the job of the elkhound is to find a moose and bark at it incessantly until the hunter can lumber up and kill it, you wouldn't want the dog to be distracted by rats when it should be yammering at moose. Perhaps its wild ancestors were similarly fixated on big game and hence there was no survival value for rats in viewing them with horror.
But what is the view of a naïve young moose? (“That play chamber is much too small!”)
[Leroy Anderson for U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service]