A rat trapped in a restrainer elicits focused activity from his cage mate, leading eventually to door opening and consequent liberation of the trapped rat. Rats, despite their selfish reputation, don’t act like, well, rats, new experiments show. Instead, rats show empathy, helping to free fellow trapped rats, often before gorging on chocolate that they could hog all by themselves. A study of rats in Thursday’s journal Science shows that 23 of 30 rats opened a cage to free a trapped rodent. Some of them even did that before eating chocolate chips left out for them and instead shared the goodies with the freed rats. |
