#Calhoun mouse utopia series#

It transforms wild and healthy animals into habitual beggars. The National Park Service’s website for Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan advises, Signs in national and state parks all over America warn visitors, “Please Don’t Feed the Animals.” Some of those government-owned parks provide further explanation, such as “The animals may bite” or “It makes them dependent.” To what extent do the mouse utopia lessons apply to humans? Calhoun, best known for his mouse experiments in the 1960s.

#Calhoun mouse utopia series#

Those who managed to control space led relatively normal lives.”Ĭalhoun’s work didn’t give us answers, but it is rare that any single study or series of studies can draw definite conclusions.One of the more famous ethologists in recent decades was John B. “Not all of Calhoun’s rats had gone berserk. Moral decay could arise “not from density, but from excessive social interaction,” Ramsden says. His work suggested a different interpretation.

“Calhoun’s research was seen not only as questionable, but also as dangerous.”Īnother researcher, Jonathan Freedman, turned to studying actual people - they were just high school and university students, but definitely human. Ultimately, “ats may suffer from crowding human beings can cope,” Ramdsen says. The NIH Record spoke to medical historian Edmund Ramsden about Calhoun’s work: She writes, “ Instead of a population problem, one could argue that Universe 25 had a fair distribution problem.”īut we can take comfort in the face that humans are not mice. Inglis-Arkell explains that the habitats he created weren’t really overcrowded, but that isolation enabled aggressive mice to stake out territory and isolate the beautiful ones.

Now, interpretations of Calhoun’s work have changed. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which was also made into a 1982 film The Secret of NIMH, notes the National Institutes of Health.

The work also inspired the 1971 children’s book Mrs. The work tapped into the era’s feeling of dread that crowded urban areas heralded the risk of moral decay - and events like the murder of Kitty Genovese (though it was misreported) only served to intensify the worry.Ī host of science fiction works - books like Soylent Green , comics like 2000AD - played on Calhoun’s ideas and those of his contemporaries. The unusual behaviors he observed he dubbed “behavioral sinks.”Īfter Calhoun wrote about his findings in a 1962 issue of Scientific American, that term caught on in popular culture, according to a paper published in the Journal of Social History. When the population started declining the beautiful ones were spared from violence and death, but had completely lost touch with social behaviors, including having sex or caring for their young.Ĭalhoun’s experiments, which started with rats an outdoor pen and moved on to mice at the National Institute of Mental Health during the early 1960s, were interpreted at the time as evidence of what could happen in an overpopulated world. The few secluded spaces housed a population Calhoun called, “the beautiful ones.” Generally guarded by one male, the females-and few males-inside the space didn’t breed or fight or do anything but eat and groom and sleep. Sometimes they’d drop and abandon a baby while they were carrying it. They’d move half their litter away from danger and forget the rest. They gathered in the main squares, waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other.įew females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did seemed to simply forget about their babies. For io9, Esther Inglis-Arkell writes about Calhoun’s twenty-fifth habitat and the experiment that followed:Īt the peak population, most mice spent every living second in the company of hundreds of other mice.