Odd forms of rat research will always be welcome here. (I was particularly fond of the ticking rats story a few months ago.)
Now from Nature:
Rats that benefit from the charity of others are more likely to help strangers get a free meal, researchers have found.Maybe all rats go to heaven too.
This phenomenon, known as 'generalized reciprocity', has only ever been seen before in humans. A good example, says Michael Taborsky of the University of Bern, Switzerland, is what happens when someone finds money in a phone box. In controlled experiments such people have been shown to be much more likely to help out a stranger in need following their good luck.
In humans, such benevolence can be explained by cultural factors as well as by underlying biology, says Taborsky. But if similar behaviour can be found in other animals, he reasons, an evolutionary explanation would be far more likely.
To test for this behaviour in animals, Taborsky trained rats to pull a lever that produced food for its partner, but not for itself. Rats who had received a free meal in this way were found to be 20% more likely to help out an unknown partner than rats who had received no such charity
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