Speaker 1: Pushkin, Hey, last Archive listeners. Today on the show, we're
Speaker 1: sharing an episode I did for Revisionist History about why
Speaker 1: we wound up studying the lab rat instead of the raccoon.
Speaker 1: It involves a frontier psychologist in Oklahoma at the turn
Speaker 1: of the century and one of my favorite academic articles
Speaker 1: of all time. I'm excited to share with you now.
Speaker 1: You can find more episodes of Revisionist History wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy this one. How
Speaker 1: did you get into writing about raccoons?
Speaker 2: I got into writing about raccoons because they started breaking
Speaker 2: into my supposedly raccoon proof green band named Toronto.
Speaker 1: I'm talking with intrepid investigative reporter for the Toronto Star,
Speaker 1: Amy Dempsey Raven. Typically she covers police wrongdoing, child welfare,
Speaker 1: controversial homicides, But in twenty sixteen, when Toronto declared a
Speaker 1: war on raccoons and unveiled a new raccoon resistant composting ben,
Speaker 1: she realized it's time to get serious.
Speaker 2: Mayor came out on this garbage truck and made all
Speaker 2: of these promises, and I wondered, I thought to myself,
Speaker 2: I'm going to keep an eye on things here.
Speaker 1: This raccoon resistant ben cost the city thirty one million
Speaker 1: Canadian dollars. But Toronto is known as the raccoon Capital
Speaker 1: of the world. Theoretically it's a point of pride, but
Speaker 1: it's a little more complicated than that. If a race
Speaker 1: of Martians took over your city, would you call it
Speaker 1: the Martian Capital of the world, only if you'd already
Speaker 1: admitted defeat.
Speaker 3: My first job after graduating was in Toronto and I
Speaker 3: had a group.
Speaker 1: House, local man Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 3: I did not grow up in raccoon country, so I
Speaker 3: had no idea something was making a racket so loud
Speaker 3: and all night. Like what I say, all night, I
Speaker 3: mean without without stopping. From the moment I went to
Speaker 3: by to the morning, woke up, I couldn't sleep, and
Speaker 3: I went my friends. A couple of friends were from Toronto,
Speaker 3: and I was like, what is going on?
Speaker 1: Like, oh, it's raccoons.
Speaker 3: Like for them, it was like, oh yeah, it's just
Speaker 3: like that's the deal here.
Speaker 1: That was about forty years ago. Things have gotten much
Speaker 1: much worse.
Speaker 4: It doesn't get any more Toronto than this.
Speaker 5: A raccoon inside a supermarket.
Speaker 1: Here, raccoons in the garbage raccoons on the train. Oh,
Speaker 1: oh my god, raccoons on the back deck.
Speaker 5: Time to go down, buddy, Time to go down. You
Speaker 5: can't stay on this deck anymore. But you're a viction day.
Speaker 1: Raccoons have taken over the attics in a whole street
Speaker 1: of houses and refused to leave. They brought traffic to
Speaker 1: a screeching halt on Toronto's highways and just stood there.
Speaker 1: They figured out how to open doors to houses and refrigerators,
Speaker 1: and stood on top of countertops leftovers in their paws,
Speaker 1: staring at freaked out homeowners as if to say, if
Speaker 1: I wanted you here, I would have run the bell.
Speaker 1: Hence the pricey raccoon resistant bins, which surely no raccoon
Speaker 1: would be able to open.
Speaker 2: Soon after the rollout, we began hearing reports that raccoons
Speaker 2: were outsmarting the bins, and the city said, now, that's
Speaker 2: not really happening. But then one night they broke into mine.
Speaker 1: Amy found herself wondering, how are raccoons smart enough to
Speaker 1: open that bin? This was the question a historian of
Speaker 1: science had found himself wondering one night when he looked
Speaker 1: at his back deck in Toronto and saw composts all
Speaker 1: over the place. He had an earlier version of the
Speaker 1: compost bin. But here too, the raccoons had picked the lock.
Speaker 1: Were they really just that smart? It turned out nobody
Speaker 1: really knew. Raccoons had hardly been studied, basically not at
Speaker 1: all compared to other animals, like say, rats or monkeys.
Speaker 1: This historian wanted to know why the midnight raid on
Speaker 1: his compost bin would set in motion a sequel of
Speaker 1: events that, in my own estimation, have come to topple
Speaker 1: an entire century of psychological theory and restored the raccoon
Speaker 1: to its proper place, the dead center of how we
Speaker 1: understand human beings.
Speaker 3: I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my show
Speaker 3: about things overlooked, misunderstood and in praise of Toronto. You
Speaker 3: may be familiar with the phrase lab rat. Perhaps you
Speaker 3: are aware that many of the things we know about
Speaker 3: human beings and the way we behave are based upon
Speaker 3: the things we know about rats and the way they behave.
Speaker 3: But in this episode, my colleague Bend daph Haffrey asks,
Speaker 3: what if we picked the wrong animal?
Speaker 1: Many historians of science will write about the greats Einstein
Speaker 1: Freud Oppenheimer. The kind of research project not usually begun
Speaker 1: while scooping up trash in your bathrobe on your back
Speaker 1: deck in Toronto. But Michael Pettitt's always gotten into things sideways.
Speaker 5: I have almost never written about kind of the dominant
Speaker 5: people in the field. I personally find myself attracted to
Speaker 5: the misfits.
Speaker 1: Pettitt is a historian of psychology at York University in Toronto.
Speaker 5: I looked one morning, and of course the compost is
Speaker 5: all over the deck. I scooping it up because the
Speaker 5: raccoons could very easily get into the walk. And as
Speaker 5: a start of psychology, I asked myself, huh, I wonder
Speaker 5: if anyone ever used a puzzle box with raccoons. They
Speaker 5: seem really good at it.
Speaker 1: Petitt knew all about scientists putting rats and mazes and
Speaker 1: puzzly cages, the mainstream stuff who cares, But in all
Speaker 1: his studies he had never heard of a raccoon in
Speaker 1: a puzzle box. And yet here on his deck was
Speaker 1: evidence that they were basically able to outsmart any human system.
Speaker 5: These raccoons seemed very adept at doing walks, and so
Speaker 5: I was just curious.
Speaker 1: Michael was curious for good reason, not just because of
Speaker 1: the Locke situation. We've basically never known quite what to
Speaker 1: make of raccoons.
Speaker 5: You know, they aren't fightings, but they're also not rodents,
Speaker 5: so there's like there's something about them that they sort
Speaker 5: of take on this role as kind of intermediary species.
Speaker 5: There's this reputation of the raccoon for being this cunning,
Speaker 5: intelligent sickster.
Speaker 1: For a while, there wasn't even consensus on how exactly
Speaker 1: they evolved. The famous naturalist Carl Linnaeus called them ursus
Speaker 1: loader or washer bear, because they like to rinse their
Speaker 1: food and water, and he thought they descended from bears. Now,
Speaker 1: for any true raccoon fans out there, I should note that, yes,
Speaker 1: they aren't actually washing their food. They basically see you
Speaker 1: with their paws, and their paws are more sensitive in
Speaker 1: the water. This, by the way, is the instinct behind
Speaker 1: that amazing Japanese TV show where they gave a raccoon
Speaker 1: cotton candy, which the raccoon dutifully washed until they've vanished.
Speaker 1: But no, they're not washing and they're not bears. When
Speaker 1: Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World, he
Speaker 1: remarked upon its quote clown like dogs, to which the
Speaker 1: people of Italy said, Chris, what the hell are you
Speaker 1: talking about? Until centuries later another naturalist realized, Oh, he's
Speaker 1: talking about raccoons. They're their own thing.
Speaker 5: They in some ways seem to be above the rodents
Speaker 5: and maybe even our carnivores.
Speaker 1: Pettitt went looking for a history of raccoons science, specifically
Speaker 1: about people investigating their intelligence, and found basically nothing a
Speaker 1: handful of scientists in one slim volume in particular from
Speaker 1: nineteen oh seven, titled Concerning the Intelligence of Raccoons, It
Speaker 1: was written by a man named Lawrence Cole, Frontier raccoonist.
Speaker 5: So Lawrence Cole, in a lot of ways is a nobody.
Speaker 5: You know, He's not someone if you go to an
Speaker 5: history of psychology textbook and pull it off the shelf,
Speaker 5: he's not someone that's particularly remarkable.
Speaker 1: Lawrence Cole had done his graduate work at Harvard and
Speaker 1: was part of a psychological movement that studied animals to
Speaker 1: understand humans. In the nineteenth century, psychology had largely been
Speaker 1: based on what people said about how they felt, which
Speaker 1: was not super reliable. So why not instead observe how
Speaker 1: animals behave and just extrapolate up the chain from there.
Speaker 5: Darwin absolutely says it's not just our kind of our
Speaker 5: physical form as human beings that is continuous with natural selection,
Speaker 5: but also our psychological selves.
Speaker 1: But which animal was best for the psychologists to study?
Speaker 1: Any of them theoretically could work. Scientists were comparing species
Speaker 1: across tests to see how they'd fare. People had studied chickens, dogs.
Speaker 1: Coal's advisor like the idea of studying monkeys, but monkeys
Speaker 1: are super expensive. It would be helpful, though, if there
Speaker 1: were a kind of consensus a linguis franca animal that
Speaker 1: people could generalize from.
Speaker 5: Through a series of circumstances, he acquires a small qualony
Speaker 5: of raccoons.
Speaker 1: Cole still had to find an experiment of his own
Speaker 1: to get his PhD. These raccoons seemed promising.
Speaker 5: As far as Pool knew, no one had kind of
Speaker 5: put raccoons to these motions. So that's adoptible dissertation. I
Speaker 5: can run these studies with these raccoons, right, whatever the
Speaker 5: data is, I can say I have added to our
Speaker 5: knowledge of comparative psychology.
Speaker 1: He probably had a hunch that this was going to
Speaker 1: be interesting.
Speaker 5: I don't know if raccoons were the most charismatic of
Speaker 5: our fauna. But raccoons they're kind of fun.
Speaker 1: Come on, I think they're the most charismatic of our fauna.
Speaker 5: Well, they're annoying, but they're like they're lumable scamps. Right.
Speaker 1: Cole began running tests on the raccoons. He put them
Speaker 1: in boxes with complicated locks every day for a whole
Speaker 1: academic year, and he found they were incredible. Any box,
Speaker 1: it seemed any puzzle the raccoon could solve it. And
Speaker 1: what's more, the animal it wasn't just going through the motions.
Speaker 1: The raccoon seemed curious about what he was doing, and
Speaker 1: Cole thought there was evidence that raccoons could hold images
Speaker 1: in their mind. Nobody was making these kinds of claims
Speaker 1: about other animals. So Cole started publishing his research, writing
Speaker 1: the Leading Figures in Psychology, saying, Hey, these raccoons are
Speaker 1: really unusually intelligent, maybe as intelligent as monkeys, which seems
Speaker 1: to me like it should make them a great model
Speaker 1: organism for people. Except there was a movement that was
Speaker 1: growing swiftly within Cole's field right around them, which was
Speaker 1: explicitly uncomfortable with any talk of an animal having a
Speaker 1: mind and it was fast becoming the only show in town.
Speaker 1: It was called behaviorism. All this history is documented in
Speaker 1: an amazing article by Michael Pettitt titled The Problem of
Speaker 1: Raccoon Intelligence in Behaviorist America, which is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite academic essays of time, because the raccoon was indeed
Speaker 1: a problem.
Speaker 6: So it was no surprise to us that a lot
Speaker 6: of psychologists steered clear of coons.
Speaker 1: Bob Bailey, he used to be the top guy at
Speaker 1: a legendary behaviorist organization called Animal Behavior Enterprises. The founders
Speaker 1: of that company wrote an infamous paper questioning the fundamentals
Speaker 1: of behaviorism, the idea that all animals were blank slates
Speaker 1: you could write whatever you wanted on. A key example
Speaker 1: one raccoon they trained to put coins in a box.
Speaker 6: After a one hundred or so responses, the raccoon would start.
Speaker 6: Instead of just picking up one coin and taking it
Speaker 6: to the box and putting it in the box, the
Speaker 6: raccoon would pick up two coins and then rub them
Speaker 6: together and would start walking towards the box, and then
Speaker 6: it would stop and rub the coins together, and then
Speaker 6: it would go to the box and then start to
Speaker 6: put the coins in, and then stop and rub the
Speaker 6: coins together, and then start to put the coins back
Speaker 6: in the box, and the stop and rub the coins together.
Speaker 6: Eventually it would put the coins in the box most
Speaker 6: of the time.
Speaker 1: Eventually in most of the time were bad news for
Speaker 1: people trying to turn psychology into a reputable hard science.
Speaker 1: That raccoon box situation came later on, but this exact
Speaker 1: dynamic put a bit of a target on Lawrence Cole,
Speaker 1: the frontier raccoonist. And if you know anything about the
Speaker 1: history of psychology, you'll know how the problem of the
Speaker 1: raccoon was solved raccoon erasure. The raccoon does not figure
Speaker 1: prominently at all, but you know which animal does, the rat.
Speaker 1: I'm curious about how you account for that historical process
Speaker 1: of raccoon erasure that be around them.
Speaker 5: One of the problems with raccoons is they are a
Speaker 5: much larger and more cumbersome species than your bread lab racks. Right,
Speaker 5: In terms of feeding, caging, maintenance, rats proved much more
Speaker 5: docile and at debt. And again, if you want to
Speaker 5: have decent numbers for your study, right, they also reproduce
Speaker 5: quite readily. They have very short greeding cycles, and you
Speaker 5: can kind of build up the populations.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just about convenience. It was also difficult
Speaker 1: to generalize from raccoon experiments. Rats, for example, behaved in predictable,
Speaker 1: repeatable ways, raccoons not so much. How is a scientist
Speaker 1: supposed to work with an animal who each spring gets
Speaker 1: wanderlust and attempts to break out of their cage? What
Speaker 1: do you do when your experimental raccoon colony does escape
Speaker 1: and moves into your labs of ventilation system? Behaviorism gains steam.
Speaker 1: Scientists and the big cities attacked the nascent science of raccoons.
Speaker 1: Wasn't this all a bit silly? Meanwhile, other behaviorists complained
Speaker 1: that keeping raccoon colonies was really just a huge pain
Speaker 1: in the neck, And so we got the century of
Speaker 1: the rat, and to a lesser degree, the pigeon.
Speaker 5: This behaviorism is that theory of control. They are animals
Speaker 5: that you could control.
Speaker 1: Behaviorists thought they were studying an animal that stood in
Speaker 1: for all human beings, but actually they wound up studying
Speaker 1: a lot of lab rats, and that led us to
Speaker 1: some pretty flawed conclusions about people. We'll be right back
Speaker 1: for a little while now. I've been interested in how
Speaker 1: the lab rat has shaped our understanding of human beings.
Speaker 1: Rats are all over the history of psychology. Rat studies
Speaker 1: of depression, rat studies of cooperation, rat studies of rationality.
Speaker 1: Think about the way we speak rat in a maze,
Speaker 1: the rat race, malrat, jim rat, smell a rat, or
Speaker 1: rat's nest. It's all rats all the way down. I
Speaker 1: figured if anyone could tell me about how exactly this
Speaker 1: all came to be, it would be one of the
Speaker 1: leading rat behavioral researchers in the country, Doctor Kelly Lambert
Speaker 1: at the University of Richmond.
Speaker 7: For most of psychology, it's just they were the only
Speaker 7: show in town if you wanted to do research with
Speaker 7: an animal model. When I was in graduate school at
Speaker 7: the University of Georgia, this is what we had. That
Speaker 7: was the only animal model you had.
Speaker 1: Lambert loves rats. She's written a book called The lab
Speaker 1: Rat Chronicles. A neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet's
Speaker 1: most successful mammals. She's particularly famous for experiments where she
Speaker 1: taught rats to drive cars, which, if we're being honest,
Speaker 1: is really why I've got to Richmond.
Speaker 7: So the idea was to train them get in the car,
Speaker 7: you get a fruitly sit here and get a fruely
Speaker 7: But early on it was amazing that they seemed to
Speaker 7: learn the constant a drop. So once we shaped them
Speaker 7: and they learned to press the right lever to go right,
Speaker 7: they seem to automatically know to press the left one
Speaker 7: to go left.
Speaker 1: If you've seen Stuart Little in his red convertible, you're
Speaker 1: not even half prepared for the image of a lab
Speaker 1: rat hunched over the dashboard on what appears to be
Speaker 1: a monster truck, just careening towards a bunch of fruit loops.
Speaker 1: Lambert loves working with her rats, but lately she's also
Speaker 1: been questioning how the rat became the be all end
Speaker 1: all for understanding human beings.
Speaker 7: I don't think they made a decision about which model
Speaker 7: organism should we use. The rat was already on board
Speaker 7: for biomedical research, so it's practical to use the rat.
Speaker 1: Basically, it's the lab rat industry. There was a whole
Speaker 1: factory line system around producing labrats via mass inbreeding, premised
Speaker 1: on the fantasy that the inbred rats were basically interchangeable
Speaker 1: with one another.
Speaker 7: They bred brothers and sisters for twenty generations. The intention
Speaker 7: was the animals be as close to clones as possible,
Speaker 7: and then whatever your manipulation was, diet, stress, movement, or whatever,
Speaker 7: they felt confident that they saw a difference between the
Speaker 7: experimental group that got it and the control group that didn't,
Speaker 7: that that variable was the influential variable.
Speaker 1: This was all taking off around the time Lawrence Cole's
Speaker 1: work with raccoons was being cast aside. That kind of
Speaker 1: inbreeding helped create rats who were much more docile and
Speaker 1: easier to control than wild rats and certainly than raccoons,
Speaker 1: which meant it gave the behaviorists easier, more reliable data.
Speaker 1: And then it just took off. Soon a prominent psychologist
Speaker 1: described the field as being infected by a plague of rats.
Speaker 1: Millions of dollars poured into rat studies. The leader of
Speaker 1: the Yale Institute of Human Relations announced that anything he
Speaker 1: observed about rats behaviors among other animals was quote identical
Speaker 1: with those operative in man, even in his highest behavioral
Speaker 1: achievements end quote. Let me play you a bit of
Speaker 1: film that Yelle Institute produced. I think it goes a
Speaker 1: long way to showing exactly how confident these people were
Speaker 1: in what studying rats could tell us about people.
Speaker 8: Again, a mild electric shock can be administered through the
Speaker 8: grid on the floor of the apparatus.
Speaker 1: This film has always freaked me out. There's a rat
Speaker 1: in a cage with an electric current running through the bars.
Speaker 1: He's got to figure out how to turn it off.
Speaker 8: This time, it can only be turned off by rotating
Speaker 8: a wheel. The satiated animals starts responding as soon as
Speaker 8: a drive is supplied.
Speaker 1: The whole time that tone is sounding, the rat is
Speaker 1: just frantically scrambling around his cage trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how to make it stop. Then he starts pawing at
Speaker 1: a wheel and it turns off.
Speaker 8: The drive produced by electric shock is stronger than hunger.
Speaker 1: It turns out zapping a rat is a good way
Speaker 1: to get it to do anything, including violence.
Speaker 8: Responding to another animal by striking him can also deal
Speaker 8: learn All he needs is a little motivation.
Speaker 1: If you could teach a rat to do anything, why
Speaker 1: not a person. Suddenly the scary world of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century began to seem a lot more manageable. Mass movements,
Speaker 1: great depressions, whatever. Just find the right set of incentives
Speaker 1: or punishments, and all of human behavior it could be
Speaker 1: predicted and controlled.
Speaker 7: When we started comparing that behavior to humans at a
Speaker 7: slot machine or something. People I think started seeing humans
Speaker 7: as big rats or rats as little humans. Always say
Speaker 7: that we're not. We've got what, six thousand mammalian species,
Speaker 7: and we're going to pick one or two.
Speaker 1: Few people question the dominance of the rat at first,
Speaker 1: Why bother when it was working so well? This kind
Speaker 1: of thing has always bothered me on a gut level.
Speaker 1: I look in the mirror every day and I do
Speaker 1: not see a rat staring back at me, at least
Speaker 1: nonsense patching the hole in my bathroom wall. We aren't rats.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying we can't learn anything about ourselves from animals,
Speaker 1: but I am saying that you should never underestimate how
Speaker 1: many of the things we think we know about human
Speaker 1: beings are actually things we know about inbred rats with
Speaker 1: brains the size of grapes kept in cages that sometimes
Speaker 1: electrocute you.
Speaker 7: And it's hard for me to think back about why
Speaker 7: didn't I question that, or did I ask if there
Speaker 7: are other models? And it's just come lately that I've
Speaker 7: had so many of these. Kelly, What the heck were
Speaker 7: you thinking? All these years?
Speaker 1: We built a science of human nature, and one of
Speaker 1: the strongest pillars was the lab rat. And who is
Speaker 1: the labrat? He's crucially not the raccoon. The raccoon lets
Speaker 1: it all hang out. He's defiant, mischievous, crafty. If asked
Speaker 1: to participate in a scientific experiment, he will inquire about
Speaker 1: payment than call in sick. Not the rat. The rat
Speaker 1: is hard working by instinct, diligent. He gnaws away, he
Speaker 1: navigated it's complex warrants. He gets a perfect score on
Speaker 1: his SATs. He's rational. Build the maze and he'll fall
Speaker 1: in line. He is, in short, a good animal for
Speaker 1: running the same test again and again and again without complaint,
Speaker 1: while delivering consistent, reliable data, suggesting that we humans behave
Speaker 1: in consistent, reliable ways. For all this, the rat has
Speaker 1: been rewarded by becoming the only animal synonymous with the
Speaker 1: scientific laboratory. It's not lab pigeon, it's not lab monkey.
Speaker 1: It's lab rat. But I was beginning to wonder what
Speaker 1: if it should have been lab raccoon. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Some years ago, when Michael Pettitt was working on his
Speaker 1: ingenious article about raccoon erasure, he took a colleague out
Speaker 1: to lunch. Suzann MacDonald, behaviorist and expert in animal cognition.
Speaker 1: He told her what he'd been learning about Lawrence Cole
Speaker 1: in the early raccoon studies. She, a fellow Torontonian, be
Speaker 1: set by the plague of raccoons, was like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: how did we miss this?
Speaker 4: I originally had thought and I told Mike this because
Speaker 4: I thought it was a brilliant insight. Oh, they're they're
Speaker 4: the monkeys of North America.
Speaker 1: By monkeys of North America, you mean they feel a
Speaker 1: certain ecological niche.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because we don't have monkeys, right, so it's just like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe they're just like that. They're not primates,
Speaker 4: but maybe they have evolved to cognitively to be like primates.
Speaker 1: Traveling to study monkeys was expensive. If raccoons were like monkeys,
Speaker 1: then living in Toronto was like living on safari. So
Speaker 1: McDonald caught the Lawrence colebug. She began to study raccoons
Speaker 1: and she's been doing it ever since.
Speaker 4: Because we don't know very much, just trying to fill
Speaker 4: gaps and trying to see what I find out about them,
Speaker 4: and they are annoying little critters, so it's been challenging
Speaker 4: and I wouldn't recommend it to most people.
Speaker 1: McDonald has become one of the world's leading experts in raccoons,
Speaker 1: and in particular the urban raccoons of Toronto, with whom
Speaker 1: I think she feels a strong kinship. For instance, I've
Speaker 1: seen people saying that there are one hundred thousand raccoons
Speaker 1: in Toronto. Where did they get that number? MacDonald told
Speaker 1: me that she was the origin of that statistic, and
Speaker 1: she just made a number up, which is exactly what
Speaker 1: a raccoon would do. She gets it. So, after a
Speaker 1: century of waiting, I prepared to receive the good news
Speaker 1: about the raccoons true intelligence from the source. I leaned
Speaker 1: back in my desk.
Speaker 4: Chair and I can tell you of having studied cognition
Speaker 4: and baby raccoons, they are dumber and sticks. They are
Speaker 4: so dumb, just terrible. Every one of our little markers
Speaker 4: that we use for animals cognission or intelligence or you know,
Speaker 4: developmental milestones, and they just fail every single one.
Speaker 1: How intriguing I thought, maybe the raccoons superintelligence develops at
Speaker 1: a later age.
Speaker 4: No, an adult not either.
Speaker 1: This is not going well.
Speaker 4: So honestly, that is what I'm disappointed me so much
Speaker 4: because I always thought, you know, the raccoons are the
Speaker 4: monkeys of North America, but they are not.
Speaker 1: I was at this point trying not to look hugely depressed, right,
Speaker 1: McDonald just kept going.
Speaker 4: So what they have done is a evolt to sort
Speaker 4: of search and destroy, and that seems to be their
Speaker 4: strategy plus pequal search and destroy. And they find a
Speaker 4: thing and they break it, right, But there are other
Speaker 4: situations where you present them with a thing and you
Speaker 4: can see them looking at it and figuring it out. Yeah,
Speaker 4: raccoons don't do that. They're just like, what can I
Speaker 4: do to knock this over? What can I do to
Speaker 4: break this open? What can I do to get whatever
Speaker 4: it is I need to get? And they just leave
Speaker 4: destruction in their way. So they are not sitting and
Speaker 4: thinking about things. They are all action. Very little thought.
Speaker 1: Here. I should just say that there's a lot we
Speaker 1: still don't know about raccoons, and indeed McDonald still gets
Speaker 1: a lot out of studying them too, especially the particularities
Speaker 1: of urban raccoons. But still, I had wondered about this
Speaker 1: question for years. Hearing that raccoons were morons actually was
Speaker 1: kind of a bummer in my book. But you know
Speaker 1: who was thrilled when I told him about it.
Speaker 3: That's precisely why there's such a better model for human beings.
Speaker 1: Again, local man Malcolm Ladwell.
Speaker 3: They are clever, mischievous, vengeful, destructive, and profoundly stupid. That
Speaker 3: is humanity. We observe the raccoon and we think there
Speaker 3: is a kind of deep intelligence there that's fueling his behavior,
Speaker 3: and there isn't. The raccoon just wants to mess things up, right,
Speaker 3: He just and he's maniacal about it. He just wants
Speaker 3: to destroy and he has a kind of surface cleverness
Speaker 3: that serves those destructive impulses. So when I look at
Speaker 3: the raccoon, I mean, do I need to say it?
Speaker 3: It's Donald Trump?
Speaker 5: He's a raccoon.
Speaker 4: Hey.
Speaker 3: The problem with our the way we think about Trump
Speaker 3: is at various points. You know, is Donald Trump a rat? No,
Speaker 3: he's not a rat.
Speaker 1: Nixon's a rat.
Speaker 3: Nixon Nixon's a rat.
Speaker 1: So is he a fox?
Speaker 3: Sometimes people say, oh, crazy like a fox, crazy like
Speaker 3: a fox. No, because the fox is actually a deeply
Speaker 3: intelligent animal right well.
Speaker 1: And crucially wary. The fox is wary. The raccoon is
Speaker 1: not wary.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, the fox would stops to think and pause
Speaker 3: and blake a strategy, and you know, takes his time.
Speaker 3: A raccoon would have fallen into the Russian orbit without
Speaker 3: realizing it. Raccoon, you know, like a raccoon would choose
Speaker 3: his running mates with carelessness and abandoned. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: just like, it's all, it's all raccoon. It feels like
Speaker 3: to call Trump a rat is to miss is to
Speaker 3: completely misunderstand who he is. It's just a raccoon. He's
Speaker 3: going to scrape outside your window all night and like
Speaker 3: create a racket and just know everyone else will be
Speaker 3: sleep with some groggy and he will be happy in
Speaker 3: the morning.
Speaker 1: There's also, I think crucially, if we're going back to
Speaker 1: this kind of did we pick the wrong model organism?
Speaker 1: What do we conclude about human beings if we think
Speaker 1: they are like rats. Rats are very hard working. You
Speaker 1: give them a task and they will do it ad nauseum.
Speaker 1: Just they're happy to just keep getting the job done.
Speaker 1: They are they live in little warrens. You put a
Speaker 1: rat in amaze and knows exactly what to do, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of like fine being an amaze. Problem solvers,
Speaker 1: they're problem solvers. They're sort of cautious about new things.
Speaker 1: You talk to any exterminator, it's like very hard to
Speaker 1: get a rat to eat poison, Like, they are very
Speaker 1: careful about what they eat, what risks they take. Raccoons
Speaker 1: are extremely disinhibited. They aren't where at all. A raccoon
Speaker 1: can live to like twenty in a lab. In the wild,
Speaker 1: they tend to live two to three years because they're
Speaker 1: just sort of like, what's that do? And then they
Speaker 1: just like like could jam their fingers in a socket.
Speaker 1: It's like and that's the end of the raccoon. We
Speaker 1: built the world for rats, but we are functionally raccoons,
Speaker 1: and so we are dissatisfied with the rat world. But
Speaker 1: it is the fact that we have the rat world
Speaker 1: that has kept us from blowing it all up in
Speaker 1: our face so far.
Speaker 5: No, yes, you can't.
Speaker 3: What you never plan for in a world built on
Speaker 3: rats on the rat model is that someone, instead of
Speaker 3: trying to navigate the maze, just wants to burn it down. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's the one thing. The ret is never going to
Speaker 3: do that, and the rat's never going to effectively commit
Speaker 3: a kind of institutional suicide. The raccoon just wants to
Speaker 3: destroy things.
Speaker 1: I did a complete one eighty on this story. I
Speaker 1: started thinking that the rat model was a just grace
Speaker 1: because I had rats all wrong. I see now it
Speaker 1: was kind of utopian. Every need could be anticipated, every
Speaker 1: behavior nudged, every outcome predicted, and every person satisfied. But
Speaker 1: there is no one animal model for human behavior. Rats
Speaker 1: its own thing, elab rats its own thing. Raccoons are
Speaker 1: really their own thing, And we're not one or the other.
Speaker 1: We're all the above and something else. But these days
Speaker 1: it seems clear we definitely did ourselves a disservice when
Speaker 1: we forgot about the raccoon. Sadly, I never got to
Speaker 1: come face to face with a raccoon in reporting this story,
Speaker 1: but I did get to meet a labrat.
Speaker 6: Rooms.
Speaker 7: I love designing tests for rats.
Speaker 1: Kelly Lambert now studies all kinds of animals in all
Speaker 1: kinds of places. She's particularly interest sid in wild animals
Speaker 1: these days, but Lambert still has a soft spot for
Speaker 1: the lamb rat. When I visited her at the University
Speaker 1: of Richmond, she took me back into a locked set
Speaker 1: of rooms. There were signs up that said quiet behavioral
Speaker 1: testing in progress, and behind one of the doors a
Speaker 1: cage with two rats she's been teaching to drive.
Speaker 7: They're generally, you know, like kittens. A wild rat I
Speaker 7: have to suit up. It would bite my nose off.
Speaker 7: So they've been bread to be able to handle them easily.
Speaker 7: So if I'm looking at aggression or stress, this may
Speaker 7: not be the best model to use.
Speaker 1: I leaned closer to the rat. Lambert seemed to think
Speaker 1: he was showing an unusual interest in my microphone.
Speaker 7: You're more interested in the novel than the.
Speaker 1: Food, more curious about the microphone.
Speaker 7: I wonder what it is about that.
Speaker 1: Actually, the rat was really grabbing at the mic, pulling
Speaker 1: it closer to its snout.
Speaker 5: Podcast rat, this is your first rat podcaster.
Speaker 1: It was really weird. He wasn't climbing on the mic.
Speaker 1: He was just yanking hit right up to his face.
Speaker 1: Not something you would have predicted if you know about
Speaker 1: rats and how wary they are. A mystery. I felt
Speaker 1: like maybe that rat was trying to tell me something.
Speaker 1: Rats communicate via ultrasonic frequencies. So a few days later,
Speaker 1: when I got home, I processed the audio, pitch shifted
Speaker 1: it down, and hit play.
Speaker 4: Have you ever seen a raccoon drive a car?
Speaker 6: Long Live the.
Speaker 5: Lab Rat.
Speaker 1: Sorry, buddy, I know you're right, but it's the raccoon's
Speaker 1: time now. Revisionous History is produced by me Ben Mattahaffrey,
Speaker 1: Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen
Speaker 1: Schakerji fact checking by Aica Robbins. Original scoring by Luis Kara,
Speaker 1: mixing and stirring on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our
Speaker 1: executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Lizette Barton
Speaker 1: at the Doctors, Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the
Speaker 1: History of Psychology, and to Sarah Nix and Gretacone. I'm
Speaker 1: Ben mad of Haffrey