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Speaker 1: Pushkin, How did you get into writing about raccoons.

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Speaker 2: I got into writing about raccoons because they started breaking

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Speaker 2: into my supposedly raccoon proof green ban named Toronto.

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Speaker 1: I'm talking with intrepid investigative reporter for the Toronto Star,

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Speaker 1: Amy Dempsey Raven. Typically she covers police wrongdoing, child welfare,

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Speaker 1: controversial homicides, but in twenty sixteen, when Toronto declared a

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Speaker 1: war on raccoons and unveiled a new raccoon resistant composting ben,

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Speaker 1: she realized it's time to get serious.

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Speaker 2: Mayor came out on this garbage truck and made all

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Speaker 2: of these promises, and I wondered. I thought to myself,

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Speaker 2: I'm going to keep an eye on things here.

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Speaker 1: This raccoon resistant ben cost the city thirty one million

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Speaker 1: Canadian dollars. But Toronto is own is the raccoon capital

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Speaker 1: of the world. Theoretically it's a point of pride, but

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Speaker 1: it's a little more complicated than that. If a race

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Speaker 1: of Martians took over your city, would you call it

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Speaker 1: the Martian capital of the world, only if you'd already

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Speaker 1: admitted defeat.

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Speaker 3: My first job after graduating was in Toronto, and I

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Speaker 3: had a.

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Speaker 1: Group house local man, Malcolm Gladwell.

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Speaker 3: I did not grow up in raccoon country, so I

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Speaker 3: had no idea something was making a racket so loud

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Speaker 3: and all night. Like when I say all night, I

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Speaker 3: mean without without stopping. From from the moment I went

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Speaker 3: to bed to the morning. I woke up, I couldn't sleep,

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Speaker 3: and I went my friends. A couple of my friends

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Speaker 3: were from Toronto, and I was like, what is going on? Like, oh,

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Speaker 3: it's raccoons. Like for them it was like, oh ye,

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Speaker 3: it's just like that's the deal here.

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Speaker 1: That was about forty years ago. Things have gotten much

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Speaker 1: much worse.

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Speaker 4: It doesn't get any more Toronto than this.

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Speaker 5: A raccoon inside a supermarket.

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Speaker 1: Here, raccoons in the garbage, Raccoons on the train, Oh god,

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Speaker 1: raccoons on the back deck.

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Speaker 4: Time to go down, buddy, time to go down.

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Speaker 5: You can't stay on this deck anymore that your viction day.

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Speaker 1: Raccoons have taken over the attics in a whole street

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Speaker 1: of houses and refused to leave. They brought traffic to

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Speaker 1: a screeching halt on Toronto's highways and just stood there.

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Speaker 1: They figured out how to open doors to houses and

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Speaker 1: refrigerators and stood on top of countertops, leftovers in their paws,

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Speaker 1: staring at freaked out homeowners as if to say, if

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Speaker 1: I wanted you here, I would have rung the bell.

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Speaker 1: Hence the priceya raccoon resistant bins, which surely no raccoon

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Speaker 1: would be able to open.

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Speaker 2: Soon after the rollout, we began hearing reports that raccoons

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Speaker 2: were outsmarting the bins, and the city said, now, that's

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Speaker 2: not really happening. But then one night they broke into mine.

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Speaker 1: Amy found herself wondering, how are raccoons smart enough to

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Speaker 1: open that bin? This was the question a historian of

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Speaker 1: science had found himself wondering one night when he looked

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Speaker 1: at his back deck in Toronto and saw composts all

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Speaker 1: over the place. He had an earlier version of the

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Speaker 1: compost bin, but here too, the raccoons had picked the lock.

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Speaker 1: Were they really just that smart? It turned out nobody

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Speaker 1: really knew. Raccoons had hardly been studied, basically, not at

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Speaker 1: all compared to other animals, like say, rats or monkeys.

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Speaker 1: This historian wanted to know why the midnight raid on

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Speaker 1: his compost bin would set in motion a sequence of

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Speaker 1: events that, in my own estimation, have come to Topple

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Speaker 1: an entire century of psychological theory and restored the raccoon

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Speaker 1: to its proper place, the dead center of how we

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Speaker 1: understand human beings.

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Speaker 3: Him Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History, my show

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Speaker 3: about things overlooked, misunderstood and in praise of Toronto. You

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Speaker 3: may be familiar with the phrase lab rat. Perhaps you

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Speaker 3: are aware that many of the things we know about

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Speaker 3: human beings and the way we behave are based upon

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Speaker 3: the things we know about rats and the way they behave.

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Speaker 3: But in this episode, my colleague Ben the daph Haffrey

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Speaker 3: asks what if we picked the wrong animal.

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Speaker 1: Many historians of science will write about the greats Einstein, Freud, Oppenheimer,

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Speaker 1: the kind of research project not usually begun while scooping

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Speaker 1: up trash in your bathrobe on your back deck in Toronto.

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Speaker 1: But Michael Pettitt's always gotten into things sideways.

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Speaker 5: I have almost never written about kind of the dominant

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Speaker 5: people in the field. I personally find myself attracted to

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Speaker 5: the misfits.

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Speaker 1: Pettitt is a historian of psychology at York University in Toronto.

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Speaker 5: I work one morning, and of course the compost is

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Speaker 5: all over the deck, on scooping it up, because the

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Speaker 5: raccoons could very easily get into the lock, and as

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Speaker 5: in a start of psychology, I asked myself, Huh, I

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Speaker 5: wonder if anyone ever used a puzzle box with raccoons.

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Speaker 5: They seem really good at it.

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Speaker 1: Petitt knew all about scientists putting rats in mazes and

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Speaker 1: puzzly cages, the mainstream stuff. Who cares, But in all

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Speaker 1: his studies he had never heard of a raccoon in

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Speaker 1: a puzzle box. And yet here on his deck was

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Speaker 1: evidence that they were basically able to outsmart any human system.

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Speaker 5: These raccoons seemed very adept at doing locks, and so

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Speaker 5: I was just curious.

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Speaker 1: Michael was curious for good reason, not just because of

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Speaker 1: the locks situation. We've basically never known quite what to

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Speaker 1: make of raccoons.

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Speaker 5: You know, they aren't finates, but they're also not rodents,

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Speaker 5: So there's like there's something about them that they sort

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Speaker 5: of take on this role as kind of intermediary species.

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Speaker 5: There's this reputation of the raccoon for being this cunning,

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Speaker 5: intelligent trickster.

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Speaker 1: For a while, well, there wasn't even consensus on how

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Speaker 1: exactly they evolved. The famous naturalist Carl Lenaeus called them

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Speaker 1: Ursus louder or washer bear, because they like to rinse

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Speaker 1: their food and water, and he thought they descended from bears. Now,

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Speaker 1: for any true raccoon fans out there, I should note that, yes,

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Speaker 1: they aren't actually washing their food. They basically see you

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Speaker 1: with their paws, and their paws are more sensitive in

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Speaker 1: the water. This, by the way, is the instinct behind

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Speaker 1: that amazing Japanese TV show where they gave a raccoon

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Speaker 1: cotton candy, which the raccoon dutifully washed until they vanished.

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Speaker 1: But no, they're not washing and they're not bears. When

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Speaker 1: Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World, he

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Speaker 1: remarked upon its quote clown like dogs, to which the

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Speaker 1: people of Italy said, Chris, what the hell are you

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Speaker 1: talking about? Until centuries later another naturalist realized, Oh, he's

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Speaker 1: talking about raccoons. They're their own thing.

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Speaker 5: They in some ways seem to be above the rodents,

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Speaker 5: and maybe even are carnivores.

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Speaker 1: Pettitt went looking for a history of raccoons science, specifically

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Speaker 1: about people investigating their intelligence, and found basically nothing. A

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Speaker 1: handful of scientists in one slim volume, in particular from

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Speaker 1: nineteen oh seven titled Concerning the Intelligence of Raccoons. It

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Speaker 1: was written by a man named Lawrence Cole, Frontier raccoonist.

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Speaker 5: So Lawrence Cole, in a lot of ways is a nobody.

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Speaker 5: You know, He's not someone if you go to a

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Speaker 5: history of psychology textbook and pull it off the shelf,

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Speaker 5: he's not someone that's particularly remarkable.

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Speaker 1: Lawrence Cole had done his graduate work at Harvard and

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Speaker 1: was part of a psychological movement that studied animals to

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Speaker 1: understand humans. In the nineteenth century, psychology had largely been

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Speaker 1: based on what people said about how they felt, which

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Speaker 1: was not super reliable. So why not instead observe how

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Speaker 1: animals behave and just extrapolate up the chain from there.

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Speaker 5: One absolutely says, it's not just our kind of our

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Speaker 5: physical formous human beings that is continuous with natural selection,

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Speaker 5: but also our psychological selves.

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Speaker 1: But which animal was best for the psychologists to study?

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Speaker 1: Any of them theoretically could work. Scientists were comparing species

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Speaker 1: across tests to see how they'd fare. People had studied chickens, dogs.

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Speaker 1: Coal's Advisor like the idea of studying monkeys, but monkeys

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Speaker 1: are super expensive. It would be helpful, though if there

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Speaker 1: were a kind of consensus, a linguis franca animal that

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Speaker 1: people could generalize from.

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Speaker 5: Through a series of circumstances, he acquires a small quality

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Speaker 5: of raccoons.

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Speaker 1: Cole still had to find an experiment of his own

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Speaker 1: to get his PhD. These raccoons seemed promising.

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Speaker 5: As far as Pool knew, no one had kind of

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Speaker 5: put raccoons through these motions. So that's adoptrible dissertation. I

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Speaker 5: can run these studies with these raccoons, right, whatever the

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Speaker 5: data is, I can say I have added to our

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Speaker 5: knowledge of compared to psychology.

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Speaker 1: He probably had a hunch that this was going to

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Speaker 1: be interesting.

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Speaker 5: I don't know if raccoons were the most charismatic of

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Speaker 5: our fauna, but raccoons they're kind of fun.

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Speaker 1: I think they're the most charismatic of our fauna.

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Speaker 5: Well, they're annoying, but they're like they're lovable scamps. Right.

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Speaker 1: Cole began running tests on the raccoons. He put them

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Speaker 1: in boxes with complicated locks every day for a whole

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Speaker 1: academic year, and he found they were incredible any box.

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Speaker 1: It seemed any puzzle the raccoon could solve it. And

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Speaker 1: what's more, the animal wasn't just going through the motions.

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Speaker 1: The raccoons seemed curious about what he was doing, and

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Speaker 1: Cole thought there was evidence that raccoons could hold images

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Speaker 1: in their mind. Nobody was making these kinds of claims

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Speaker 1: about other animals, so Cole started publishing his research, writing

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Speaker 1: the Leading Figures in Psychology, saying, Hey, these raccoons are

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Speaker 1: really unusually intelligent, maybe intelligent as monkeys, which seems to

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Speaker 1: me like it should make them a great model organism

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Speaker 1: for people. Except there was a movement that was growing

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Speaker 1: swiftly within Cole's field, right around them, which was explicitly

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Speaker 1: uncomfortable with any talk of an animal having a mind,

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Speaker 1: and it was fast becoming the only show in town.

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Speaker 1: It was called behaviorism. All this history is documented in

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Speaker 1: an amazing article by Michael Pettitt titled The Problem of

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Speaker 1: Raccoon Intelligence in Behaviorist America, which is one of my

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Speaker 1: favorite academic essays of all time, because the raccoon was

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Speaker 1: indeed a problem.

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Speaker 6: So it was no surprise to us that a lot

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Speaker 6: of psychologists steered clear of coon's.

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Speaker 1: Bob Bailey, he used to be the top guy at

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Speaker 1: a legendary behaviorist organization called Animal Behavior Enterprises. The founders

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Speaker 1: of that company wrote an infamous paper questioning the fundamentals

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Speaker 1: of behaviorism, the idea that all animals were blank slates

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Speaker 1: you could write whatever you wanted on. A key example,

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Speaker 1: one raccoon they trained to put coins in the box.

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Speaker 6: After a hundred or so responses, the raccoon would start.

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Speaker 6: Instead of just picking up one coin and taking it

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Speaker 6: to the box and putting it in the box, the

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Speaker 6: raccoon would pick up two coins and then rub them together,

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Speaker 6: and would start walking towards the box, and then it

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Speaker 6: would stop and rub the coins together, and then it

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Speaker 6: would go to the box and then start to put

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Speaker 6: the coins in, and then stop and rub the coins together,

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Speaker 6: and then start to put the coins back in the box,

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Speaker 6: and stop and rub the coins together. Eventually it would

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Speaker 6: put the coins in the box. Most of the.

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Speaker 1: Time, potentially, and most of the time were bad news

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Speaker 1: for people trying to turn psychology into a reputable hard science.

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Speaker 1: That raccoon box situation came later on, but this exact

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Speaker 1: dynamic put a bit of a target on Lawrence Cole,

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Speaker 1: the frontier raccoonist. And if you know anything about the

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Speaker 1: history of psychology, you'll know how the problem of the

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Speaker 1: raccoon was solved raccoon erasure. The raccoon does not figure

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Speaker 1: prominently at all, but you know which animal does, the rat.

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Speaker 1: I'm curious about how you account for that historical process

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Speaker 1: of raccoon erasure that begins around them.

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Speaker 5: One of the problems with raccoons is they are a

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Speaker 5: much larger and more cumbersome species than your bread labyrocks right.

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Speaker 5: In terms of feeding, caging, maintenance, rats proved much more

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Speaker 5: docile than a debt. Again, if you want to have

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Speaker 5: decent numbers study right. They also reproduce quite readily. They

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Speaker 5: have very short greeding cycles, and you can kind of

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Speaker 5: build up the populations.

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Speaker 1: But it wasn't just about convenience. It was also difficult

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Speaker 1: to generalize from raccoon experiments. Rats, for example, behaved in predictable,

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Speaker 1: repeatable ways, raccoons not so much. How is a scientist

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Speaker 1: supposed to work with an animal who each spring gets

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Speaker 1: wanderlust and attempts to break out of their cage. What

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Speaker 1: do you do when your experimental raccoon colony does escape

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Speaker 1: and moves into your labs of ventilation system. As behaviorism

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Speaker 1: gains steam, scientists in the big cities attacked the nascent

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Speaker 1: science of raccoons. Wasn't this all a bit silly? Meanwhile,

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Speaker 1: other behaviorists complained that keeping raccoon colonies was really just

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Speaker 1: a huge pain in the neck, and so we got

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Speaker 1: the century of the rat into a lesser degree the pigeon.

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Speaker 5: This behaviorism is a theory of control. They are animals

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Speaker 5: that you could control.

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Speaker 1: Behavior thought they were studying an animal that stood in

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Speaker 1: for all human beings, but actually they wound up studying

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Speaker 1: a lot of lab rats, and that led us to

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Speaker 1: some pretty flawed conclusions about people. We'll be right back

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Speaker 1: for a little while now. I've been interested in how

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Speaker 1: the lab rat has shaped our understanding of human beings.

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Speaker 1: Rats are all over the history of psychology, Rat studies

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Speaker 1: of depression, rat studies of cooperation, rat studies of rationality.

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Speaker 1: Think about the way we speak ratin a maze, the

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Speaker 1: rat race, malrat, jim rat, smell a rat, or rat's nest.

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Speaker 1: It's all rats all the way down. I figured if

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Speaker 1: anyone could tell me about how exactly this all came

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Speaker 1: to be, it would be one of the leading rat

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Speaker 1: behavioral researchers in the country. Doctor Kelly Lambert at the

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Speaker 1: University of Richmond.

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Speaker 7: For most of psychology. It's just they were the only

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Speaker 7: show in town. If you want to to do research

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Speaker 7: with an animal model. When I was in graduate school

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Speaker 7: at the University of Georgia, this is what we had.

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Speaker 7: That was the only animal model you had.

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Speaker 1: Lambert loves rats. She's written a book called The Labrat Chronicles.

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Speaker 1: A neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet's most successful mammals.

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Speaker 1: She's particularly famous for experiments where she taught rats to

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Speaker 1: drive cars, which, if we're being honest, is really why

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Speaker 1: I've gone to Richmond.

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Speaker 7: So the idea was to train them. Get in the car,

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Speaker 7: you get a fruitleate, sit here and get a fruitly

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Speaker 7: But early on it was amazing that they seemed to

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Speaker 7: learn the concept of driving. So once we shaped them

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Speaker 7: and they learned to press the right lever to go right,

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Speaker 7: they seem to automatically know to press the left one

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Speaker 7: to go left.

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Speaker 1: If you've seen Stuart Little in his red convertible, you're

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Speaker 1: not even half prepared for the image of a lab

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Speaker 1: rat hunched over the dashboard on what appears to be

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Speaker 1: a monster truck, just careening towards a bunch of fruit loops.

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Speaker 1: Lambert loves were with her rats, but lately she's also

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Speaker 1: been questioning how the rat became the be all end

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Speaker 1: all for understanding human beings.

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Speaker 7: I don't think they made a decision about which model

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Speaker 7: organism should we use. The rat was already on board

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Speaker 7: for biomedical research, so it's practical to use the rat.

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Speaker 1: Basically, it's the lab rat industry. There was a whole

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Speaker 1: factory line system around producing lab rats via mass inbreeding,

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Speaker 1: premised on the fantasy that the inbred rats were basically

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Speaker 1: interchangeable with one another.

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Speaker 7: They bred brothers and sisters for twenty generations. Their intention

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Speaker 7: was the animals be as close to clones as possible,

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Speaker 7: and then whatever your manipulation was, diet, stress, movement, or whatever,

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Speaker 7: they felt confident that they saw a difference between the

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Speaker 7: experimental group that got it and the control group that didn't,

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Speaker 7: that that variable was the influential variable.

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Speaker 1: This was all taking off around the time and Cole's

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Speaker 1: work with raccoons was being cast aside. That kind of

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Speaker 1: inbreeding helped create rats who were much more docile and

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Speaker 1: easier to control than wild rats and certainly than raccoons,

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Speaker 1: which meant it gave the behaviorists easier, more reliable data,

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Speaker 1: and then it just took off. Soon. A prominent psychologist

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Speaker 1: described the field as being infected by a plague of rats.

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Speaker 1: Millions of dollars poured into rat studies. The leader of

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Speaker 1: the Yale Institute of Human Relations announced that anything he

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Speaker 1: observed about rats behaviors among other animals was quote identical

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Speaker 1: with those operative in man, even in his highest behavioral

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Speaker 1: achievements end quote. Let me play you a bit of

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Speaker 1: film that Yale Institute produced. I think it goes a

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Speaker 1: long way to showing exactly how confident these people were

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Speaker 1: in what studying rats could tell us about people.

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Speaker 8: Again, a mild electric shock and they administered through the

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Speaker 8: grid on the floor of the apparatus.

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Speaker 1: This film has always freaked me out. A rat in

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Speaker 1: a cage with an electric current running through the bars.

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Speaker 1: He's got to figure out how to turn it off.

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Speaker 8: This time, it can only be turned off by ropetaking

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Speaker 8: a wheel. The satiated animals starts responding as soon as

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Speaker 8: a drive is supplied.

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Speaker 1: The whole time that tone is sounding, the rat is

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Speaker 1: just frantically scrambling around his cage trying to figure out

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Speaker 1: how to make it stop. Then he starts pawing at

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Speaker 1: a wheel and it turns off.

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Speaker 8: The drive produced by electric shock is stronger than hunger.

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Speaker 1: It turns out zapping a rat is a good way

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Speaker 1: to get it to do anything, including violence.

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Speaker 8: Responding to another animal by striking him can also be learned.

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Speaker 8: All he needs is a little motivation.

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Speaker 1: If you could teach a rat to do anything, why

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Speaker 1: not a person. Suddenly the scary world of the twentieth

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Speaker 1: century began to seem a lot more manageable. Mass movements,

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Speaker 1: great depressions, whatever. Just find the right set of incentives

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Speaker 1: or punishments, and all of human behavior it could be

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Speaker 1: predicted and can controlled.

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Speaker 7: We started comparing that behavior to humans at a slot

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Speaker 7: machine or something. People I think started seeing humans as

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Speaker 7: big rats or rats as little humans. Always say that

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Speaker 7: we're not. We've got what six thousand mammalian species, and

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Speaker 7: we're going to pick one or two.

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Speaker 1: A few people question the dominance of the rat at first,

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Speaker 1: Why bother when it was working so well. This kind

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Speaker 1: of thing has always bothered me on a gut level.

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Speaker 1: I look in the mirror every day and I do

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Speaker 1: not see a rat staring back at me. At least

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Speaker 1: nonsense patching the hole in my bathroom wall. We aren't rats.

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Speaker 1: I'm not saying we can't learn anything about ourselves from animals,

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Speaker 1: but I am saying that you should never underestimate how

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Speaker 1: many of the things we think we know about human

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Speaker 1: beings are actually things we know about inbred rats with

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Speaker 1: brains the size of grapes kept in cages that sometimes

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Speaker 1: electrocute you.

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Speaker 7: And it's hard for me to think back about why

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Speaker 7: didn't I question that, or did I ask if there

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Speaker 7: are other models? And it's just become lightly that I've

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Speaker 7: had so many of these. Kelly, what the heck were

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Speaker 7: you thinking? All these years?

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Speaker 1: We built a science of human nature and one of

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Speaker 1: the strongest pillars was the labrat. And who is the labrat?

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Speaker 1: He's crucially not the raccoon. The raccoon lets it all

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Speaker 1: hang out. He's defiant, mischievous, crafty. If asked to participate

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Speaker 1: in a scientific experiment, he will inquire about payment than

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Speaker 1: callin sick. Not the rat. The rat is hard working

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Speaker 1: by instinct, diligent. He gnaws away, he navigates complex warrants.

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Speaker 1: He gets a perfect score on his SATs. He's rational.

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Speaker 1: Build the maze and he'll fall in line. He is

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Speaker 1: in short, a good animal for running the same test

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Speaker 1: again and again and again without complaint, while delivering consistent,

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Speaker 1: reliable data suggesting that we humans behave in consistent, reliable ways.

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Speaker 1: For all this, the rat has been rewarded by becoming

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Speaker 1: the only animals synonymous with the scientific laboratory. It's not

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Speaker 1: lab pigeon, it's not lab monkey, it's lab rat. But

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Speaker 1: I was beginning to wonder what if it should have

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Speaker 1: been lab raccoon. We'll be right back. Some years ago,

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Speaker 1: when Michael Pettitt was working on his ingenious article about

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Speaker 1: raccoon or rasure, he took a colleague out to lunch,

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Speaker 1: Suzanne MacDonald, behaviorist and expert in animal cognition. He told

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Speaker 1: her what he'd been learning about Lawrence Cole and the

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Speaker 1: early raccoon studies. She, a fellow Torontonian beset by the

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Speaker 1: plague of raccoons, was like, oh my god, how did

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Speaker 1: we miss this?

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Speaker 4: I originally had thought, and I told Mike this because

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Speaker 4: I thought it was a brilliant insight. Oh, they're they're

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Speaker 4: the monkeys of North America.

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Speaker 1: By monkeys of North America, you mean they fill a

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Speaker 1: certain ecological niche yeah.

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Speaker 4: Because we don't have monkeys, right, So it's just like, oh, well,

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Speaker 4: you know, maybe they're just like that. They're not primates,

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Speaker 4: but maybe they have evolved to cognitively to be like primates.

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Speaker 1: Traveling to study monkeys was expensive. If raccoons were like monkeys,

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Speaker 1: then living in Toronto was like living on safari. So

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Speaker 1: McDonald caught the Lawrence colebug. She began to study raccoons

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Speaker 1: and she's been doing it ever since.

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Speaker 4: Because we don't know very much, just trying to fill

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Speaker 4: gaps and trying to see what I find out about them,

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Speaker 4: and they are annoying little critters. So it's been challenging

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Speaker 4: and I wouldn't recommend it to most people.

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Speaker 1: McDonald has become one of the world's leading experts in raccoons,

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Speaker 1: and in particular the urban raccoons of Toronto, with whom

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Speaker 1: I think she feels a strong kinship. For instance, I've

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Speaker 1: seen people saying that there are one hundred thousand raccoons

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Speaker 1: in Toronto. Where did they get that number? McDonald told

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Speaker 1: me that she was the origin of that statistic, and

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Speaker 1: she just made a number up, which is exactly what

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Speaker 1: a raccoon would do. She gets it. So, after a

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Speaker 1: century of waiting I prepared to receive the good news

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Speaker 1: about the raccoon's true intelligence from the source. I leaned

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Speaker 1: back in my desk chair.

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Speaker 4: And I can tell you, having studied cognition and maybe raccoons,

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Speaker 4: they are dumber and sticks. They are so dumb, just terrible.

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Speaker 4: Every one of our little markers that we use for

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Speaker 4: animals cognition or intelligence or you know, developmental milestones are

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Speaker 4: going they just fail every single one.

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Speaker 1: How intriguing. I thought maybe the raccoons super intelligence develops

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Speaker 1: at a later age.

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Speaker 4: No, an adult not either.

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Speaker 1: This was not going well.

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Speaker 4: So honestly, that that is what I've disappointed me so much,

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Speaker 4: because I always thought, you know that raccoons are the

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Speaker 4: monkeys of North America, but they are not.

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Speaker 1: I was at this point trying not to look hugely depressed,

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Speaker 1: but McDonald just kept going.

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Speaker 4: So what they have done is a evolved to sort

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Speaker 4: of search and destroying. That seems to be their strategy

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Speaker 4: plus pecqual search and destroy and they find a thing

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Speaker 4: and they break it, right, But there are other situations

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Speaker 4: where you present them with a thing and you can

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Speaker 4: see them looking at it and figuring it out. Yeah,

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Speaker 4: raccoons don't do that. They're just like, what can I

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Speaker 4: do to knock this over? What can I do to

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Speaker 4: break this open? What can I do to get whatever

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Speaker 4: it is I need to get? And they just leave

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Speaker 4: destruction in their way. So they are not sitting and

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Speaker 4: thinking about things. They are all action, very little thought.

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Speaker 1: Here, I should just say that there's a lot we

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Speaker 1: still don't know about raccoons, and indeed McDonald still gets

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Speaker 1: a lot out of studying them too, especially the particularities

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Speaker 1: of urban raccoons. But still, I had wondered about this

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Speaker 1: question for years. Hearing that raccoons were morons actually was

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Speaker 1: kind of a bummer in my book. But you know

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Speaker 1: who was thrilled when I told them about it.

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Speaker 3: That's precisely why there's such a better model for human beings.

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Speaker 1: Again, local man Malcolm Gladwell.

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Speaker 3: They are clever, mischievous, vengeful, destructive, and profoundly stupid. That

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00:25:25,036 --> 00:25:27,836
Speaker 3: is humanity. We observe the raccoon and we think there

432
00:25:27,916 --> 00:25:32,116
Speaker 3: is a kind of deep intelligence there that's fueling his behavior,

433
00:25:32,516 --> 00:25:37,236
Speaker 3: and there isn't. The raccoon just wants to mess things up, right,

434
00:25:37,756 --> 00:25:42,036
Speaker 3: He just and he's maniacal about it. He just wants

435
00:25:42,076 --> 00:25:46,116
Speaker 3: to destroy and he has a kind of surface cleverness

436
00:25:46,476 --> 00:25:50,436
Speaker 3: that serves those destructive impulses. So when I look at

437
00:25:50,476 --> 00:25:53,876
Speaker 3: the raccoon, I mean, do I need to say it?

438
00:25:53,876 --> 00:25:55,556
Speaker 3: It's Donald Trump? He's a raccoon.

439
00:25:55,716 --> 00:25:55,916
Speaker 4: Hey.

440
00:25:56,116 --> 00:25:58,196
Speaker 3: The problem with our the way we think about Trump

441
00:25:58,236 --> 00:26:02,076
Speaker 3: is at various points. You know, is Donald Trump a rat? No,

442
00:26:02,156 --> 00:26:02,876
Speaker 3: he's not a rat.

443
00:26:02,996 --> 00:26:03,836
Speaker 1: Nixon's a rat.

444
00:26:04,436 --> 00:26:06,756
Speaker 3: Nixon's a rat.

445
00:26:06,876 --> 00:26:07,876
Speaker 1: So is he a fox?

446
00:26:08,116 --> 00:26:12,236
Speaker 3: Sometimes people say crazy like a fox, crazy like a fox. No,

447
00:26:12,316 --> 00:26:16,276
Speaker 3: because the fox is actually a deeply intelligent animal, right well.

448
00:26:16,196 --> 00:26:19,196
Speaker 1: And crucially wary. The fox is wary. The raccoon is

449
00:26:19,236 --> 00:26:19,836
Speaker 1: not wary.

450
00:26:20,196 --> 00:26:24,356
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, the fox wood stops to think and pause

451
00:26:24,436 --> 00:26:28,596
Speaker 3: and make a strategy, and you know, takes his time.

452
00:26:28,956 --> 00:26:31,636
Speaker 3: A raccoon would have fallen into the Russian orbit without

453
00:26:31,636 --> 00:26:35,596
Speaker 3: realizing it. The raccoon, you know, like a raccoon would

454
00:26:35,676 --> 00:26:39,236
Speaker 3: choose his running mates with carelessness and abandoned. I mean,

455
00:26:39,236 --> 00:26:42,076
Speaker 3: it's just like, it's all, it's all raccoon. It feels

456
00:26:42,116 --> 00:26:45,236
Speaker 3: like to call Trump a rat is to miss is

457
00:26:45,276 --> 00:26:49,356
Speaker 3: to completely misunderstand who he is. It's just a raccoon.

458
00:26:49,356 --> 00:26:51,956
Speaker 3: He's going to scrape outside your window all night and

459
00:26:52,036 --> 00:26:54,356
Speaker 3: like create a racket and just know everyone else will

460
00:26:54,356 --> 00:26:56,436
Speaker 3: be sleep with some groggy and he will be happy

461
00:26:56,436 --> 00:26:56,876
Speaker 3: in the morning.

462
00:26:57,156 --> 00:26:59,796
Speaker 1: There's also, I think crucially, if we're going back to

463
00:26:59,836 --> 00:27:02,556
Speaker 1: this kind of did we pick the wrong model organism?

464
00:27:02,596 --> 00:27:04,516
Speaker 1: What do we conclude about human beings if we think

465
00:27:04,516 --> 00:27:08,636
Speaker 1: they are like rats. Rats are very hard working. You

466
00:27:08,716 --> 00:27:12,236
Speaker 1: give them a task and they will do it ad nauseum,

467
00:27:12,676 --> 00:27:15,596
Speaker 1: just just they're happy to just keep getting the job done.

468
00:27:16,036 --> 00:27:19,036
Speaker 1: They are They live in little warrens. You put a

469
00:27:19,076 --> 00:27:20,676
Speaker 1: rat in amaze and knows exactly what to do, and

470
00:27:20,716 --> 00:27:23,996
Speaker 1: it's kind of like fine being an amaze.

471
00:27:24,436 --> 00:27:25,276
Speaker 3: Problem solvers.

472
00:27:25,356 --> 00:27:30,276
Speaker 1: They're problem solvers. They're sort of cautious about new things.

473
00:27:30,316 --> 00:27:32,556
Speaker 1: You talk to any exterminator. It's like very hard to

474
00:27:32,556 --> 00:27:35,356
Speaker 1: get a rat to eat poison. Like they they are

475
00:27:35,716 --> 00:27:37,916
Speaker 1: very careful about what they eat, what risks they take.

476
00:27:38,516 --> 00:27:45,516
Speaker 1: Raccoons are extremely disinhibited. They aren't wary at all. A

477
00:27:45,636 --> 00:27:48,796
Speaker 1: raccoon can live to like twenty in a lab. In

478
00:27:48,876 --> 00:27:51,316
Speaker 1: the wild, they tend to live two to three years

479
00:27:51,636 --> 00:27:53,476
Speaker 1: because they're just sort of like, what's that do and

480
00:27:53,516 --> 00:27:57,236
Speaker 1: they just like like could jam their fingers in a socket.

481
00:27:57,756 --> 00:28:00,796
Speaker 1: It's like and that's the end of the raccoon. We

482
00:28:00,916 --> 00:28:05,756
Speaker 1: built the world for rats, but we are functionally raccoons,

483
00:28:05,956 --> 00:28:08,476
Speaker 1: and so we are dissatisfied with the rat world. But

484
00:28:08,556 --> 00:28:10,676
Speaker 1: it is the fact that we have the rat world

485
00:28:11,036 --> 00:28:13,236
Speaker 1: that has kept us from blowing it all up in

486
00:28:13,276 --> 00:28:14,076
Speaker 1: our face so far.

487
00:28:14,316 --> 00:28:15,636
Speaker 5: No, yes, you can't.

488
00:28:15,756 --> 00:28:19,076
Speaker 3: What you never plan for in a world built on

489
00:28:20,436 --> 00:28:24,196
Speaker 3: rats on the rat model, is it someone instead of

490
00:28:24,196 --> 00:28:27,476
Speaker 3: trying to navigate the maze, just wants to burn it down.

491
00:28:28,076 --> 00:28:30,356
Speaker 3: That's the one thing. The ret is never going to

492
00:28:30,476 --> 00:28:33,596
Speaker 3: do that, and the rat's never going to effectively commit

493
00:28:33,636 --> 00:28:37,396
Speaker 3: a kind of institutional suicide. The raccoon just wants to

494
00:28:37,436 --> 00:28:39,116
Speaker 3: destroy things.

495
00:28:39,916 --> 00:28:42,676
Speaker 1: I did a complete one eighty on this story. I

496
00:28:42,716 --> 00:28:45,436
Speaker 1: started thinking that the rat model was a disgrace because

497
00:28:45,516 --> 00:28:48,916
Speaker 1: I had rats all wrong. I see now, it was

498
00:28:48,996 --> 00:28:53,916
Speaker 1: kind of utopian. Every need could be anticipated, every behavior nudged,

499
00:28:54,356 --> 00:28:59,316
Speaker 1: every outcome predicted, and every person satisfied. But there is

500
00:28:59,436 --> 00:29:03,836
Speaker 1: no one animal model for human behavior. Rats its own thing,

501
00:29:04,156 --> 00:29:07,916
Speaker 1: elab rats its own thing. Raccoons are really their own thing,

502
00:29:08,436 --> 00:29:10,916
Speaker 1: And we're not one or the other. We're all of

503
00:29:10,956 --> 00:29:15,276
Speaker 1: the above and something else. But these days it seems

504
00:29:15,316 --> 00:29:19,436
Speaker 1: clear we definitely did ourselves a disservice when we forgot

505
00:29:19,556 --> 00:29:27,916
Speaker 1: about the raccoon. Sadly I never got to come face

506
00:29:27,956 --> 00:29:30,676
Speaker 1: to face with a raccoon and reporting this story, but

507
00:29:30,756 --> 00:29:32,796
Speaker 1: I did get to meet a labrat.

508
00:29:35,756 --> 00:29:36,316
Speaker 3: Rooms.

509
00:29:37,436 --> 00:29:39,636
Speaker 7: I love designing tests for rats.

510
00:29:39,996 --> 00:29:42,556
Speaker 1: Kelly Lambert now studies all kinds of animals in all

511
00:29:42,636 --> 00:29:46,596
Speaker 1: kinds of places. She's particularly interested in wild animals these days,

512
00:29:46,836 --> 00:29:49,956
Speaker 1: but Lambert still has a soft spot for the labrat.

513
00:29:50,156 --> 00:29:52,836
Speaker 1: When I visited her at the University of Richmond, she

514
00:29:52,916 --> 00:29:55,876
Speaker 1: took me back into a locked set of rooms. There

515
00:29:55,876 --> 00:29:59,396
Speaker 1: were signs up that said quiet behavioral testing in progress,

516
00:30:00,156 --> 00:30:02,836
Speaker 1: and behind one of the doors a cage with two

517
00:30:02,916 --> 00:30:04,756
Speaker 1: rats she's been teaching to drive.

518
00:30:06,756 --> 00:30:10,716
Speaker 7: They're generally, you know, like kittens. I have to suit up.

519
00:30:10,796 --> 00:30:14,916
Speaker 7: It would bite my nose off. So they've been bread

520
00:30:15,236 --> 00:30:20,636
Speaker 7: to be able to handle them easily. So if I'm

521
00:30:20,636 --> 00:30:23,236
Speaker 7: looking at aggression or stress, this may not be the

522
00:30:23,276 --> 00:30:24,556
Speaker 7: best model to use.

523
00:30:25,236 --> 00:30:27,916
Speaker 1: I leaned closer to the rat. Lambert seemed to think

524
00:30:27,956 --> 00:30:30,356
Speaker 1: he was showing an unusual interest in my microphone.

525
00:30:31,916 --> 00:30:33,876
Speaker 7: You're more interested in the novel than the.

526
00:30:33,876 --> 00:30:36,476
Speaker 1: Food, more curious about the microphone. I wonder what it

527
00:30:36,516 --> 00:30:39,796
Speaker 1: is about that. Actually the rat was really grabbing at

528
00:30:39,796 --> 00:30:42,396
Speaker 1: the mic, pulling it closer to its snout.

529
00:30:43,036 --> 00:30:45,956
Speaker 7: Podcast rat, this is your first rat podcaster.

530
00:30:48,596 --> 00:30:51,636
Speaker 1: It was really weird. He wasn't climbing on the mic.

531
00:30:51,676 --> 00:30:53,956
Speaker 1: He was just yanking it right up to his face.

532
00:30:54,596 --> 00:30:56,476
Speaker 1: Not something you would have predicted if you know about

533
00:30:56,596 --> 00:31:00,196
Speaker 1: rats and how wary they are. A mystery. I felt

534
00:31:00,196 --> 00:31:02,356
Speaker 1: like maybe that rat was trying to tell me something.

535
00:31:03,076 --> 00:31:07,556
Speaker 1: Rats communicate via ultrasonic frequencies. So a few days later,

536
00:31:07,636 --> 00:31:11,596
Speaker 1: when I got home, processed the audio, pitch shifted it

537
00:31:11,636 --> 00:31:13,316
Speaker 1: down and hit play.

538
00:31:14,116 --> 00:31:16,196
Speaker 4: Have you ever seen a raccoon drive a car? Long

539
00:31:16,316 --> 00:31:17,676
Speaker 4: Live the Librat?

540
00:31:18,756 --> 00:31:22,316
Speaker 1: Sorry, buddy, I know you're right, but it's the raccoon's

541
00:31:22,356 --> 00:31:33,276
Speaker 1: time now. Revision of History is produced by me Ben

542
00:31:33,316 --> 00:31:37,716
Speaker 1: Mattip Haffrey, Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor

543
00:31:37,796 --> 00:31:42,476
Speaker 1: is Karen Schakerji, fact checking by Anica Robbins, original scoring

544
00:31:42,556 --> 00:31:46,436
Speaker 1: by Luis Kara, mixing and mastering on this episode by

545
00:31:46,436 --> 00:31:50,956
Speaker 1: Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks

546
00:31:50,996 --> 00:31:54,196
Speaker 1: to Lizette Barton at the Doctors Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings

547
00:31:54,236 --> 00:31:56,996
Speaker 1: Center for the History of Psychology, and to Sarah Nix

548
00:31:57,196 --> 00:32:04,956
Speaker 1: and Greta Cone. I'm Bennatip Haffrey

549
00:32:09,196 --> 00:32:09,236
Speaker 8: O