Rat vs. Raccoon

Pushkin, How did you get into writing about raccoons.

I got into writing about raccoons because they started breaking into my supposedly raccoon proof green ban named Toronto.

I'm talking with intrepid investigative reporter for the Toronto Star, Amy Dempsey Raven. Typically she covers police wrongdoing, child welfare, controversial homicides, but in twenty sixteen, when Toronto declared a war on raccoons and unveiled a new raccoon resistant composting ben, she realized it's time to get serious.

Mayor came out on this garbage truck and made all of these promises, and I wondered. I thought to myself, I'm going to keep an eye on things here.

This raccoon resistant ben cost the city thirty one million Canadian dollars. But Toronto is own is the raccoon capital of the world. Theoretically it's a point of pride, but it's a little more complicated than that. If a race of Martians took over your city, would you call it the Martian capital of the world, only if you'd already admitted defeat.

My first job after graduating was in Toronto, and I had a.

Group house local man, Malcolm Gladwell.

I did not grow up in raccoon country, so I had no idea something was making a racket so loud and all night. Like when I say all night, I mean without without stopping. From from the moment I went to bed to the morning. I woke up, I couldn't sleep, and I went my friends. A couple of my friends were from Toronto, and I was like, what is going on? Like, oh, it's raccoons. Like for them it was like, oh ye, it's just like that's the deal here.

That was about forty years ago. Things have gotten much much worse.

It doesn't get any more Toronto than this.

A raccoon inside a supermarket.

Here, raccoons in the garbage, Raccoons on the train, Oh god, raccoons on the back deck.

Time to go down, buddy, time to go down.

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

Raccoons have taken over the attics in a whole street of houses and refused to leave. They brought traffic to a screeching halt on Toronto's highways and just stood there. They figured out how to open doors to houses and refrigerators and stood on top of countertops, leftovers in their paws, staring at freaked out homeowners as if to say, if I wanted you here, I would have rung the bell. Hence the priceya raccoon resistant bins, which surely no raccoon would be able to open.

Soon after the rollout, we began hearing reports that raccoons were outsmarting the bins, and the city said, now, that's not really happening. But then one night they broke into mine.

Amy found herself wondering, how are raccoons smart enough to open that bin? This was the question a historian of science had found himself wondering one night when he looked at his back deck in Toronto and saw composts all over the place. He had an earlier version of the compost bin, but here too, the raccoons had picked the lock. Were they really just that smart? It turned out nobody

Him Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked, misunderstood and in praise of Toronto. You may be familiar with the phrase lab rat. Perhaps you are aware that many of the things we know about human beings and the way we behave are based upon the things we know about rats and the way they behave. But in this episode, my colleague Ben the daph Haffrey asks what if we picked the wrong animal.

Many historians of science will write about the greats Einstein, Freud, Oppenheimer, the kind of research project not usually begun while scooping up trash in your bathrobe on your back deck in Toronto. But Michael Pettitt's always gotten into things sideways.

I have almost never written about kind of the dominant people in the field. I personally find myself attracted to the misfits.

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

I work one morning, and of course the compost is all over the deck, on scooping it up, because the raccoons could very easily get into the lock, and as in a start of psychology, I asked myself, Huh, I wonder if anyone ever used a puzzle box with raccoons. They seem really good at it.

Petitt knew all about scientists putting rats in mazes and puzzly cages, the mainstream stuff. Who cares, But in all his studies he had never heard of a raccoon in a puzzle box. And yet here on his deck was evidence that they were basically able to outsmart any human system.

These raccoons seemed very adept at doing locks, and so I was just curious.

Michael was curious for good reason, not just because of the locks situation. We've basically never known quite what to make of raccoons.

You know, they aren't finates, but they're also not rodents, So there's like there's something about them that they sort of take on this role as kind of intermediary species. There's this reputation of the raccoon for being this cunning, intelligent trickster.

For a while, well, there wasn't even consensus on how exactly they evolved. The famous naturalist Carl Lenaeus called them Ursus louder or washer bear, because they like to rinse their food and water, and he thought they descended from bears. Now, for any true raccoon fans out there, I should note that, yes, they aren't actually washing their food. They basically see you with their paws, and their paws are more sensitive in

They in some ways seem to be above the rodents, and maybe even are carnivores.

Pettitt went looking for a history of raccoons science, specifically about people investigating their intelligence, and found basically nothing. A handful of scientists in one slim volume, in particular from nineteen oh seven titled Concerning the Intelligence of Raccoons. It was written by a man named Lawrence Cole, Frontier raccoonist.

So Lawrence Cole, in a lot of ways is a nobody. You know, He's not someone if you go to a history of psychology textbook and pull it off the shelf, he's not someone that's particularly remarkable.

Lawrence Cole had done his graduate work at Harvard and was part of a psychological movement that studied animals to understand humans. In the nineteenth century, psychology had largely been based on what people said about how they felt, which was not super reliable. So why not instead observe how animals behave and just extrapolate up the chain from there.

One absolutely says, it's not just our kind of our physical formous human beings that is continuous with natural selection, but also our psychological selves.

But which animal was best for the psychologists to study? Any of them theoretically could work. Scientists were comparing species across tests to see how they'd fare. People had studied chickens, dogs. Coal's Advisor like the idea of studying monkeys, but monkeys are super expensive. It would be helpful, though if there were a kind of consensus, a linguis franca animal that people could generalize from.

Through a series of circumstances, he acquires a small quality of raccoons.

Cole still had to find an experiment of his own to get his PhD. These raccoons seemed promising.

As far as Pool knew, no one had kind of put raccoons through these motions. So that's adoptrible dissertation. I can run these studies with these raccoons, right, whatever the data is, I can say I have added to our knowledge of compared to psychology.

He probably had a hunch that this was going to be interesting.

I don't know if raccoons were the most charismatic of our fauna, but raccoons they're kind of fun.

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

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

Cole began running tests on the raccoons. He put them in boxes with complicated locks every day for a whole academic year, and he found they were incredible any box. It seemed any puzzle the raccoon could solve it. And what's more, the animal wasn't just going through the motions. The raccoons seemed curious about what he was doing, and Cole thought there was evidence that raccoons could hold images

So it was no surprise to us that a lot of psychologists steered clear of coon's.

Bob Bailey, he used to be the top guy at a legendary behaviorist organization called Animal Behavior Enterprises. The founders of that company wrote an infamous paper questioning the fundamentals of behaviorism, the idea that all animals were blank slates you could write whatever you wanted on. A key example, one raccoon they trained to put coins in the box.

After a hundred or so responses, the raccoon would start. Instead of just picking up one coin and taking it to the box and putting it in the box, the raccoon would pick up two coins and then rub them together, and would start walking towards the box, and then it would stop and rub the coins together, and then it would go to the box and then start to put the coins in, and then stop and rub the coins together, and then start to put the coins back in the box,

Time, potentially, and most of the time were bad news for people trying to turn psychology into a reputable hard science. That raccoon box situation came later on, but this exact dynamic put a bit of a target on Lawrence Cole, the frontier raccoonist. And if you know anything about the history of psychology, you'll know how the problem of the raccoon was solved raccoon erasure. The raccoon does not figure prominently at all, but you know which animal does, the rat.

One of the problems with raccoons is they are a much larger and more cumbersome species than your bread labyrocks right. In terms of feeding, caging, maintenance, rats proved much more docile than a debt. Again, if you want to have decent numbers study right. They also reproduce quite readily. They have very short greeding cycles, and you can kind of build up the populations.

But it wasn't just about convenience. It was also difficult to generalize from raccoon experiments. Rats, for example, behaved in predictable, repeatable ways, raccoons not so much. How is a scientist supposed to work with an animal who each spring gets wanderlust and attempts to break out of their cage. What do you do when your experimental raccoon colony does escape and moves into your labs of ventilation system. As behaviorism gains steam, scientists in the big cities attacked the nascent

This behaviorism is a theory of control. They are animals that you could control.

Behavior thought they were studying an animal that stood in for all human beings, but actually they wound up studying a lot of lab rats, and that led us to some pretty flawed conclusions about people. We'll be right back for a little while now. I've been interested in how the lab rat has shaped our understanding of human beings. Rats are all over the history of psychology, Rat studies of depression, rat studies of cooperation, rat studies of rationality.

For most of psychology. It's just they were the only show in town. If you want to to do research with an animal model. When I was in graduate school at the University of Georgia, this is what we had. That was the only animal model you had.

Lambert loves rats. She's written a book called The Labrat Chronicles. A neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet's most successful mammals. She's particularly famous for experiments where she taught rats to drive cars, which, if we're being honest, is really why I've gone to Richmond.

So the idea was to train them. Get in the car, you get a fruitleate, sit here and get a fruitly But early on it was amazing that they seemed to learn the concept of driving. So once we shaped them and they learned to press the right lever to go right, they seem to automatically know to press the left one to go left.

If you've seen Stuart Little in his red convertible, you're not even half prepared for the image of a lab rat hunched over the dashboard on what appears to be a monster truck, just careening towards a bunch of fruit loops. Lambert loves were with her rats, but lately she's also been questioning how the rat became the be all end all for understanding human beings.

I don't think they made a decision about which model organism should we use. The rat was already on board for biomedical research, so it's practical to use the rat.

Basically, it's the lab rat industry. There was a whole factory line system around producing lab rats via mass inbreeding, premised on the fantasy that the inbred rats were basically interchangeable with one another.

They bred brothers and sisters for twenty generations. Their intention was the animals be as close to clones as possible, and then whatever your manipulation was, diet, stress, movement, or whatever, they felt confident that they saw a difference between the experimental group that got it and the control group that didn't, that that variable was the influential variable.

This was all taking off around the time and Cole's work with raccoons was being cast aside. That kind of inbreeding helped create rats who were much more docile and easier to control than wild rats and certainly than raccoons, which meant it gave the behaviorists easier, more reliable data, and then it just took off. Soon. A prominent psychologist described the field as being infected by a plague of rats.

Again, a mild electric shock and they administered through the grid on the floor of the apparatus.

This film has always freaked me out. A rat in a cage with an electric current running through the bars. He's got to figure out how to turn it off.

This time, it can only be turned off by ropetaking a wheel. The satiated animals starts responding as soon as a drive is supplied.

The whole time that tone is sounding, the rat is just frantically scrambling around his cage trying to figure out how to make it stop. Then he starts pawing at a wheel and it turns off.

The drive produced by electric shock is stronger than hunger.

It turns out zapping a rat is a good way to get it to do anything, including violence.

Responding to another animal by striking him can also be learned. All he needs is a little motivation.

If you could teach a rat to do anything, why not a person. Suddenly the scary world of the twentieth century began to seem a lot more manageable. Mass movements, great depressions, whatever. Just find the right set of incentives or punishments, and all of human behavior it could be predicted and can controlled.

We started comparing that behavior to humans at a slot machine or something. People I think started seeing humans as big rats or rats as little humans. Always say that we're not. We've got what six thousand mammalian species, and we're going to pick one or two.

A few people question the dominance of the rat at first, Why bother when it was working so well. This kind of thing has always bothered me on a gut level. I look in the mirror every day and I do not see a rat staring back at me. At least nonsense patching the hole in my bathroom wall. We aren't rats.

And it's hard for me to think back about why didn't I question that, or did I ask if there are other models? And it's just become lightly that I've had so many of these. Kelly, what the heck were you thinking? All these years?

We built a science of human nature and one of the strongest pillars was the labrat. And who is the labrat? He's crucially not the raccoon. The raccoon lets it all hang out. He's defiant, mischievous, crafty. If asked to participate in a scientific experiment, he will inquire about payment than callin sick. Not the rat. The rat is hard working by instinct, diligent. He gnaws away, he navigates complex warrants. He gets a perfect score on his SATs. He's rational.

I originally had thought, and I told Mike this because I thought it was a brilliant insight. Oh, they're they're the monkeys of North America.

By monkeys of North America, you mean they fill a certain ecological niche yeah.

Because we don't have monkeys, right, So it's just like, oh, well, you know, maybe they're just like that. They're not primates, but maybe they have evolved to cognitively to be like primates.

Traveling to study monkeys was expensive. If raccoons were like monkeys, then living in Toronto was like living on safari. So McDonald caught the Lawrence colebug. She began to study raccoons and she's been doing it ever since.

Because we don't know very much, just trying to fill gaps and trying to see what I find out about them, and they are annoying little critters. So it's been challenging and I wouldn't recommend it to most people.

McDonald has become one of the world's leading experts in raccoons, and in particular the urban raccoons of Toronto, with whom I think she feels a strong kinship. For instance, I've seen people saying that there are one hundred thousand raccoons in Toronto. Where did they get that number? McDonald told me that she was the origin of that statistic, and she just made a number up, which is exactly what

And I can tell you, having studied cognition and maybe raccoons, they are dumber and sticks. They are so dumb, just terrible. Every one of our little markers that we use for animals cognition or intelligence or you know, developmental milestones are going they just fail every single one.

How intriguing. I thought maybe the raccoons super intelligence develops at a later age.

No, an adult not either.

This was not going well.

So honestly, that that is what I've disappointed me so much, because I always thought, you know that raccoons are the monkeys of North America, but they are not.

I was at this point trying not to look hugely depressed, but McDonald just kept going.

So what they have done is a evolved to sort of search and destroying. That seems to be their strategy plus pecqual search and destroy and they find a thing and they break it, right, But there are other situations where you present them with a thing and you can see them looking at it and figuring it out. Yeah, raccoons don't do that. They're just like, what can I do to knock this over? What can I do to break this open? What can I do to get whatever it is I need to get? And they just leave

Here, I should just say that there's a lot we still don't know about raccoons, and indeed McDonald still gets a lot out of studying them too, especially the particularities of urban raccoons. But still, I had wondered about this question for years. Hearing that raccoons were morons actually was kind of a bummer in my book. But you know who was thrilled when I told them about it.

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

Again, local man Malcolm Gladwell.

They are clever, mischievous, vengeful, destructive, and profoundly stupid. That is humanity. We observe the raccoon and we think there is a kind of deep intelligence there that's fueling his behavior, and there isn't. The raccoon just wants to mess things up, right, He just and he's maniacal about it. He just wants to destroy and he has a kind of surface cleverness that serves those destructive impulses. So when I look at the raccoon, I mean, do I need to say it?

Hey.

The problem with our the way we think about Trump is at various points. You know, is Donald Trump a rat? No, he's not a rat.

Nixon's a rat.

Nixon's a rat.

So is he a fox?

Sometimes people say crazy like a fox, crazy like a fox. No, because the fox is actually a deeply intelligent animal, right well.

And crucially wary. The fox is wary. The raccoon is not wary.

Yes, exactly, the fox wood stops to think and pause and make a strategy, and you know, takes his time. A raccoon would have fallen into the Russian orbit without realizing it. The raccoon, you know, like a raccoon would choose his running mates with carelessness and abandoned. I mean, it's just like, it's all, it's all raccoon. It feels like to call Trump a rat is to miss is to completely misunderstand who he is. It's just a raccoon.

There's also, I think crucially, if we're going back to this kind of did we pick the wrong model organism? What do we conclude about human beings if we think they are like rats. Rats are very hard working. You give them a task and they will do it ad nauseum, just just they're happy to just keep getting the job done. They are They live in little warrens. You put a rat in amaze and knows exactly what to do, and it's kind of like fine being an amaze.

Problem solvers.

They're problem solvers. They're sort of cautious about new things. You talk to any exterminator. It's like very hard to get a rat to eat poison. Like they they are very careful about what they eat, what risks they take. Raccoons are extremely disinhibited. They aren't wary at all. A raccoon can live to like twenty in a lab. In the wild, they tend to live two to three years because they're just sort of like, what's that do and they just like like could jam their fingers in a socket.

No, yes, you can't.

What you never plan for in a world built on rats on the rat model, is it someone instead of trying to navigate the maze, just wants to burn it down. That's the one thing. The ret is never going to do that, and the rat's never going to effectively commit a kind of institutional suicide. The raccoon just wants to destroy things.

I did a complete one eighty on this story. I started thinking that the rat model was a disgrace because I had rats all wrong. I see now, it was kind of utopian. Every need could be anticipated, every behavior nudged, every outcome predicted, and every person satisfied. But there is no one animal model for human behavior. Rats its own thing, elab rats its own thing. Raccoons are really their own thing, And we're not one or the other. We're all of

Rooms.

I love designing tests for rats.

Kelly Lambert now studies all kinds of animals in all kinds of places. She's particularly interested in wild animals these days, but Lambert still has a soft spot for the labrat. When I visited her at the University of Richmond, she took me back into a locked set of rooms. There were signs up that said quiet behavioral testing in progress, and behind one of the doors a cage with two rats she's been teaching to drive.

They're generally, you know, like kittens. I have to suit up. It would bite my nose off. So they've been bread to be able to handle them easily. So if I'm looking at aggression or stress, this may not be the best model to use.

I leaned closer to the rat. Lambert seemed to think he was showing an unusual interest in my microphone.

You're more interested in the novel than the.

Food, more curious about the microphone. I wonder what it is about that. Actually the rat was really grabbing at the mic, pulling it closer to its snout.

Podcast rat, this is your first rat podcaster.

It was really weird. He wasn't climbing on the mic. He was just yanking it right up to his face. Not something you would have predicted if you know about rats and how wary they are. A mystery. I felt like maybe that rat was trying to tell me something. Rats communicate via ultrasonic frequencies. So a few days later, when I got home, processed the audio, pitch shifted it down and hit play.

Have you ever seen a raccoon drive a car? Long Live the Librat?

Sorry, buddy, I know you're right, but it's the raccoon's time now. Revision of History is produced by me Ben Mattip Haffrey, Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Schakerji, fact checking by Anica Robbins, original scoring by Luis Kara, mixing and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Lizette Barton at the Doctors Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, and to Sarah Nix

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