Yes straightforward perhaps... Archived Message
Posted by walter on December 24, 2019, 12:26 pm, in reply to "I thought the case is quite straight-forward"
Your own perception of beauty leads you down a mouse-free exposition of the situation - helping hand to the beautiful owls, etc. No need to spare a thought for the supply of helping but unwilling mice, or consider that some people might be a bit put off at the sight of suffering then? I'm not objecting to helping the owls. But lovely? Compassionate? Something else going on there. Plenty of beauty in rodents if you look: Science. 2011 Dec 9;334(6061):1427-30. doi: 10.1126/science.1210789. Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats. Ben-Ami Bartal I, Decety J, Mason P. Abstract: Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate. Rats did not open empty or object-containing restrainers. They freed cagemates even when social contact was prevented. When liberating a cagemate was pitted against chocolate contained within a second restrainer, rats opened both restrainers and typically shared the chocolate. Thus, rats behave pro-socially in response to a conspecific's distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22158823 Cheers
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