3Ĭalhoun’s experiments with rats and mice proved extremely influential. In the words of one of Calhoun’s collaborators, rodent “utopia” had descended into “hell”. Even when reintroduced to normal rodent communities, these “socially autistic” animals remained isolated until death. At the experiments’ end, the only animals still alive had survived at an immense psychological cost: asexual and utterly withdrawn, they clustered in a vacant huddled mass. Their numbers fell into terminal decline and the population tailed off to extinction. Calhoun called this vortex “a behavioural sink”. Males became hypersexual, pansexual and, an increasing proportion, homosexual. Violence quickly spiralled out of control. 2 But in the sealed enclosure, flight was impossible. Following the work of the physiologist, Hans Selye, it seemed that the adrenal system offered the standard binary solution: fight or flight. Unwanted social contact occurred with increasing frequency, leading to increased stress and aggression. The one thing they were lacking was space, a fact that became increasingly problematic as what he liked to describe as his “rat city” and “rodent utopia” teemed with animals. 1 He had placed several rats in a laboratory in a converted barn where – protected from disease and predation and supplied with food, water and bedding – they bred rapidly. In a 1962 edition of Scientific American, the ecologist John B Calhoun presented the results of a macabre series of experiments conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
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