Really intereting. Thanks
Of course there are way too many cofounding varianles here, to draw any firm concclusiond. It would be interesting (but exctremely unethical, IMO) to run as a lot of different variations of this expeiment. What if you divide the area into a group of mouse villages villages, connected by long run, so the subgroups can get out of each others' faces more easily?
Mice are highly intelligent creatures, but no thought was piut into stimulating their minds, so it's no big surprise that their curiosity atrophied.
This very much reminded me of Seligman's "learned helplessness" experiments. His animals became depressed because the experimental conditions were designed to teach them that there was nothing they could possibly do to avoid some kind of shitty outcome. Parallels with clinically depressed humans were obvious.
In the case of these mice, they are similarly powerless to change their situation in any meaningful; way, because all the supplied resources are identical, there's nowhere else to go., etc. And when they nake a little nest for themselves (out of standardised nesting material) , some great big oaf comes and destroys the nest, replacing tjhe soiled material with clean. How would we feel about that? Grareful? The hell we would. Looks to me like mice are lot more humans , mentally, than we like to think.
The mouse colony also reminds me of England in the present day. There are some quite chilling parallels there. Pretty much all of we English (apart from some of those overprilieged Southerners) feel that England is overpopulated. It's even come to the point where there's a measurable strain on resources, and EU are starting to agree. But this country has been overpopulated for decades. It was never really about shortage of housing, etc. so much as shortage of elbow room; too much new housing being built on green field sites all the time., and property prices spiralling up all the time. There's a very profound sense of "no way out" if you live in an inner-city slum.
Of course , it wouldn't be so bad if theUK population wasn't all crammed into England, especially the North of England . Unlike the Mouse Utopia, the UJK is not uniform, so there's an obvious geographiocal basis for the uneven population distribution. Historically, it just wasn't so easy to scratch out a living in the hills and moutains of Scotland and Wales. But these days, it mostly founded on socioeconmic factors. Nobody want to movbve away from their best prospects of employment (such as they are) , but on the hand, very few can afford the astronomical housing prices in the South: so one way or another, people drift into that very small area of the UK, not through choice, as such, but but most often driven by ecomomic necessity . Maybe the one big difference bewtween ourselves and the mice is that the outgorup (that is ones who get driven into less desirable territory) is larger than the ingroup.
Already, the UK's birthrate has fallen below sustenance levels. And some idiots cite that as a reason why we need immigration. Sheeesh. I believe that it's because we're overpopulated already. . I just hope that the psychosocial effects turn out to be reversible in humans. unlike those poor mice.
(Oh! and if Odeon calls these observations "racist" please restrain me from strangling him
)
