“With a few liberating swipes of their paws, a group of research rats freed trapped labmates and raised anew the possibility that empathy isn’t unique to humans and a few extra-smart animals, but is widespread in the animal world. Though more studies are needed on the rats’ motivations, it’s at least plausible they demonstrated ‘emphatically motivated pro-social behavior.’ People would generally call that helpfulness, or even kindness. ‘Rats help other rats in distress. That means it’s a biological inheritance,’ said neurobiologist Peggy Mason of the University of Chicago. ‘That’s the biological program we have.’ In a study published in Science, Mason and University of Chicago psychologists Jean Decety and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal describe their rat empathy-testing apparatus: An enclosure into which pairs of rats were placed, with one roaming free and the other restrained inside a plastic tube. It could only be opened from the outside, which is exactly what the free rats did — again and again and again, seemingly in response to their trapped companions’ distress.” w/ photo + video
