Can Caged Animals Get Anxity Can Caged Animals Get Anxiety

Of the thousands of bodies in this room, only five of us reflect the fluorescent lights. A low ceiling fan blows germfree air down onto the stainless-steel countertop and over iii mice in an open cage, and their sister wriggling between my thumb and alphabetize finger.

As I compression back the loose skin over her shoulders, her forearms splay outward. She pumps her hind legs as if pond. I hesitate. Then, with a hole punch that I could apply for part paper, I divot the lower edge of her right ear. Information technology's a kind of branding, a way to identify her, mouse A, the offset of four from cage 896. To collect her DNA, I utilise scissors to cut off a snippet of her tail. With forceps, I drib the snippet into a pocket-sized plastic tube, a microcuvette marked with a Sharpie pen: 896A.

Beside u.s., her muzzle looks like a shoebox. Moulded from articulate plastic, its flooring is lined with a sparse layer of paper bedding. Because her cage is hard to comprehend while I'1000 belongings a mouse, information technology lies open. In the night behind u.s., shelves contain hundreds of shoeboxes but similar it.

1 of her sisters sits in the corner of the open cage. The other two scale its wall. One folds her belly over the rim, like a child pulling herself out of a pool. The other walks its rim, balancing as if on a high wire. I sense she's working through options: 'Leap from the cage I've spent my life trying to escape? Or retreat dorsum inside?' With liberty right in that location, they near always spring dorsum to the familiar.

I am likewise working through options. I go on mulling over a quote by the American writer and muckraker Upton Sinclair, whose book The Jungle (1906) exposed conditions in the meatpacking industry. 'Information technology is difficult to get a human to understand something,' he used to say, 'when his salary depends upon his not understanding information technology.'

I don't cutting flanks from sirloins. As a professor at a medical school, I'm paid to teach and run a research laboratory of mostly grad students and technicians. My chore is, at least, to endeavor to understand.

We conduct experiments on mice to help determine what makes a person susceptible to autism. To place its genetic causes, my lab invented behaviour tests to determine whether certain strains of mice enjoy the company of their peers. Our experiments more often than not go well, so long equally we imagine how nosotros might feel if nosotros were in a mouse'southward situation. For instance, since the students in my laboratory noticed that feeling stressed left united states of america less sociable, we decided to test mice under comfortable weather condition. Since mice are nocturnal – agile and sociable in the dark – we would report them under red lighting, a hue they can barely see, amid soft bedding. Bucking the convenient arroyo for scientists – studies nether brilliant lights on steel flooring – we got proficient results.

Lately, though, I've been questioning my research, wondering whether our studies of mice could ever help people with autism. My thoughts keep circling, scouring through the same, seemingly arid plot of scientific questions. What am I missing?

I call back back to a presentation I heard years before past Thomas Insel, then manager of the United states National Plant of Mental Health. The institute funds scientific research to discover new drugs for treating psychiatric illnesses. Most scientists finish presentations with some variation of 'we are on the brink of discovery' merely Insel concluded with a different betoken. Animal research, he said, had failed to generate a single new category of psychiatric drugs in more than l years. New drugs on the market place were by and large redesigned or repurposed versions of existing drugs. He'd funded brilliant experiments, yet scientists were coming up empty-handed. Nosotros needed to practise something dissimilar. The candour of his words would stick with me. Information technology sounded like a plea.

Glancing dorsum down at the mouse wriggling betwixt my fingertips, I feel her twists and kicks through my latex gloves. I return her to her cage, then snap shut the microcuvette. She scurries to one corner, turns, huddles, and faces middle. Her whiskers quiver. Ane sister quits bellying the cage rim and drops back inside. Her other sis still walks the rim. For a split 2nd, I wonder if I would experience sociable living in a pocket-size cell with three other people in such a thin landscape, only able to take a few steps forward in any management.

Another day on campus. I'one thousand a few minutes late to interview a candidate for our section chair. I'm the last of the 5 kinesthesia to get in. No fashion to sneak in.

The room is pocket-sized, the lights are brilliant, and the white Formica-topped table is far too big for the space. I edge toward my seat. Somebody mentions how the atmospheric condition is not e'er this nice in April. Another quips 'or in June'. In the Pacific Northwest, it often rains in June. A few people chuckle.

I pull out a chair, trying not to draw more attention. A senior colleague sits across the tabular array, her hands clasped, looking downward at a canvass of paper. ID badges hang off lanyards on two kinesthesia. Several accept enamel pins on their lanyards that read 'I intendance.' At 1 corner of the table sits an unfamiliar woman. I nod and grinning at her. She nods and smiles dorsum, and then looks down at her cellphone. I presume she's the focus of our meeting. Our group shares with the candidate an interest in neurodevelopment: how the brain develops and matures. Some of the states work with humans, others with rodents, a few with monkeys. My goal is 2-fold: to get some inkling of whether she'd be a good department chair, and to curry favour with her on the off-take chances she gets the job and remembers the interview.

The senior professor unclasps her easily, straightens her dorsum, so picks up the candidate'south itinerary, a sail of paper listing her many appointments for the day. The gesture stills everyone in the room, save the one beside me who continues typing into his laptop.

From a platform on a high metal barricade, they can watch the few monkeys who live outdoors

'Y'all visited the West Campus today?' the senior professor asks.

My colleague stops typing and closes his laptop. The West Campus includes one of the few federally funded primate centres in the United States, housing more than 5,000 monkeys. Nosotros talk about the grounds. A privilege to visit, you need special clearance to go past the guardhouse. The grounds were conspicuously designed past landscape architects. Picture an enchanted woods of towering Douglas firs, sequoias and Japanese scarlet maples, with garden lights and azaleas brindled beneath. Serenity, too – salvage the slow roll of an occasional passing motorcar. You can hear birdsong.

For visitors, the campus offers 'the tour'. From a platform on the rim of a high metal barricade, they can scout the few monkeys who live outdoors: sitting in the grass, grazing on biscuits. Red-tailed hawks too live nearby. When they wing above the campus, they tin soar over the monkeys that live outdoors – strangely, the only place on campus with no trees to climb.

'Yeah,' the candidate responds, 'such a cute campus.'

Sitting in our thin conference room, I now imagine a different bird's eye view. I see several kinesthesia members below, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing stale air.

How did I get here?

In the 1990s, I was working on my PhD dissertation in immunology. AIDS was raging and scientists were hard-pressed to find a vaccine, much less a cure. As a graduate student, I by and large worked in a laboratory and ran experiments. Three years in, about halfway toward my diploma, I met with our graduate programme director. He was classic, anachronistic even: goatee, ascot, cardigan, corduroys. After we talked most my mouse experiments, nosotros turned to his concerns. The faculty members were debating whether to add the word 'molecular' to the championship of our graduate plan. He wasn't smashing on the idea.

At the fourth dimension, 'molecular' was the buzzword, shorthand for molecular biology, science'southward newfound power to manipulate Deoxyribonucleic acid. For a mouse or a human being, this lawmaking embodies around twenty,000 genes written with iv characters, about 2.five billion of them – aeon's worth of accumulated cognition, longer than 3,000 Bibles or 7,500 Qurans.

Using molecular techniques, scientists could mix and match DNA, make a batch of mice, then watch them walk on their own. Literally rewriting the script of evolution, we could genetically engineer mouse models of disease featuring various aspects of human illnesses – depression, diabetes, schizophrenia, autism, cancer – then search for drugs to cure them. If scientists could find a drug that could render these mouse models of disease 'healthy', they might have discovered a drug for human utilize. Our piece of work felt God-like in its mission: with molecular biology at our fingertips, nosotros could bring to life creatures that natural selection would never permit, and then conquer human suffering.

'Technologies,' he griped, 'should never dictate our questions'

As yous might wait, 'molecular' also came with a financial windfall. The US National Institutes of Wellness more than doubled its budget over the 1980s, investing heavily in animal experiments that capitalised on the new molecular techniques. You could run across our newfound wealth in the sparkle of our remodelled laboratories. Even our equipment looked smart: cream-coloured countertop microcentrifuges and thermocyclers, clear plastic gel boxes, and electrophoresis tanks. A whole symphony of affluence. Centrifuges latched shut like the doors of luxury cars. Rotors whizzed like miniature jet engines.

Still, that old advisor grumbled, if graduate students were learning how to manipulate Dna, then a doctorate in philosophy meant no longer learning about pathology, how organisms cope with the impositions of our environments: pathogens, wounds, malnourishment. Presently, he groused, scientists would inquire only the profitable questions our molecular biological science techniques could reply. 'Technologies,' he griped, 'should never dictate our questions.'

I didn't know what to brand of it. Was this wisdom or sour grapes? Was he stuck in his erstwhile ways, resentful because his listen was no longer nimble plenty to learn the new techniques? After I finished my dissertation, I headed direct to a molecular lab where I would create new kinds of mice and study them. The years that followed were pure adrenalin.

Thirty years afterwards, our molecular revolution firmly established, we should have plenty to boast about. Merely practice we? Not exactly. When present-solar day scientists defend animal inquiry, we often tout discoveries fabricated more than a century ago: a treatment for diabetes from studies of pigs and dogs, a polio vaccine from experiments on monkeys. Pointing to that distant by, I suspect we betray our failures.

While universities invested their windfalls to cock radiant laboratory buildings with gleaming hallways, drinking glass atriums and cathedral ceilings, they allocated nothing to the complication of the brute cages. To keep housing costs down, cages remained cramped and impoverished, with only enough space to eat and brood. Even today, the standard cages used to house laboratory rats are not high plenty for them to stand up straight. Flat out, a laboratory mouse can run 6 cage lengths in nether a second. Rhesus macaques, primates used because they resemble humans, get living spaces inside steel cubes that are barely twice their summit.

Still, not a unmarried scientist I knew was asking whether such impoverished confinement might render our 'animal models' irrelevant to questions of human health.

For decades, neither did I.

The first clue that something was awry came from a failed experiment, around 2007. To place mice with autistic-like traits, my laboratory devised an experiment to ask whether sure mouse strains, given a choice, would favour a food advantage over a social encounter. Since autistic children ofttimes play lonely, we reasoned that young autistic-like mice would head straight for a food reward, non stopping forth the mode to socialise.

To test our hypothesis, nosotros designed the 'Social Gauntlet Examination', a reference to a movie I saw every bit a teenager, where the hero brings a witness to testify against a police commissioner. By the terminate of the movie, he drives an armoured school bus right up the courthouse steps through a gauntlet of police officers and gunfire.

They were fixated on something – a aroma, a breeze, a sound – that we couldn't detect

For our Social Gauntlet experiment, nosotros built a test construction out of black sheet plastic. It had multiple walls simply no ceiling, so nosotros could notice the test mice and record their movements with overhead video recorders. From above, the structure looked similar an arrow, a triangle-shaped archway foyer followed by a shaft of thin runway lined on either side with narrow cages. A mouse would be placed in the foyer, detect the rails, then walk past the gauntlet of caged mice to get to the chocolate flake, a treat we learned from previous tests that they liked near.

When nosotros initially trained the mice, the cages on either side of the runway were empty. On the afternoon before exam day, we isolated our exam mice – ane mouse per cage – and took away their food. Hungry, we reasoned, they would 'run for chocolate'. Isolated for a twenty-four hour period from their peers, they would also exist craving a social encounter.

The next afternoon, we added mice to the cages lining the rails, then ran our tests. Overall, our mice behaved as predicted. Our control mice generally slowed down to sniff their jailed peers before travelling to the chocolate fleck. Some nuzzled every peer. Others stalled to rub noses with one private. A few walked directly to the chocolate, then turned effectually, boot the bit to the side to greet their jailed peers before returning to expect for their nutrient advantage. Mice from the autistic-similar strain, on the other manus, mostly walked directly to the chocolate fleck.

Merely, analysing the data, nosotros discovered a design flaw in our examination structure. We had built it to be adjustable because we didn't know in advance how wide to make the runway: too wide and the test mice might ignore their jailed peers, but besides narrow and they might feel overwhelmed past the social situation, staying put in the foyer instead. To make the structure adjustable, we built the corners out of hinges.

During testing, some of the mice would discover the hinges, then go preoccupied with them. Despite beingness hungry for food and starved of social interaction, they snubbed the chocolate and dismissed their peers. Nosotros couldn't get statistically significant results because many of them were captivated past the hinges. They pressed their snouts and paws into the hinges' narrow vertical slits, sometimes for the duration of the 5-minute test. They were fixated on something – a smell, a breeze, a sound – that we couldn't detect and obviously with a drive far more compelling than eating or socialising. Was it curiosity? Or were they trying to escape?

Searching for an caption, I learned about the novel object recognition test, a widely used and highly cherished measure of rodent learning and memory that relies entirely upon the rodent's curiosity. In this examination, the experimenter places the rat or mouse within a small arena with two objects. Subsequently the rodent becomes familiar with the two objects, the experimenter removes him from the loonshit, replaces one of the objects with a novel ane, and then brings him back. If he remembers the familiar object, he spends more than time sniffing the novel one. This test measures a rodent's cognitive abilities – learning and retentivity – but the behaviour is motivated by an underlying drive to investigate. Some scientists call this motivation 'exploratory drive', others call information technology 'sensation seeking'.

For a wild animal, curiosity can be essential for survival. For example, wild fauna don't always consume as much high-free energy nutrient as their bellies can hold. Nor do they dependably provender at the best feeding spots. Sometimes, they nibble on unknown foods of questionable caloric value, equally if to bank check them out. Sometimes, they fodder in less well-travelled areas, despite the dangers. If they don't go sick, they might endeavor information technology once more. Curiosity buys a beast an insurance policy for when traditional approaches no longer apply. If the apples disappear, maybe the persimmons volition piece of work.

Not all behaviours are learned. Some are hardwired, like the blinking of an eyelid. If they're always essential, nosotros might inherit them from our ancestors, without having to learn them. Some people call these hardwired behaviours 'innate'. But such genetically inherited pre-programmed behaviours can't accommodate the multitude of unpredictable challenges we typically come across. For those unexpected situations, we need to adopt a flexible behavioural repertoire. That flexibility requires both a cognitive ability to larn – and the motivation to practise so.

For a encephalon to fully develop, it needs places to go, novel sensations to feel and bug to solve

To accommodate to an surround, animals do good from three motivations: seek pleasure, avoid pain and learn what aspects of the surround predict the departure. You lot might consider motivations for animals every bit akin to gravity for objects. Both are invisible. We infer them from physical deportment. They can get u.s.a. moving. They can concord us in identify.

By seeking pleasance, avoiding pain and learning what predicts the difference, a newborn mouse can adapt to the various temporal and physical weather condition of her birth, whether nested beneath a floorboard, burrowed under a wheat field, swaddled inside an quondam machine engine, or tucked in the rafters of a barn. A mouse tin can accept advantage of what she might stumble upon: seeds, tubers, crackers, oats, worms, crickets, junk nutrient. She can acquire what to avoid: road traffic, true cat dander, glue traps, hawks.

What's more, 70 years of animal experiments tell us that a encephalon doesn't simply require novel experiences, it feeds upon them. For a brain to fully develop, it needs places to become, novel sensations to feel and problems to solve. Scientists accept had inklings of this phenomenon since at to the lowest degree the late 1940s, when Donald Hebb, an early on pioneer in neuroscience, asked whether lab rats would be any smarter subsequently living as pets. He brought rats home to live with his daughters. He wrote that the rats were 'out of their cages a good deal of the fourth dimension and running about the house.' Then, when he ran them through mazes, he discovered that the pet rats were smarter than his lab rats. They could learn from new experiences, 'one of the characteristics of the "intelligent" human.'

Decades later, William Greenough, some other icon in neuroscience history, asked what slight improvements to the harsh impoverishment within a standard cage could practise to a rat's concrete brain. He afforded them slightly bigger cages with added blocks and tunnels. Looking through the lens of his microscope, he saw that their brains were more than densely packed with neurons than those of the rats from standard cages. And their neurons appeared more differentiated, elaborating with more abundant branching. While the capillaries, the smallest blood vessels that nourish these neurons, bourgeoned under the 'enriched' weather condition, they looked anaemic in rats housed in standard cages.

Past the twelvemonth 2010, scientists had discovered how environmental complexity reshapes a rodent's brain and enhances its office: a molecular process chosen epigenetics that turns some genes on and others off. Reflecting on more than 70 years of neuroscience experiments, we can see one undeniable reality: for an integrated biological system – a living beingness – ecology complication matters. A brain flourishes with challenges to overcome, opportunities to explore and novel experiences.

Back at the stainless-steel countertop, a world of divergence exists between the two of u.s.a.. Her whiskers quiver equally if tapping invisible air-borne particles. She hears sounds octaves beyond my auditory range, perhaps the ballasts of the fluorescent lights. She might odour the blood on my latex gloves. Her optics have no whites. I don't know if she looks at me. Perhaps, she feels my pulse.

What keeps us from understanding that their cages jeopardise the relevance of our science?

One Christmas morning, my students gone for the holidays, I'd toured our mouse colony to do the wellness bank check, which amounted to surveying every cage for empty water bottles, mice with hunched backs or scruffy fur, claret smears on the cage walls, and dead animals in the bedding.

Non yet fully awake, I forgot to flip on the light switch before entering the colony room. I walked into darkness and what sounded like dozens of people lightly sanding away at the walls. The door let in some calorie-free, then I peered inside a cage. 2 mice were reaching for bedding alee of them, pushing it through their hind legs, piling information technology behind them, moving forwards, turning near the walls, shovelling again, methodically digging dorsum and forth across the cage similar miniature tractors harvesting wheat. I glimpsed into other cages and saw more of this same, seemingly frantic behaviour. When I flipped on the lite switch, nearly 140 cages of activeness went silent.

I learned subsequently that, in the wild, mice excavate hugger-mugger burrows: subterranean mazes of tunnels, intersections, chambers and cul-de-sacs. As a surface-domicile beast, information technology wouldn't occur to me that a mouse might feel compelled to quarry, to find some edge to pull on, some soft spot beneath the bedding that might give way.

I would frequently recollect most this moment. What if caged mice felt frustrated considering they couldn't dig through the plastic floor below the bedding? And, if and then, without a doubt some mouse strains would feel more frustrated than others. If those differences in their frustration levels influenced their interests in social interactions, so my lab would not exist studying the biological science of sociability. We would be studying the biology of frustration. My research, with all the millions in federal dollars used to fund it, would be useless for understanding autism. Nosotros would exist studying the artefacts of living inside a shoebox cage.

Scientists ofttimes defend our need for cages 'to command the variables'. In practice, cages do not control the variables

And what if the mouse models of other diseases – low, anxiety, addiction, attention deficit (ADHD) – were also affected past the artificiality of their cages? In the wild, mice roam territories hundreds of thousands of times more expansive than the footprint of a standard muzzle. They get full utilise of their bodies, new challenges, and authorship of their experiences – for case, whether to socialise or be alone. They take risks and learn from them. With all of this denied them, how much of our biomedical research enterprise was focused on artefacts of impoverished captivity?

For a while, I took solace in thinking that caged monkeys take it far worse than my mice. Still, for decades I couldn't grasp that the perspectives of my mice also mattered. What blinds united states from seeing that caged animals – staring for life at walls – might have warped psychological experiences and aberrant brain development? What keeps us from understanding that their cages jeopardise the relevance of our scientific discipline?

Nosotros depend on small cages to produce scientific papers – our staff of life and butter – and not only considering I can pull 896A off the shelf when the fourth dimension is right. Cages sensitise our animals then they readily succumb to whatever we practice to them. For example, in small cages, rodents get more readily addicted to drugs: heroin, amphetamines, alcohol. Put a few objects in their cages, and they're generally not that interested in the drugs. The same pattern goes with other developmental challenges and mental illnesses – dementia, autism, stroke, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, ADHD – which get significantly exacerbated when rodents are housed in standard cages.

Nor is this blueprint restricted to mental illness. Animals in standard cages are also hypersensitive to wounds, infections, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers. Their susceptibility helps usa publish papers. And this makes me wonder almost the costs to human health. How many potentially useful drugs might have been shelved, never making it to human being trials, considering pre-clinical trials showed they were toxic to these hypersensitive animals?

Scientists often defend our need for cages 'to control the variables'. Conceptually, this argument makes sense. Because caged animals become exposed to fewer random variables than freer animals, we can more readily discern how our chosen experimental variable, the stimulus, influences the biological outcome of involvement, the response. But in practice, cages exercise not command the variables. Often incapable of replicating experimental results, laboratories accept faced a reproducibility crisis because cages do not control the variables: not the ultrasonic noises in the rodent's colony rooms, nor the phytoestrogens in the chow, nor the calorie-free levels inside the cages. And laboratories practice non apply standardised beddings. We can choose from corncob pellets; aspen, pine or hardwoods rendered into chips, pellets or shavings; paper products laundered into shreds, pellets, twists or fibres; fifty-fifty cellulose. For scientists, these variables are an administrative nuance. For laboratory animals, they are a life sentence.

With our candidate for the department chair, amid our churr in that small room well-nigh the beautiful landscaping, I feel like I'g the obvious outlier, non just for being late, but also for beingness tranquility. I feel at moments as though my colleagues can read my listen, as if they know I'm no longer a amalgamated. I tin't shake my memories of the monkeys. Were they angry? When I visited their colony rooms, I was instructed non to get too shut to a cage, lest one grab a finger and bite it off. I had to article of clothing a face shield and a disposable bodysuit to protect me from their spit. Whatever they could see of me was gowned up. Some monkeys could see others circling, somersaulting or rattling the doors of their cages. They could as well hear latches commodities, metal doors slam shut, banging against walls, shrieks echoing against cinderblock.

Then, why don't I e'er speak up? Why can't I question aloud whether those monkeys might be so mentally bedridden by living within fridge-sized cages that they couldn't possibly give us any meaningful data most autism or ADHD? And why tin can't I speak to a possible solution? We could build indoor/outdoor enclosures where lab animals could author their experiences, face the consequences, and experience unpredictable challenges, like what might come naturally with the weather. What holds me back? Why tin't I mention that our rats and mice could live in mass-produced enclosures with outdoor access, like small inquiry barns, where they would be allowed to burrow, run and form social alliances? Or that monkeys could become what we at present telephone call 'sanctuaries', vast fenced-in areas akin to what they might have in a forest? Nosotros have the remote technologies to study their biology from a altitude! We have them in the phones we acquit.

I could mention that, so long equally we see laboratory animals only every bit mechanisms and neurocircuits, nosotros will continue to miss the mark, non just in our understanding of mental affliction merely of other maladies – cancer, wound recovery, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease. These illnesses might flourish in animals only under the unnatural caged conditions that brand life not worth living.

It wasn't just that the animals suffered, but that their suffering didn't matter

Even so at this meeting, like at every other previous meeting, I say cipher. Practice I lack the courage to speak out? Practice I fearfulness being ostracised by the only membership that would accept me? It is every bit if I were a member of a gentlemen'southward gild, in tacit understanding of unacceptable topics. Any mention of the internal experiences of our lab animals seems out of bounds amidst scientists. Possibly, nosotros fear that such talk, even in private, might bolster arguments past animal advocates to shut us down. Still, don't we have a professional obligation to question our research? What if our antiquated cage technologies are dictating our questions? Shouldn't we at least ask whether the perspectives of our laboratory animals bear upon the relevance of our experiments?

For me, information technology wasn't only that the animals suffered, but that their suffering didn't matter. As well, I saw researchers becoming trapped in careers without significant, captive like the animals nosotros cage: a different kind of learned helplessness. Perchance, nosotros projection on ourselves what we meet in other animals. Until we acknowledge that laboratory animals might have qualms with their captivity – and that their perspectives might taint our experiments – I suspect we volition continue to manus at invisible surfaces, tap at our reflections, follow ourselves.

The chat moves on, congenial in intonations, peppered with details, systematically ignoring the implications of our research. Struggling to detect something to contribute, I remain silent. I begin to fear that my silence speaks of my growing doubts, more confusing to the group than my bumbling late arrival. I have to say something.

'Yes,' I say, 'the landscaping is gorgeous.'

Back at the stainless-steel countertop, I piece of work on the mouse in mitt. Meanwhile, the mouse on the cage rim takes the one-half-foot drop to the countertop. She'south that outlier, a true rarity, ii standard deviations from the mean. She lands on the steel surface, limbs splayed, head all the same, whiskers quivering. With seconds to catch her, I lower the ear punch. She extends her head, lengthening her cervix. I render her sister to their cage. She advances a front paw, the get-go fourth dimension she'southward e'er stepped on steel. My palm sweeps beyond its surface. She darts, first behind the water canteen, so some other cage.

The animal transfer station is chaotic: paper towels, the steriliser, forceps in a chlorine bath, other cages. I pull them away equally if hunting through cracker boxes in a pantry. She crouches behind the steriliser, turns, and so advances to the edge of the countertop. The adjacent drop is nearly a metre, a freefall into darkness. I open my paw to make a second attempt. She leaps from the countertop, 15 torso lengths to the floor. I switch on the room lights. I look below the countertop, so peer around it. She's gone.

If she avoids the glue traps, she might live off the devious grub beneath the racks and testing equipment. She might slip out the door when a caretaker rolls out the fauna transfer station. She might become to the cafeteria, maybe the campus grounds. And for those few minutes, hours or perhaps days, she would be making decisions. She would be dealing with their consequences. She would be relevant.

Source: https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-caged-animals-really-tell-us-about-our-mental-lives

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