A day at the lab
A Chinese colleague and I went to get two albino mice to perform surgery to study why cancer patience won’t get a pain killing effect from morphine. We did put them in the same “cage” and went to the lab. We started by giving the female mouse some analgesia and made sure that she was unconscious. Since we wouldn’t perform surgery on both at the same time, we made sure that the male mouse was alert and could play in the cage. So, we gave her the analgesia and put her back in the cage with the alert male mouse. In the meantime while we prepared for surgery, we didn’t put any attention to the mice. So when we went back to the cage, we saw that the male mouse was “raping” the female one while she was unconscious.
If animals should have the same right as humans then that means that we should be able to report that to the police.
Not many men would have sex with a woman if she was unconscious, because they are raised not to. But of course, as we all know, there are some rapists that would. Animals are not raised to follow a certain behavior, they just follow their instinct.
If animals should have the same right as humans then that means that we should be able to report that to the police.
Not many men would have sex with a woman if she was unconscious, because they are raised not to. But of course, as we all know, there are some rapists that would. Animals are not raised to follow a certain behavior, they just follow their instinct.
posted by Diana Chavlah at 10:34 p.m.
2 Comments:
It is an intresting theory you have. When we “cage” criminals by putting them in prison, we have to remember that they start to follow an instinct. Aggression is a form of energy and if they don’t get the possibility to use their energy, they might start to follow the instinct and not what they have been taught.
I am sure that if many humans wouldn’t have been brought up in a certain way, they’d act like animals.
The event that took place at the lab is not unusual. It is very common I’ve hared. Rabbits are worse. Mice are more social in a way. The female one “plays hard to get” in the beginning but eventually she gives up.
How/why would the male mouse know not to have sex with the female mouse, caged or otherwise? I have seen research which observed drakes (male ducks) having sex with other drakes that were dead. You got it right in your original post - animals can operate on nothing but instinct, while sex with an unconscious or dead being would repel most human beings as morally-aware, reflective creatures.
There are very few circumstances indeed where humans operate entirely on instinct. Even in classic "fight or flight" scenarios, a range of complex calculations are at work including rational reflection on the past and present and forecasts of the future, plus moral calculations. Faced with an attacker, we might choose to incapacitate or kill him. In the heat of the moment, it's possible that we might kill him by mistake, but it's also possible (unlike any animal) that we would only choose to incapacitate him.
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