My sister emailed the picture (she says it's from Cute Overload) and it made me laugh...it also reminded me of this Science Times article from a while back:
...though rats have yet to produce an Albert Camus or design a better mouse trap, a host of new behavioral studies makes plain that the similarities between us and Rattus extend far beyond gross anatomy. They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a rat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle. Rats dream as we dream, in epic narratives of navigation and thwarted efforts at escape: When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracked the neuronal activity of rats in REM sleep, the researchers saw the same firing patterns they had seen in wakeful rats wending their way through those notorious rat mazes.
Rats can learn to crave the same drugs that we do -- alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine -- and they, like us, will sometimes indulge themselves to death.
They’re sociable, curious and love to be touched -- nicely, that is. If a rat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn't come, the rat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.
The rest of the article is also pretty interesting...especially considering it's about rats.
Some people claim humans "still have one hand in the tree." Hell, that might be giving us too much credit: if it weren't for lacking open-rooted incisors, we might all still be compulsively gnawing on anything within reach and digging holes in the ground. After all, that's what Dick Cheney does.
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