Mice Prefer Videos Of Fighting To Videos Of Sex But They Prefer Drugs Most Of All

Mice Prefer Videos Of Fighting To Videos Of Sex But They Prefer Drugs Most Of All

Researchers at Keio University spent weeks showing laboratory mice footage of mouse porn, mouse fights and mouse sniffing. They found out that mice can distinguish between social behaviours — and that they prefer seeing fighting to sex, unless drugs are involved.

Biologists, psychologists and sociologists have been working on how to classify behaviour for decades. At Keio University, researchers wanted to know if mice could do what scientists do: sort behaviour into categories. They described the results of their experiments in a recent paper in Animal Cognition.

At first, the researchers exposed mice to a continuous loop of video. They saw, in sequence, a clip of mice mating, a clip of mice fighting and a clip of mice sniffing each other. After the mice in the experiment had gotten a good look, they were moved to a mouse multiplex, where their main enclosure was flanked by two different small compartments, each playing videos.

One compartment would show one type of video, and the other would show another type of video. The researchers used the amount of time the mice spent in each compartment to judge their overall film preferences. Given a choice between sniffing and sex, the mice spent 41 per cent of their time in the sex theatre, and only 34 in the sniffing theatre. Given the choice between sex and fighting, the mice spent 40 per cent of their time in the fighting theatre and only 35 per cent of their time in the sex theatre.

Mice Prefer Videos Of Fighting To Videos Of Sex But They Prefer Drugs Most Of All
Oh crap, I’m in the porn theatre again.

“Oh crap, I’m in the porn theatre again.” Credit: Rama/Wikimedia

The scientists had something that they knew the mice would prefer to any kind of video: morphine. In a second experiment, they began to inject mice with morphine whenever they went into a specific theatre. Half the mice got an injection when they went into the sex theatre, and the other half got the injection when they went into the fighting theatre.

The injection was necessary to see if the mice really could distinguish kinds of behaviour. In this experiment, the mice were no longer shown one single clip of sex or fighting. They were shown a range of clips, and their chance to get a shot of morphine depended on their ability to recognise that a certain type of behaviour — not just a specific clip — would get them their drugs.

Soon the researchers found that mice who had been given morphine in the sex theatre spent more time in the sex theatre, even though the previous experiment showed a marked preference for fighting videos over sex. And the mice that had been given a shot in the fight theatre still hung out in that theatre, waiting for their fix. So mice are able to figure out that a broad range of clips can be classified under the category of “sex” or “violence”, even though they aren’t able to articulate the classification system. They just know what they like.

If the mice’s priorities — violence over sex and drugs over everything — seem depressing, take heart. The researchers don’t know why they prefer the fights. It could be that the mice want to emulate the fighters, or it could be that they’re studying the behaviour closely because they sense danger. Moreover, the mice used in this experiment were all male, and all sexually inexperienced. Perhaps if they had tried sex before any of this started, they’d be more interested in seeing it onscreen.

[Animal Cognition via New Scientist]

Image credit: Rama/Wikimedia


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