Revisionist History - Rat vs. Raccoon

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

What if we picked the wrong animal?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. You're listening to an iHeart podcast. How did you get into writing about raccoons? I got into writing about raccoons because they started breaking into my supposedly raccoon-proof green bin in Toronto. I'm talking with intrepid investigative reporter for the Toronto Star, Amy Dempsey-Raven. Typically she covers police wrongdoing, child welfare, controversial homicides.

But in 2016, when Toronto declared a war on raccoons and unveiled a new raccoon-resistant composting bin, she realized it's time to get serious. The mayor came out on this garbage truck and made all of these promises and I wondered, I thought to myself, I'm gonna keep an eye on things here. This raccoon resistant bin cost the city 31 million Canadian dollars, but Toronto is known as the raccoon capital of the world. Theoretically, it's a point of pride, but it's a little more complicated than that. If a race of Martians took over your city,

would you call it the Martian capital of the world? Only if you'd already admitted defeat. My first job after graduating was in Toronto, and I had a group house. Local man Malcolm Gladwell. I did not grow up in raccoon country. So I had no idea something was making a racket so loud and all night. Like when I say all night, I mean without without stopping from the moment I went to

bed to the moment I woke up, I couldn't sleep. And I went, my friends, a couple of my friends were from Toronto. And I was like, what is going on? They're like, oh, it's raccoons. Like for them, it was like, oh yeah, it's just like, that's the deal here. That was about 40 years ago. Things have gotten much, much worse. Doesn't get any more Toronto than this.

A raccoon inside a supermarket here. Raccoons in the garbage, Raccoons on the train. Oh my god. Raccoons on the back deck. Time to go down buddy. Time to go down. You can't stay on this deck anymore. It's your eviction day. Raccoons have taken over the attics in a whole street of houses and refused to leave. They brought traffic to a screeching halt on Toronto's highways and just stood there.

They figured out how to open doors to houses and refrigerators and stood on top of countertops, leftovers in their paws, staring at freaked out homeowners as if to say, if I wanted you here, I would have rung the bell. Hence the pricey raccoon resistant bins, which surely no raccoon would be able to open. Soon after the rollout, we began hearing reports that raccoons were outsmarting the bins. And the city said, Nah, that's not really happening. But then one night they broke into mine.

Amy found herself wondering, how were raccoons smart enough to open that bin? This was the question a historian of science had found himself wondering one night when he looked at his back deck in Toronto and saw compost all over the place. He had an earlier version of the compost bin, but here too, the raccoons had picked the lock. Were they really just that smart?

It turned out nobody really knew. Raccoons had hardly been studied. Basically not at all compared to other animals like, say, rats or monkeys. This historian wanted to know why. The midnight raid on his compost bin would set in motion a sequence of events that in my own estimation have come to topple an entire century of psychological theory and restored the raccoon to its proper place. The dead center of how we understand human beings. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,

my show about things overlooked, misunderstood, and in praise of Toronto. You may be familiar with the phrase lab rat. Perhaps you are aware that many of the things we know about human beings and the way we behave are based upon the things we know about rats and the way they behave. But in this episode, my colleague Ben Nadaf-Haffrey asks, what if we picked the wrong animal? Staff Haferi asks, what if we picked the wrong animal? Many historians of science will write about the greats. Einstein, Freud, Oppenheimer, the kind of research project not usually begun while scooping up trash in your bathrobe on your back deck in Toronto.

But Michael Pettit's always gotten into things sideways. I have almost never written about kind of the dominant people in the field. I personally find myself attracted to the misfits. Pettit is a historian of psychology at York University in Toronto. I woke up one morning and of course the compost is all over the deck. I'm scooping it up because the raccoons could very easily get into the walk. And as an asterno-psychology, I asked myself, I wonder if anyone ever used a puzzle box with raccoons. They seem really good at it. Pettit knew all about scientists putting rats in mazes and puzzly cages, the mainstream stuff,

who cares? But in all his studies, he had never heard of a raccoon in a puzzle box. And yet here on his deck was evidence that they were basically able to outsmart any human system. These raccoons seem very adept at doing locks, and so I was just curious. Michael was curious for good reason. Not just because of the locks situation. We've basically never known quite what to make of raccoons. You know, they aren't primates, but they're also not rodents. So there's something about them that they sort of take on this role as kind of this intermediary species. There's

this reputation of the raccoon for being this cunning, intelligent trickster. For a while, there wasn't even consensus on how exactly they evolved. The famous naturalist Carl Linnaeus called them Ursus Loader, or Washer Bear, because they liked to rinse their food in water and he thought they descended from bears. Now for any true Raccoon fans out there, I should note that yes, they aren't actually washing their food. They basically see with their paws, and their paws are more sensitive in the water. This, by the way, is the instinct behind that amazing Japanese TV show,

where they gave a raccoon cotton candy, which the raccoon dutifully washed, until it vanished. But no, they're not washing, and they're not theirs. When Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World, he remarked upon its, quote, clown-like dogs, to which the people of Italy said, Chris, what the hell are you talking about? Until centuries later, another naturalist realized, oh, he's talking about raccoons. They're their own thing. They in some ways seem to be above the rodents and maybe even our carnivores. Pettit went looking for a history of raccoon science, specifically about people investigating

their intelligence, and found basically nothing. A handful of scientists, in one slim volume in particular, from 1907, titled Concerning the Intelligence of Raccoons. It was written by a man named Lawrence Cole, frontier raccoonist. So Lawrence Cole in a lot of ways is a nobody. You know, he's not someone if you go to a history of psychology textbook and pull it off the shelf, he's not someone that's particularly remarkable. Lawrence Cole had done his graduate work at Harvard and was part of a psychological movement that studied animals to understand humans.

In the 19th century, psychology had largely been based on what people said about how they felt, which was not super reliable. So why not instead observe how animals behave and just extrapolate up the chain from there. Darwin absolutely says it's not just our kind of physical form as human beings that is continuous with natural selection, but also our psychological selves. But which animal was best for the psychologists to study? Any of them theoretically could work. Scientists were comparing species across tests to see how they'd fare. People had studied chickens, dogs. Cole's advisor liked the idea of studying monkeys, but monkeys are super expensive. It would be helpful, though, if there were a kind of consensus, a lingua franca animal, that people could generalize from.

Through a series of circumstances, he acquires a small colony of raccoons. Cole still had to find an experiment of his own to get his PhD. These raccoons seemed promising. As far as Cole knew, no one had kind of put raccoons to these motions. So that's a doctoral dissertation. I can run these studies with these raccoons, right? Whatever the data is, I can say I have added to our knowledge of comparative psychology.

He probably had a hunch that this was going to be interesting. I don't know if raccoons are the most charismatic of our fauna, but raccoons? They're kind of fun. I think they're the most charismatic of our fauna. Well, they're annoying, but they're like, they're lovable scamps, right? Cole began running tests on the raccoons. He put them in boxes with complicated locks every day for a whole academic year. And he found they were incredible.

Any box it seemed, any puzzle, the raccoon could solve it. And what's more, the animal wasn't just going through the motions. The raccoon seemed curious about what he was doing. And Cole thought there was evidence that raccoons could hold images in their mind. Nobody was making these kinds of claims about other animals. So Cole started publishing his research, writing the leading figures in psychology, saying, hey, these raccoons are really unusually intelligent. Maybe as intelligent as monkeys. Which seems to me like it should make them a great model organism for people.

Except, there was a movement that was growing swiftly within Coles Field right around then. Which was explicitly uncomfortable with any talk of an animal having a mind. And it was fast becoming the only show in town. It was called Behaviorism. All this history is documented in an amazing article by Michael Pettit titled, The Problem of Raccoon Intelligence in Behaviorist America, which is one of my favorite academic essays of all time,

because the raccoon was indeed a problem. essays of all time. Because the raccoon was indeed a problem. So it was no surprise to us that a lot of psychologists steered clear of coons. Bob Bailey. He used to be the top guy at a legendary behaviorist organization called Animal Behavior Enterprises. The founders of that company wrote an infamous paper questioning the fundamentals of behaviorism. The idea that all animals were blank slates you could write whatever you wanted on. A key example? One raccoon they'd trained to put coins in a box.

After a hundred or so responses, the raccoon would start, instead of just picking up one coin and taking it to the box and putting it in the box the raccoon would pick up two coins and then rub them together and would start walking towards the box and then it would stop and rub the coins together and then it would go to the box and then start to put the coins in and then stop and rub the coins together and then start to put the coins back in the box and the stop and rub the coins together. Eventually it would put the coins in the box most of the time. Eventually, most of the time.

Eventually, and most of the time, were bad news for people trying to turn psychology into a reputable hard science. That raccoon box situation came later on. But this exact dynamic put a bit of a target on Lawrence Cole, the frontier raccoonist. And if you know anything about the history of psychology, you'll know how the problem of the raccoon was solved. Raccoon erasure. The raccoon does not figure prominently at all. But you know which animal does? The rat. I'm curious about how you account for that historical process of raccoon erasure that begins around them. One of the problems with raccoons is they are a much larger and more cumbersome species than your bred lab rats, right?

In terms of feeding, caging, maintenance, rats proved much more docile in a debt. And again, if you want to have decent numbers for your study, right, they also reproduce quite readily. They have very short breeding cycles and you can kind of build up the populations. But it wasn't just about convenience. It was also difficult to generalize from raccoon experiments. Rats, for example, behaved in predictable, repeatable ways. Raccoons, not so much. How is a scientist supposed to work with an animal who each spring gets wanderlust and

attempts to break out of their cage? What do you do when your experimental raccoon colony does escape and moves into your lab's ventilation system? As behaviorism gained steam, scientists in the big cities attacked the nascent science of raccoons. Wasn't this all a bit silly? Meanwhile, other behaviorists complained that keeping raccoon colonies was really just a huge pain in the neck. And so we got the century of the rat, and to a lesser degree, the pigeon. This behaviorism is a theory of control.

They are animals that you could control. Behaviorists thought they were studying an animal They are animals that you could control. Behaviorists thought they were studying an animal that stood in for all human beings. But actually, they wound up studying a lot of lab rats. And that led us to some pretty flawed conclusions about people. We'll be right back. For a little while now, I've been interested in how the lab rat has shaped our understanding of human beings. Rats are all over the history of psychology. Rat studies of depression, rat studies of cooperation, rat studies of rationality. Think about the way we speak.

Rat in a maze, the rat race. Mall rat. Gym rat. Smell a rat. A rat's nest. It's all rats all the way down. I figured if anyone could tell me about how exactly this all came to be, it would be one of the leading rat behavioral researchers in the country. Dr. Kelly Lambert at the University of Richmond.

For most of psychology, it's just they were the only show in town. If you wanted to do research with an animal model, when I was in graduate school at the University of Georgia, this is what we had. That was the only animal model you had. JAY LAMBERT Lambert loves rats. She's written a book called The Lab Rat Chronicles. A neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet's most successful mammals. She's particularly famous for experiments where she taught rats to drive cars, which,

if we're being honest, is really why I got into Richmond. So the idea was to train them. You get in the car, you get a fruit loop. Sit here, you get a fruit loop. But early on, it was amazing that they seemed to learn the concept of driving. So once we shaped them and they learned to press the right lever to go right, they seemed to automatically know to press the left one to go left. – If you've seen Stuart Little in his red convertible, you're not even half prepared for the image of a lab rat hunched over the dashboard on what appears to be a monster truck,

just careening towards a bunch of Froot Loops. Lambert loves working with her rats. but lately she's also been questioning how the rat became the be-all end-all for understanding human beings. I don't think they made a decision about which model organism should we use. The rat was already on board for biomedical research, so it was practical to use the rat. Basically, it's the lab rat industry. There was a whole factory line system around producing lab rats via mass inbreeding,

premised on the fantasy that the inbred rats were basically interchangeable with one another. They bred brothers and sisters for 20 generations. Their intention was the animals to be as close to clones as possible. And then whatever your manipulation was, Their intention was the animals to be as close to clones as possible. And then whatever your manipulation was, diet, stress, movement or whatever, they felt confident that they saw a difference between the experimental group that got it and the control group that didn't,

that that variable was the influential variable. This was all taking off around the time Lawrence Cole's work with raccoons was being influential variable. This was all taking off around the time Lawrence Cole's work with raccoons was being cast aside. That kind of inbreeding helped create rats who were much more docile and easier to control than wild rats, and certainly than raccoons, which meant it gave the behaviorists easier, more reliable data.

And then it just took off. Soon, a prominent psychologist described the field as being infected by a plague of rats. Millions of dollars poured into rat studies. The leader of the Yale Institute of Human Relations announced that anything he observed about rats behaviors among other animals was quote, identical with those operative in man even in his highest behavioral achievements." Let me play you a bit of film that Yale Institute produced.

I think it goes a long way to showing exactly how confident these people were in what studying rats could tell us about people. Again, a mild electric shock can be administered through the grid on the floor of the apparatus. This film has always freaked me out. There's a rat in a cage with an electric current running through the grid on the floor of the apparatus. This film has always freaked me out. There's a rat in a cage with an electric current running through the bars. He's got to figure out how to turn it off.

This time, it can only be turned off by rotating a wheel. The satiated animal starts responding as soon as a drive is supplied. The whole time that tone is sounding, the rat is just frantically scrambling around his cage, trying to figure out how to make it stop. Then he starts pawing at a wheel, and it turns off. The drive produced by electric shock is stronger than hunger. It turns out zapping a rat is a good way to get it to do anything, including violence.

Responding to another animal by striking him can also be learned. All he needs is a little motivation. If you could teach a rat to do anything, why not a person? Suddenly the scary world of the 20th century began to seem a lot more manageable. Mass movements, Great Depressions, whatever. Just find the right set of incentives or punishments, and all of human behavior could be predicted and controlled. We started comparing that behavior to humans at a slot machine or something. People I think started seeing humans as big rats or rats as little humans.

I always say that we're not. We've got what, 6,000 mammalian species and we're gonna pick one or two? Few people question the dominance of the rat at first. Why bother when it was working so well? This kind of thing has always bothered me on a gut level. I look in the mirror every day and I do not see a rat staring back at me, at least not since patching the hole in my bathroom wall. We aren't rats. I'm not saying we can't learn anything about ourselves from animals, but I am saying

that you should never underestimate how many of the things we think we know about human beings are actually things we know about inbred rats with brains the size of grapes, kept in cages that sometimes electrocute you. And it's hard for me to think back about, why didn't I question that? Or did I ask if there were other models? And it's just come lately that I've had so many of these, Kelly, what the heck were you thinking all these years? We built a science of human nature,

and one of the strongest pillars was the lab rat. And who is the lab rat? He's crucially not the raccoon. The raccoon lets it all hang out. He's defiant, mischievous, crafty. If asked to participate in a scientific experiment, he will inquire about payment, then call in sick. Not the rat.

The rat is hardworking by instinct, diligent. He gnaws away, he navigates complex warrants, he gets a perfect score on his SATs. He's rational. Build the maze and he'll fall in line. He is in short a good animal for running the same test again and again and again without complaint while delivering consistent reliable data suggesting that we humans behave in consistent reliable ways. For all this the rat has been rewarded by becoming the only animal synonymous with the scientific laboratory.

It's not lab pigeon. It's not lab monkey. It's lab rat. But I was beginning to wonder, what if it should have been lab raccoon? We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Some years ago, when Michael Pettit was working on his ingenious article about raccoon erasure, he took a colleague out to lunch, Suzanne MacDonald, behaviorist and expert in animal

cognition. He told her what he'd been learning about Lawrence Cole and the early raccoon studies. She, a fellow Torontonian beset by the plague of raccoons, was like, oh my god, how did we miss this? I originally had thought, and I told Mike this because I thought it was a brilliant insight, oh they're the monkeys of North America. By monkeys of North America you mean they fill a certain ecological niche? Yeah, because we don't have monkeys, right? So it's just like, oh, well, you know, maybe they're just like that. They are not primates, but maybe they have evolved

to cognitively to be primates. Traveling to study monkeys was expensive. If raccoons were like monkeys, then living in Toronto was like living on safari. So McDonald caught the Lawrence Cole bug. She began to study raccoons and she's been doing it ever since. Because we don't know very much, just trying to fill gaps and trying to see what I find out about them. And they are annoying little critters, so it's been challenging and I wouldn't recommend it

to most people. McDonald has become one of the world's leading experts in raccoons, and in particular the urban raccoons of Toronto, with whom I think she feels a strong kinship. For instance, I've seen people saying that there are a hundred thousand raccoons in Toronto. Where did they get that number? McDonald told me that she was the origin of that statistic, and she just made a number up. Which is exactly what a raccoon would do. She gets it.

So after a century of waiting, I prepared to receive the good news about the raccoon's true intelligence from the source. I leaned back in my desk chair. And I can tell you, having studied cognition in baby raccoons, they are dumber than sticks. They are so dumb, just terrible. And every one of our little markers that we use for animal cognition or intelligence or developmental milestones, they just fail every single one.

How intriguing, I thought. Maybe the raccoon's super intelligence develops at a later age? No, and adults, not either. This is not going well. So honestly, that is what disappointed me so much because I always thought, you know, that raccoons are the monkeys of North America. But they are not.

I was at this point trying not to look hugely depressed. But McDonald just kept going. So what they have done is they've evolved to sort of search and destroy. That seems to be their strategy. Lots of species will search and destroy and they find a thing and they break it, right? But there are other situations where you present them with a thing and you can see them looking at it and figuring it out. Yeah, raccoons don't do that. They're just like, what can I do to knock this over? What can I do to break this open? What can I do to get whatever it is I need to get?

And they just leave destruction in their wake. So they are not sitting and thinking about things. They are all action. Very little thought. Here I should just say that there's a lot we still don't know about raccoons. And indeed, McDonald's still gets a lot out of studying them too. Especially the particularities of urban raccoons. But still, I had wondered about this question for years. Hearing that raccoons were morons, actually, was kind of a bummer in my book.

But you know who was thrilled when I told him about it? That's precisely why there's such a better model for human beings. Again, local man Malcolm Gladwell. They are clever, mischievous, vengeful, destructive, and profoundly stupid. That is humanity. We observe the raccoon and we think there is a kind of deep intelligence there that's fueling his Behavior and there isn't the raccoon just wants to mess things up, right? He just and he's maniacal about it. He just wants to destroy and He has a kind of surface cleverness that serves those destructive impulses.

So when I look at the raccoon, I mean, do I need to say it? It's Donald Trump. He's a raccoon. The problem with our, the way we think about Trump is at various points, you know, is Donald Trump a rat? No, he's not a rat. Nixon's a rat. Nixon was a rat.

Nixon's a rat. Trump is a rat. So is he a fox? Sometimes people say, oh. Crazy like a fox. Nixon's a rat. So is he a fox? Sometimes people say, oh crazy like a fox. Crazy like a fox. No because the fox is actually a deeply intelligent animal right? Well, and crucially wary. The fox is wary. The raccoon is not wary. Yes exactly. The fox stops to think and pause and make a strategy and you know takes his time.

A raccoon would have fallen into the Russian orbit without realizing it. Raccoon, you know, like a raccoon would choose his running mates with carelessness and abandon. I mean, it's just like, it's all, it's all raccoon. It feels like to call Trump a rat is to miss, is to completely misunderstand who he is. It's just a raccoon. record he's gonna scrape outside your window all night and like create a racket and just know everyone else will be sleepless and groggy

and he will be happy in the morning. There's also, I think crucially, if we're going back to this kind of did we pick the wrong model organism? What do we conclude about human beings if we think they're like rats? Rats are very hardworking. You give them a task and they will do it ad nauseum. They're happy to just keep getting the job done. They live

in little warrens. You put a rat in a maze and it knows exactly what to do and it's kind of like fine being in a maze. Problem solvers. They're problem solvers. They're sort of cautious about new things. You talk to any exterminator, it's like very hard to get a rat to eat poison. Like they are very careful about what they eat, what risks they take. Raccoons are extremely disinhibited. They aren't wary at all.

A raccoon can live to like 20 in a lab. In the wild, they tend to live two to three years because they're just sort of like, what's that do? And then they just like jam their fingers in a socket. And it's like, and that's the end of the raccoon. We built the world for rats, but we are functionally raccoons. And so we are dissatisfied with the rat world. But it is the fact that we have the rat world that has kept us from blowing it all up in our face so far.

No, yes. What you can't, what you never plan for in a world built on rats, on the rat model, is that someone, instead of trying to navigate the maze, just wants to burn it down. That's the one thing, the rat's never gonna do that. And the rat's never gonna effectively commit a kind of institutional suicide. The raccoon just wants to destroy things. I did a complete 180 on this story. I started thinking that the rat model was a disgrace

because they had rats all around. I see now it was kind of utopian. Every need could be anticipated, every behavior nudged, every outcome predicted, and every person satisfied. But there is no one animal model for human behavior. A rat's its own thing, a lab rat's its own thing, raccoons are really their own thing, and we're not one or the other. We're all the above and something else.

But these days it seems clear. We definitely did ourselves a disservice when we forgot about the raccoon. Sadly, I never got to come face to face with a raccoon in reporting this story, but I did get to meet a lab rat. Kelly Lambert, Lab Rat I love designing tests for rats. Kelly Lambert now studies all kinds of animals in all kinds of places. She's particularly interested in wild animals these days.

But Lambert still has a soft spot for the lab rat. When I visited her at the University of Richmond, she took me back into a locked set of rooms. There were signs up that said, quiet, behavioral testing in progress. And behind one of the doors, a cage with two rats she's been teaching to drive. They're generally, you know, like kittens, a wild rat. I have to suit up. It would bite my nose off. So they've been bred to be able to handle them easily.

So if I'm looking at aggression or stress, this may not be the best model to use. I leaned closer to the rat. Lambert seemed to think he was showing an unusual interest in my microphone. You're more interested in the novel than the food? More curious about the mic. I wonder what it is about that. Actually, the rat was really grabbing at the mic, pulling it closer to its snout. Podcast rat. This is your first rat podcaster. It was really weird.

He wasn't climbing on the mic, he was just yanking it right up to his face. Not something you would have predicted if you know about rats and how wary they are. A mystery. I felt like maybe that rat was trying to tell me something. Rats communicate via ultrasonic frequencies. So a few days later, when I got home, I processed the audio, pitch shifted it down, and hit play. Have you ever seen a raccoon drive a car? Long live the lab rat!

Sorry buddy. I know you're right. But it's the raccoon's time now. Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Nadeff Haferi, Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shakerjee. Fact-checking by Annika Robbins. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Lysette Barton at the doctors Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology.

And to Sarah Nix and Greta Cohn. I'm Ben Nadef Haferi. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.