A friend of mine is a teacher and we were talking about “what would be a good science project.” I recounted a project we did in my youth: We trained a mouse to run a maze and timed him. We then sent him up in an Estees rocket, and sent him through the maze again. We were testing to see if G force affected memory.
My friend said “Oh no, we could never do anything that cruel. I would be fired.”
I dunno, it just doesn’t seem cruel to me. I remember it as a great project. It taught me so much about the scientific process and got me excited about science.
Oh, and BTW, for a proper experiment, you would need two mice, one to ride in the rocket and one to stay on terra firma as a control. (OK, technically, you would need two groups of mice for everything to be really kosher.)
Yes, you are correct, but teaching one mouse to do a maze was quite an accomplishment for an eighth-grade class (a small, advanced class.)
But in the end, one of the things we learned was that we did not have the proper controls on the experiment. For instance, was the result (the mouse did indeed complete the maze much much more slowly) due to an affect on the mouse’s memory, OR was it an affect on his coordination? We then wrote a paper on these types of questions. We really did learn quite a lot about the scientific process.
How would you differentiate between G-force affects and having the cheese scared out of you? You would have to use different G-force methods to determine if the event itself was the cause of the memory problems.
If I were subjected to such an unnatural act I would have trouble remembering where I left my keys. I would still be thinking, “WTF was that all about”.
Exactly. The mouse has been on the ground all its life, now its in a rocket? The mouse probably shit its pants. The mouse probably has no idea what was going on and if anything, it was in shock and therefore did poorly in the second round of testing.
Sending in mouse up in a rocket sounds cool though.
Sounds like the mouse would be terrified. I don’t think this would be as bad as maybe starving it or in some way purposely hurting it, but it doesn’t seem right.
It doesn’t sound like it would be fun for the mouse at all. Then again, is it cruelty to have the mouse cooped up in a cage all it’s life, being poked and prodded by students, etc? Is a mouse’s life in the wild much better? The rocket mouse had it a bit tough in one aspect, but easier than it’s country cousin, scrounging for food, terrified by predators.
