Fearless Mouse
Japanese scientists have created a genetically-altered mouse that is not afraid of cats:
“Mice are naturally terrified of cats, and usually panic or flee at the smell of one. But mice with certain nasal cells removed through genetic engineering didn’t display any fear,” said research team leader Ko Kobayakawa.
“The mice approached the cat, even snuggled up to it and played with it,” Kobayakawa said. “The discovery that fear is genetically determined and not learned after birth is very interesting, and goes against what was previously thought.”
One such mouse was shown off to the media today, allowing for some cool video:
Why wasn’t the mouse eaten? Apparently the scientists picked a very docile cat that had little interest in hunting.
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mice + no fear of cats = very short life expectation.
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Well… not sure.
Normal mice run away, there by triggering the cats instinct to hunt after it. Even your own hand if you make a fast sudden movement.
Since these fearless mice don’t run away, the instinct of the cat is not triggered. So unless the cat is really hungry he will not kill or attack the mouse.
Of course, this only applies to cats + mice. Other animals like snakes will still attack.
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>>The discovery that fear is genetically determined and not learned after birth is very interesting, and goes against what was previously thought.<<
Of course fear of natural predators is in the genes- it’s a result of evolution. To suggest that it ‘was previously thought’ that mice learn to fear cats through experience, or from other means (perhaps by attending cats awareness classes?) seems ludicrous. This is just undoing evolution.
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>>The discovery that fear is genetically determined and not learned after birth is very interesting, and goes against what was previously thought.<<
This comment is certainly misleading. It’s an innacurate generalization, really. I think this is an example of the common tendency of the media to jazz up new scientific findings to try to convey a bigger impact than they actually have (also there may be more specific details and many other issues that are too difficult to communicate to the public). If that comment was made by Dr. Kobayakawa (it was in quotes in the article), that’s pretty bad because it came from the mouth of the type of person the public tends to regard as an authority on these issues. He was either pushed to say it, he’s looking for more credit than he deserves, or the sudden attention toward his findings went to his head.
In fact, I have trouble believing that the scientists actually think that they made such a revolutionary discovery that “Fear is genetically determined.” I just took a look at the abstract (summary) of the scientific report they are talking about and from what I gather, the aim of the study was to try to find out whether the olfactory system specifically processes odors that are innately feared (separate from those that are not) and how that information is conveyed to the rest of the brain. But it was NOT to address the issue of whether fear is already built in or not.
The idea that mice and men are hardwired to fear certain things is not only common sense, but some scientists actually already take advantage of this feature and use cat odor and fox odor (at least the chemical that emits it, imagine chasing down a fox to try to get a swab of its odor) to induce fear in mice and rats in order to study the brain areas involved in classical conditioning (by pairing the odor with another signal) or the brain pathways involved in innate fear.
This may be a small harmless instance of mistranslation of scientific findings by overly enthusiastic reporters and other media, but sometimes it can get out of hand and impact society adversely… take Aru Aru Daijten, for example.
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That cat seemed to be getting annoyed with the mouse. Maybe thats why they don’t like each other.
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Question is.. can they create an elephant that’s not afraid of mice?
In all seriousness though, cats generally only hunt things that run away from it – if they do get approached by a mouse (like in this case) they get very sceptical instead.
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