[ExI] John B. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiment and Reflections on the Welfare State

[Dave Sill]

https://fee.org/articles/john-b-calhoun-s-mouse-utopia-experiment-and-reflections-on-the-welfare-state

John B. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiment and Reflections on the Welfare
State
One of the more famous ethologists in recent decades was John B. Calhoun,
best known for his mouse experiments in the 1960s. To what extent do the
mouse utopia lessons apply to humans?
Sunday, October 11, 2020
Image Credit: Public Domain (via Smithsonian Magazine)
[image: Lawrence W. Reed] <https://fee.org/people/lawrence-w-reed/>

Lawrence W. Reed <https://fee.org/people/lawrence-w-reed/>
Economics <https://fee.org/articles/topics/Economics> Behavior
<https://fee.org/archive/topics/Behavior> Welfare State
<https://fee.org/archive/topics/Welfare%20State> Welfare
<https://fee.org/archive/topics/Welfare> Incentives
<https://fee.org/archive/topics/Incentives> Perverse Incentives
<https://fee.org/archive/topics/Perverse%20Incentives> John B. Calhoun
<https://fee.org/archive/topics/John%20B.%20Calhoun> Mouse Utopia
<https://fee.org/archive/topics/Mouse%20Utopia> Human Behavior
<https://fee.org/archive/topics/Human%20Behavior>

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Signs in national and state parks all over America warn visitors, “Please
Don’t Feed the Animals.” Some of those government-owned parks provide
further explanation, such as “The animals may bite” or “It makes them
dependent.”

The National Park Service’s website
<https://www.nps.gov/slbe/learn/nature/do-not-feed-the-bears.htm> for
Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan advises,

*It transforms wild and healthy animals into habitual beggars. Studies have
shown that panhandling animals have a shorter lifespan. *

What would happen if animals in the wild could count on human sources for
their diet and never have to hunt or scrounge? What if, in other words, we
humans imposed a generous welfare state on our furry friends? Would the
resulting experience offer any lessons for humans who might be subjected to
similar conditions? Not having to work for food and shelter sounds
appealing and compassionate, doesn’t it?

These are fascinating questions that I am certainly not the first to ask.
Because they require knowledge beyond my own, I cannot offer definitive
answers. Readers should view what I present here as a prod to thought and
discussion and not much more. I report, you decide.

Our personal pets live in a sort of welfare state. Moreover, for the most
part, they seem to like it. My two rat terriers get free food and free
health care, though I am not only their provider, but I am also their
“master” too. In fact, my loving domination is a condition for the free
stuff. It seems like a win-win, so maybe a welfare state can work after
all. Right?

Let us avoid hasty conclusions. Perhaps the human/pet welfare state works
because one of the parties has a brain the size of a golf ball or a
pomegranate.

This is an area illuminated by ethology, the scientific study of animal
behavior. One of the more famous ethologists in recent decades was John B.
Calhoun
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/19/the-researcher-who-loved-rats-and-fueled-our-doomsday-fears/>,
best known for his mouse experiments in the 1960s when he worked for the
National Institute for Mental Health.

Calhoun enclosed four pairs of mice in a 9 x 4.5-foot metal pen complete
with water dispensers, tunnels, food bins and nesting boxes. He provided
all the food and water they needed and ensured that no predator could gain
access. It was a mouse utopia.

Calhoun’s intent was to observe the effects on the mice of population
density, but the experiment produced results that went beyond that. “I
shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man,” he would later
write in a comprehensive report.

At first, the mice did well. Their numbers doubled every 55 days. But after
600 days, with enough space to accommodate as many as another 1,600
rodents, the population peaked at 2,200 and began to decline
precipitously—straight down to the extinction of the entire colony—in spite
of their material needs being met with no effort required on the part of
any mouse.

The turning point in this mouse utopia, Calhoun observed, occurred on Day
315 when the first signs appeared of a breakdown in social norms and
structure. Aberrations included the following: females abandoning their
young; males no longer defending their territory; and both sexes becoming
more violent and aggressive. Deviant behavior, sexual and social, mounted
with each passing day. The last thousand mice to be born tended to avoid
stressful activity and focused their attention increasingly on themselves.

Jan Kubań, a personal friend of mine from Warsaw and a Polish
biocybernetician, considers Calhoun’s experiment “one of the most important
in human history.” He created *The Physics of Life
<http://www.physicsoflife.pl/pol-eng.html>* website
<http://www.physicsoflife.pl/pol-eng.html> where he elaborates on the
meaning and significance of the ethologist’s work. About the final stages
of the mouse utopia, Kubań writes,

*Other young mice growing into adulthood exhibited an even different type
of behavior. Dr. Calhoun called these individuals “the beautiful ones.”
Their time was devoted solely to grooming, eating and sleeping. They never
involved themselves with others, engaged in sex, nor would they fight. All
appeared [outwardly] as a beautiful exhibit of the species with keen, alert
eyes and a healthy, well-kept body. These mice, however, could not cope
with unusual stimuli. Though they looked inquisitive, they were in fact,
very stupid.*

Because of the externally provided abundance of water and food, combined
with zero threats from any predators, the mice never had to acquire
resources on their own. The young mice never observed such actions and
never learned them. The life skills necessary for survival faded away. As
Kubań notes,

*Utopia (when one has everything, at any moment, for no expenditure)
prompts declines in responsibility, effectiveness and awareness of social
dependence and finally, as Dr. Calhoun’s study showed, leads to
self-extinction.*

The “behavioral sink” of self-destructive conduct in Calhoun’s experiment
(which he replicated on numerous subsequent occasions) has since been
mostly interpreted as resulting from crowded conditions. Demographers warn
that humans might succumb to similar aberrations if world population should
ever exceed some imaginary, optimal “maximum.” Others like Kubań point out
that the mice utopia fell apart well before the mouse enclosure was full.
Even at the peak of the population, some 20 percent of nesting beds were
unoccupied.

My instincts tell me that Kubań is correct in suggesting that a more likely
culprit in the mice demise was this: *the lack of a healthy challenge*.
Take away the motivation to overcome obstacles—notably, the challenge of
providing for oneself and family—and you deprive individuals of an
important stimulus that would otherwise encourage learning what works and
what doesn’t, and possibly even pride in accomplishment (if mice are even
capable of such a sentiment). Maybe, just maybe, personal growth in each
mouse was inhibited by the welfare-state conditions in which they lived.

Calhoun himself suggested a parallel to humanity:

*Herein is the paradox of a life without work or conflict. When all sense
of necessity is stripped from the life of an individual, life ceases to
have purpose. The individual dies in spirit.*

By relieving individuals of challenges, which then deprives them of
purpose, the welfare state is an utterly unnatural and anti-social
contrivance. In the mouse experiment, the individuals ultimately lost
interest in the things that perpetuate the species. They self-isolated,
over-indulged themselves, or turned to violence.

Does that ring a bell? Read Charles Murray’s 1984 book, *Losing Ground
<https://amzn.to/30LPkLv>*, or George Gilder’s earlier work, *Wealth and
Poverty <https://amzn.to/3lswXU4>**,* and I guarantee that you will hear
that bell.

Or, if nothing else, ponder these prophetic words
<https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-congress-3> from
one of the otherwise short-sighted, opportunistic architects of the
American welfare state, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1935:

*The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me,
show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual
and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.
To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle
destroyer of the human spirit.*

I can think of one big difference between Calhoun’s mouse utopia and the
human welfare state, and it does not weigh in humanity’s favor. For the
mice, everything truly was “free.” No mouse was taxed so another mouse
could benefit. In the human welfare state, however, one human’s benefit is
a cost to another (or to many)—a fact that rarely acts as an incentive for
work, savings, investment, or other positive behaviors. That suggests that
a human welfare state with its seductive subsidies for some and punishing
taxes for others delivers a double blow not present in mouse welfarism.

To what extent do the mouse utopia lessons apply to we humans? I would be
careful about drawing sweeping conclusions. I am reminded, however, of these
words <https://nypost.com/2011/08/26/its-different-when-its-your-own-money/>
from
economist Thomas Sowell: “The welfare state shields people from the
consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue
and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.”

We should not need mice or other animals to teach us that, but perhaps they
can.
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