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This chapter begins with a brief review of the literature on social influences on food choices of Norway rats. It describes fieldwork strongly suggesting that interactions between adult free-living rats and their young can determine which foods the young come to eat. It then describes several behavioral processes that have been shown in the laboratory to be sufficient to influence food choice in young rats. Finally, it discusses a type of social influence on rats' food preferences that has already proved to be useful in studies of the physical substrates of learning and memory.

Rats have been the intimate companions of humans for millennia. Their commensal interactions have benefited either party, but rarely both. Rats are invasive species, urban pests, pets, and experimental objects, and the levels of their intersections with human life range from the molecular to the ecosystem. Most attempts to make rats fit for co-existence with humans have entailed finding ways to kill them or exclude them from human presence. When scientists began to recognize the value of rats as experimental laboratory animals in the mid-nineteenth century, remaking the rats themselves began, whether by selective breeding, by training, or most recently by genetic modification. Killing rats remains a goal of urban dwellers, public health officials, and ecologists, while at the same time, rats have also become highly valued tools of life science as indispensable laboratory animals. These incommensurable and indeed incompatible goals highlight the wildly differing value of rats to humans, depending on their contexts. Focusing on two species, the brown or Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) and the black or ship’s rat (Rattus rattus), this essay examines the peculiar relationship between rats and humans, highlighting social, biological, and ethical limits to engineering nature.

The “Norway rat” (Rattus norvegicus), known also as the “brown rat” is rivaled as a pest only by the house mouse (Mus domesticus vel musculus) and the “ship” or “black” rat (Rattus rattus). R. norvegicus also displays peculiar features that make it of special interest to both ethologists and experimental psychologists. This chapter provides an overview of the ecology of the wild R. norvegicus.

This chapter presents brief overviews of the growth of the Norway rat pup and differentiation of behavioral systems. There follows a kind of “ethogram” of early postnatal behavior in Rattus norvegicus, intended to put into a more natural context some of the processes of sensory and motor development, with an emphasis on information that can be used for designing and interpreting tests with immature rats.