this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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Yup, they correctly learned that they were completely helpless and reacted in a completely understandable way.
In this instance they were looking into the concept of learned helplessness, where they taught 'nothing can be done to fix your situation' to one group, and then removed the obstacle stopping them from leaving the shocking room, and found that, after they'd learned helplessness, they were not inclined to seek the not-shocking floor even if the door was wide open for them to move.
It's sad, and I genuinely don't know of the ethics behind the study, but the research itself was sound and led to further studies attempting to see if this effect applies more generally to other animals. Behavior is important to understand and study, and watching the little lab mice get PTSD in college was not a fun day, and still makes me sad (i adopted two rats, after) but the tests one can run on lab mice with PTSD is really useful for understanding the human brain.
The sad truth is that we use animals for studies that specifically would not be ethical for humans. Like you said, it's still important science than needs to be done, even if it can be unseemly.
The coping mechanism I was told was that most of these animals were bred for this exact purpose, and will be disposed of at the end of the study. I don't know if that really makes our actions any better, but it does help me accept things.
What got me through the rat sudies in college was three things my statistics professor (who ran the rat studies) telling me three things.
They have better Healthcare than you do. They have to be healthy and cared for and all the shots and vet visits possible
Like you said, they do get born for this and are ethically killed
Their life use has to be calculated, scrutinized, debated, and approved by boards designed to keep the horrors of unchecked science at bay. If you want rats to do cocaine, you'll need 30 pages of explanations and forms and approved methodology and proposed scientific benefit, and then they decide if it's worthy or not. Then when you're done, if ANYTHING goes wrong with those rats it has to be documented and explained and accepted or you've just got an absolute rain of hell falling on your tenure and future prospects in animal testing.