On Aggression by Lorenz Konrad

Author:Lorenz, Konrad [Lorenz, Konrad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2002-01-01T13:00:00+00:00

10

RATS

There is a type of social organization characterized by a form of aggression that we have not yet encountered: the collective aggression of one community against another. I will try to show how the misfunctioning of this social form of intra-specific aggression constitutes ‘evil’ in the real sense of the word, and how the kind of social order now to be discussed represents a model in which we can see some of the dangers threatening ourselves.

In their behaviour towards members of their own community the animals here to be described are models of social virtue; but they change into horrible brutes as soon as they encounter members of any other society of their own species. Communities of this type possess too many individual animals for these to know each other personally, and in most cases membership of a certain society is identifiable by a definite smell common to all members.

In the huge communities of social insects it has long been known that their societies, often comprising millions, are basically families consisting of the descendants of a single female or pair which founded the colony. It is also well known that among bees, termites and ants, the members of such a large clan recognize each other by a characteristic hive, nest or anthill smell, and that murder occurs if a member of a strange colony inadvertently enters the nest. Massacres ensue if a human experimenter inhumanly tries to mix two colonies. It has, I think, been known only since 1950 that there are large families of rodents which behave similarly. F. Steiniger and J. Eibl-Eibesfeldt made this important discovery at about the same time but independently of each other, Steiniger in the brown rat and Eibl-Eibesfeldt in the house mouse.

Eibl, who at that time was with Otto Koenig at the Wilhelminenberg Biological Station, worked on the sound principle of living in as close contact as possible with his experimental animals; the house mice, which lived free in his hut, were regularly fed by him, and he moved about quietly and carefully so that they were soon tame enough for him to make observations at close quarters. One day he opened a large container in which he had bred a number of big, wild-coloured laboratory mice, not too different to the wild form. As soon as these mice dared to leave the cage and run about in the room they were attacked furiously by the resident wild mice, and only after hard fighting did they manage to regain the safety of their prison which they defended successfully against invasion by the wild mice.

Steiniger put brown rats from different localities into a large enclosure which provided them with completely natural living conditions. At first the individual animals seemed afraid of each other; they were not in an aggressive mood, but they bit each other if they met by chance, particularly if two were driven towards each other along one side of the enclosure, so that they collided at speed. However, they only became really aggressive when they began to settle and take possession of territories.

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