Dr. Calhoun's Mousery

Dr. Calhoun's Mousery tells the fascinating story of Dr. John Calhoun's life with an emphasis on the brilliant experiments that he conducted on rodent behavior in community settings. I really enjoyed the first part of the book that talked about Dr. Calhoun's career and went into detail on the experimental design of his projects and the results. The second half of the book was a little slow and discussed publications that cited Dr. Calhoun's work.

In modern times, Dr. Calhoun's work is not largely cited and the book provides some explanations on the reason for this. As a scientist I really enjoyed this book, especially the first half. Dr. Calhoun was a brilliant experimentalist. I think that it is challenging to try to extrapolate the results in controlled rodent colonies to real human life. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Chicago Press for an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Calhoun’s Universe 25 was a mouse utopia where there is no shortage of food, no predators, no sickness. It’s also where the Beautiful Ones are born, mice (and rats) who lose the ability and even the need for their fellows. They groom themselves, they eat … but they do not reach out. They do not socialize, they do not breed. And in the end, they die.

While Universe 25, with its Beautiful Ones, is a fascinating and alarming experiment, I was more caught by Universe 34B (which I’ve never heard of), in which Calhoun arranged it so that the rats living there would be required to coorperate in ways nature wouldn’t force. Making male and female rats work together to get water, rats of different statuses had to perform certain tasks in certain groups to get food which lead to more cooperation. It was in some ways a healthier society, though — like Universe 25 — it came with some unintended side effects.

But Calhoun is more than just the man with the mousery and universes of rats. He also wrote numerous papers, worked on a book, edited anthologies. He studied the wingspans of sparrows and the nesting habits of swifts. He taught, gave lectures, and worried for the future of humanity. His work has been cited all over the world, been a source of inspiration for numerous researchers, and is both fascinating and horrifying.

I’m surprised at how much I really enjoyed this book, considering that I don’t often wander into the non-fiction section of the literary world. But Universe 25 — how it came about, and what was learned from it — is interesting, and thought provoking, and I’m left with an appreciation for the imagination and curiosity of Calhoun and those who worked with him. I’m also left with an appreciation for the author who wrote in such a way that I was able to easily understand even the larger and more complex findings.

It took a day to read this book … and I might have read it quicker if I hadn’t stopped every other chapter to breathlessly repeat to some unwitting family member one of the neater bits of information I’d just learned, like the rat (from an early experiment) who climbed over the dividing wall to punish a rat that wasn’t behaving the way it was supposed to; or the birds who learned to pluck foil lids off milk bottles so they could get a drink or two in. If you’re interested in animals and their behavior, scientists and their behavior, or Universe 25, I highly recommend this book.