Cost and meal patterns in wild-caught rats

The effect of domestication upon behavior is not clearly understood and thus generalizations from domesticated laboratory animals to nondomesticated animals must be made with caution. Laboratory free-feeding studies with a variety of domesticated species have demonstrated that these animals reduce meal frequency and increase meal size as the cost of procuring access to food increases. The present experiment was conducted to determine if the same relations would be obtained with wild-caught rats. The results showed that laboratory-tested, wild-caught rats respond to changes in the cost of obtaining food in the same manner as domesticated rats. Wild-caught rats did, however, take longer to train and were less efficient than domesticated rats have proven to be in earlier research. In general, the results affirm the validity of laboratory simulations as a means of exploring parameters associated with foraging in natural settings.