Determinant

Rat and Reward

9 r a t a n D r e Wa r D When infant rats are provided as the reward, the female rat will perform whatever behavior is necessary to fill her cage with children. We assumed if the sugar corn kept coming, they would press the lever, their white paws and noses finding the milky plastic again and again. We assumed they had no sense of surfeit, pink bellies round and hard as sandstone. But it was the infants, not the corn— all bare, indistinguishable, pink bodies falling again and again down the chute, a pile. Like pennies all new-stamped and the same. We wanted to stop. and yet we let her: press, retreat, return to press again. The babies, their pink soft claws spreading like angiography, rolled over each other. She stood on her hind legs, whiskers stroking the highest body. We let her go. We knew what she would do, jowls hammering the lever, nose covering each new skin. But we wanted to see, too—waves of love, peppered with daughters, their flesh like a pheasant’s, featherless. ...