According to the studies done, rodents are able to feel pain and pleasure. The mice use high frequency sounds in order to communicate to one another, and they use sounds that cannot be heard by a human ear. They are attached to one another emotionally and they are able to love their own families or bond with the humans that are their guardians. The rats will not only express empathy, they will also express altruism by putting themselves into harm’s way in order to protect other animals.

It has been determined that mice and rats feel pain, but at the same time they were exposed to many cruel treatments during the experiment. They were dehydrated, starved, isolated, poisoned, shocked and burned but not given any pain relief during all these experiments.

Rats and mice are in the mammal categories, and they have a nervous system that is similar to that of humans. It has come to be known that they are able to feel joy, loneliness, fear and pain. They are social animals and the male mice will woo their mates using high pitched songs. The infant rats will giggle if they are tickled and they will express empathy if the human or rat they know has a problem. The rats feel pain as rabbits, cats and dogs do. The rats are not protected by law when they are in experimentation, so they will not be given pain relief when they are in certain laboratory tests.

The empathy is the ability of feeling the pain of another person and to try to ease such pain for them. Before, it was believed that humans were the only beings that can show this characteristic; however, now it is known that a rat will try to flee a cage mate when it is in distress. This result means that the rodents may be used in helping to determine the physiological and genetic underpinning of the empathy in people. The rats can sense what other rats are feeling and they will start to feel the same way. One example is that when the rats get a painful chemical injection on the paw, its cage mate will lick the paw in order to ease such pain.

The mice and rats can make expressions that are the same as that of humans when they are in pain, and they are so similar that the researchers have made up grimace scales. This is used to assess the level of the animal’s pain by looking at their faces. Other rats will pay attention to these emotional expressions of other rats and will leave the place where they see that other rats may be suffering.

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