

After earning his PhD in zoology, he joined the Rodent Ecology Project in Baltimore in 1946, whose purpose was to eliminate rodent pests in cities.


John Calhoun grew up in Tennessee, the son of a high school principal and an artist, and was an avid birder when young. And by this point he knew how quickly mouse heaven could deteriorate into mouse hell.
MOUSE UTOPIA EXPERIMENT REDDIT.PDF FREE
Free from predators and other worries, a mouse could theoretically live to an extraordinarily old age there, without a single worry.īut the thing is, this wasn’t Calhoun’s first rodent utopia. Calhoun also screened the mice to eliminate disease. It was a large pen-a 4½-foot cube-with everything a mouse could ever desire: plenty of food and water a perfect climate reams of paper to make cozy nests and 256 separate apartments, accessible via mesh tubes bolted to the walls. Unofficially, it was called mouse heaven.īiologist John Calhoun built the colony at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland in 1968. Officially, the colony was called the Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice.
