A natural food aversion in rats rendered hyperphagic by hypothalamic knife cuts

Abstract

Eight hungry rats previously rendered hyperphagic via hypothalamic parasagittal knife cuts did not differ reliably from eight sham-operated controls in their tendencies to feed upon the intact carcasses of freshly sacrificed conspecifics. The ventromedial hypothalamus is not an essential link in the neural circuit mediating the aversion of rats to feed on conspecific flesh.Hungry Norway rats exhibit an aversion to feed on conspecific flesh in the sense that, during a 1-h test, a large majority remain hungry rather than feed on a dead conspecific, whereas a large majority feed on a dead nonconspecific (e.g., a roof rat, Rattus rattus) rather than remain hungry (Carr, Landauer, Wiese, Marasco,