Squirrel Nation by Peter Coates review – glad to be grey | Science and nature books
Since the famous mid-20th century experiments on “operant conditioning” by BF Skinner, people have been tempted to describe modern humans as a “rats in cages”, forever pressing levers for tiny pellets of pleasure. Before that, however, the dominant metaphor involved a different rodent. In the 19th century, caged squirrels were popular pets, getting their exercise from running on wheels. “The tendency of the entire national energy,” John Ruskin wrote, “is to approximate more and more the state of a squirrel in a cage.”The…