Some Monday randomness: a living kaleidoscope of domestic animals.
Seriously, why does everyone like that corner so much?
I laughed, then felt a little bad about laughing - given the repeated collisions with the walls, other animals, etc. Hopefully they took everyone out for a nice pile of grain afterward.
Via a pretty cool typeface blog, monoscope. (I see they also liked the Studley toolchest!)
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Seriously, why does everyone like that corner so much?
Mice and rats like the corner because it has vertical surfaces; the tendency to seek out walls in an open-field situation is called thigmotaxis. Standard rodent behavioral assay.
I meant to strike a facetious note there, and apparently didn't succeed. ;) Yes, critters love corners - one well-known technique for stress-testing mice and rats is to deprive them of a corner to hide in. But the thing that's interesting here to me is that everybody ends up in a corner made of mirrors - a corner that doesn't look like a corner. The small birds at least are trying to fly through the mirrors (or so I infer from the smacking of their faces on the glass). Thus the giant pile-up. So yeah, they're showing that classic corner preference - but at the same time, at least some of these critters aren't viewing the mirrors as "walls" but as "windows." It's just rather interesting to watch.
I think the mice in the collide-o-scope are finding the walls and corners using whiskers/somatosensory cues, rather than visual. The birds, of course, rely more on visual cues, and so there's a lot more smacking of beaks and responding to mirror images for them.
I enjoyed it until they let the flighted birds go. That's just mean and IMO deserving of a good crotch-kicking.
I wouldn't be surprised if they seeded the corner with some grain or millet to attract a crowd.