Here's a little tidbit from
Scientific American:
Jailbreak Rat: Selfless Rodents Spring Their Pals and Share Their Sweets (12/8/11). And the findings are just yummy.
According to the article, the researchers:
... placed pairs of rats in Plexiglass pens. One rat was trapped in a cage in the middle of the pen, whereas the other rat was free to run around. Most free rats circled their imprisoned peer, gnawing at the cage and sticking their paws, noses and whiskers through any openings. After a week of trial and error, 23 of the 30 rats in the experiment learned to open the cage and free their peers by head-butting the cage door or leaning their full weight against the door until it tipped over. (The door could only be opened from the outside.) At first the rats were startled by the noise of the toppling door. Eventually, however, they stopped showing surprise, which suggests that they fully intended to push the door aside. Further, the rodents showed no interest in opening empty cages or in those containing toy rats, indicating that a break out was their genuine goal.
But it gets even better below the squiggle. Rattus norvegicus proves to be a rather empathetic little rodent.
The researcher was skeptical about the rodentiary motives, and so ...
She placed rats in a Plexiglass pen with two cages: in one was another rat, in the other was a pile of five milk chocolate chips—a favorite snack of these particular rodents. The unrestricted rats could easily have eaten the chocolate themselves before freeing their peers or been so distracted by the sweets that they would neglect their imprisoned friends. Instead, most of the rats opened both cages and shared in the chocolate chip feast.
So, let's pay a listen to a debate from last September where we saw a Republican audience cheering a hypothetical a man left to die for the crime of not buying health insurance. (Embedding was, wisely, disabled, for this one). Slate.com gives an accurate transcript:
What should happen, the moderator asked hypothetically, if a healthy 30-year-old man who can afford insurance chooses not to buy it—and then becomes catastrophically ill and needs intensive care for six months? When Dr. Paul ducked, fondly recalling the good old days before Medicare and saying that we should all take responsibility for ourselves, Blitzer pressed the point. "But, Congressman, are you saying the society should just let him die?" At that point, the rabble erupted in cheers and whoops of "Yeah!"
Now, to be a little fair to Dr. Paul, he did suggest that church fundraisers would pay for this hypothetical patient, even if his supporters were more than willing to thin the herd.