Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
Behavior Disfunction Mirroring Zoo Animals (Zoochosis): True Cause of Birth Rate Collapse?
In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the fascinating parallels between human behavior in cities and animal behavior in zoos. Drawing on research, personal anecdotes, and cultural observations, they discuss how urban environments can lead to repetitive, compulsive, and sometimes self-destructive behaviors—mirroring what is seen in captive animals. The conversation covers fertility rates, social aggression, learned helplessness, and the psychological effects of modern city life, all with the Collins' signature blend of insight and humor.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing an idea that I had that was prompted by something Ruby Yard was saying on what of Alt Hiss, no, which is that if you look at many of the odd behaviors that you see in cities today among humans, many of them look very similar to the types of behaviors that animals begin to make in captivity, specifically mammals in zoos. And a lot of people know the, you know, the mouse utopia experiment, right? And they try to draw a, a line between the mouse utopia use experiment and the ills of modern society and TikTok and falling fertility rates, and it's like, that's all well and good.
But the problem is, is that. We have evidence and you could find it online if you, if you Google about this, somebody did a extremely long blotted post that the Mouse Utopia experiment may, may have basically been faked. Like we don't know for sure. It, it basically, it, it, it was of that period of experiments in like the 1950s when [00:01:00] like nobody really cared if it was true or not.
They just cared how, how spicy it was. Yeah. It wasn't like
Simone Collins: pre-validation. There wasn't, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Go for it. Sure. Yeah, sure. Whatever. The, the, you wanna put this in your backyard? Yeah. It'll be full of dead mice soon. Sure. Whatever. Yeah. Basically what it appears they may have done is run a bunch of trials and then only reported the ones that were, that got interesting results in a very uncontrolled format.
Mm. And, and, and also that that only really gives us like one experiment to look at. But if instead of correlating with mouse utopia experiment, we correlate with well-known and well-documented behavior from zoos.
Simone Collins: Ooh, there's a lot of zoos and there's a lot of zoo animals. Yeah, a
Malcolm Collins: lot of, and this could be upstream of everything to do with fertility collapse because as you know, one of the most, oh yeah.
Simone Collins: Like you, even you, you know, when we used to start in the very beginning talk, talking with media, you talked about people breeding like caged pandas.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. People know caged pandas are famously hard to breed. They, the pandas [00:02:00] don't really breed in captivity. But lots of animals don't breed in captivity.
There, there are many species of wild animals that will almost not breed in captivity, which is odd. You know, people can look at humans not breeding and they're like, it's really weird because like evolutionarily we should be programmed to like, want to do all of this stuff stuff. Well, and
Simone Collins: especially like if you've got nothing but time, what are you gonna do?
But bang each other. What's
Simone Collins (3): going on here?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and then literally it is very similar to cities. They are in a confined area but natural predators are removed and they are given all the food that they could ever want. Yeah. And they are just, tons of toys are thrown in with them like with us, like being on our phone or something like that.
Yeah. You're given all of the stimulation so they ca
Published on 3 months, 3 weeks ago