ABSTRACT
The most menacing rodent pests owe their success largely to three features in which they resemble human beings: they can live in a great variety of environments, they tolerate a wide range of foods, and they are restlessly "inquisitive" and exploratory. An account of their feeding and exploratory behavior therefore runs the risk of understating their diversity. A surprisingly neglected accompaniment of rodents' restlessness is food sampling. Sampling may be regarded as a component of the foraging "strategy" of omnivores. One consequence of neophobia is the difficulty of trapping commensal rodents. Food can itself be a "new object" or source of neophobia: a heap of edible grains or flour may, when first encountered, be avoided. When a neophobic animal is exposed continuously or repeatedly to a new food or other object, avoidance as a rule gradually declines. This is habituation of the neophobic response: the response is replaced by increasingly close and prolonged approach.
