ABSTRACT
The use of the white rat in biomedical, psychological, behavioral, as well as toxicological research has been amazingly frequent. In fact, it has been the predominant animal model employed. Beach (1950) and Bitterman (1960) have illustrated the dominance of the white rat model in comparative psychology by noting that since the 1930s at least 60% of the research papers have concerned this model. This fact led Beach (1950) to make the statement that comparative psychology as a discipline may become extinct if the majority of research was performed only on one model.
