Oh. Rats!

I missed the educational conference in Syracuse this year, and it's probably a good thing I wasn't there.  I believe I would have staged a revolution in one of the workshops that was presented. 
    One who had attended the workshop  favorably commented  on how interesting, and, naturally, educational she found a certain  presentation to be. This  workshop presentation centered on the following body  of research, purportedly measuring motivation in humans, particularly adolescents:
     Rats were placed in a bucket of water (most likely individually), from which there was no possibility of escape.  They  were  timed as to how long they would continue to swim, futile as it was, before they gave up and were at the drowning point.  The researcher then rescued the drowned rat, and let it recover.  Then he/she put the rat back in the bucket, and again timed how long it took before the rat gave up and drowned, no lifesaving this time.  The ostensible reason for the study was to assay stress levels in humans;   the conclusion drawn was that people who have already been placed under stress will give up sooner when additional stressful situations arise. 
     Killing rats is all right with me, though  lab rats are not quite the same as sewer or alley rats.  Poisoning them, bashing them, all right, even drowning them may be acceptable ways to prevent infestations and outbreaks of the bubonic plague, but drowning, reviving, and redrowning to me says more about the mindset of the researchers than it does of legitimate scientific research.  They could have drawn the same conclusions if they had tested the rats on involuntary  treadmills.  The rats would stop when they were exhausted, but they wouldn't be dead. 
    I would say PETA should have been informed, but I don't know the details of the "respected' presenter,  where the drowning rats project was carried out, or for that matter how much of it was true.  I tried to google the experiment, couldn't find that one, but there was another rat drowning experiment measuring aggression in rats, whose level of such reportedly rose after they had "drowned" and been revived.  In that case, oddly enough, the researcher also drowned the rat for real after his initial conclusion. Perhaps the workshop  presentation  has been merely plagiarized, with observations made and then applied in a simulated exercise.  In any case, it does lend credence to the term mad scientist.  Sadists!
     Moreover, those attending the workshop totally bought into the premise, blithely accepting what would be considered torture if not done in a scientific setting.  People in general are sheep; waterboarding has been outlawed, has it not?