A descriptive analysis of tail-pinch elicited eating-behavior of rats

Noninjurious tail-pinch (TP) reportedly elicits “a normal pattern of eating” from sated rats. The present investigation, however, revealed notable features of TP-elicited eating which distinguished it from food-deprivation (FD) elicited eating. For example, naive sated rats which were subjected to TP and offered familiar food in an unfamiliar setting ate more reliably than did naive rats subjected to FD. Presentation of an unfamiliar food (chocolate wafer cookies) resulted in TP rats dropping considerably more than they ingested, whereas FD rats ingested much more than they dropped. The present findings therefore indicate that TP may be more useful as a tool for assessing stimulus control of eating independent of depletion due to FD than as a model for “normal eating.”