this is part of the origin of the Rats of Nimh books
National institute of Mental Health
absolutely horrifying what they did to these poor critters
Discussion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rats_of_NIMH
notice how the NIMH is capitalized?
the school teacher who read one of these books in my year five primary school class also coincidentally gave away a bunch of books one time and one was a book about the paranormal that set me off on a whole thing that really has shaped so much of my subsequent life
she also read us Charlottes Web, which probably is actually also a covert narrative relating to some horrible government experiment
reading that wikipedia page indeed it must surely be related
the premise of the story was it was a government experiment to make rats sapient and what happened when there was too many of them
the reality was simply an experiment where they did all kinds of weird things to the living quarters and yes indeed they also put too many of them together and observed their behaviour
so, yeah, the books were clearly tied to the experiments