Previous investigations have shown that rats and some strains of mice, but not hamsters, selectively bury prods through which electric shocks are delivered. Rats also bury noxious foods, although this behavior has never been examined in other rodents. In the present study, albino rats and CF·l mice gave some evidence of burying spouts filled with Tabasco sauce, an intrinsically aversive liquid, or sweetened condensed milk to which a taste aversion was condi· tioned. Such spouts were never buried by Syrian golden hamsters or by English short·haired guinea pigs. These results suggest that burying sources of aversive stimulation is a species· specific reaction not evident in all rodents. Several recent studies have shown that rats will bury sources of aversive stimulation. Pinel and Treit (1978) reported that rats used bedding material to bury a shock prod but did not bury a similar prod not paired with electric shock. In addition to shock prods, other sources of aversive stimulation that have evoked burying include mousetraps, flashbulbs, and tubes that produce puffs of air (Terlecki, Pinel, & Treit, 1979). Burying has also been shown to occur in response to neutral stimuli, such as marbles, and to appetitive stimuli, such as food pellets (Poling, Cleary, & Monaghan, 1981). Whether burying of neutral and appetitive stimuli is fundamentally different from burying in response to aversive stimula tion remains unclear. Pinel and associates have proposed that burying in response to aversive stimulation is a defensive reaction, innate in rats (pinel & Treit, 1978; Wilkie, MacLennan, & Pinel, 1979). Earlier, Bolles (1970) described fleeing, fighting, and freezing as species-specific defensive reactions in rats_ According to him, rats that exhibited these responses to an aversive stimulus (e.g ., a predator) were more likely to have survived and reproduced than were rats that failed to do so, and thus species-specific defensive reactions developed through natural selection. The most convincing evidence that burying of aversive stimuli might have survival value in the natural environ· ment of rats comes from studies employing noxious food. Wilkie et a1. (1979) showed that rats would bury spouts filled with either an intrinsically bad·tasting liquid (Tabasco sauce) or a palatable liquid to which a taste aversion had been conditioned. Poling et a1. (1981)