Animals in Translation Page 2

  The reason we’ve managed to live with animals all these years without noticing many of their special talents is simple: we can’t see those talents. Normal people never have the special talents animals have, so normal people don’t know what to look for. Normal people can stare straight at an animal doing something brilliant and have no idea what they’re seeing. Animal genius is invisible to the naked eye.

  I’m sure I don’t know all the talents animals have, either, let alone all the things they could use their talents to do if we gave them the chance. But now that I’ve seen the connection between autistic savantry and animal genius at least I have an idea what I’m looking for: I’m looking for ways animals can use their amazing ability to perceive things humans can’t perceive, and to remember highly detailed information we can’t remember, to make life better for everyone, animals and people alike. Just off the top of my head, here’s a thought: we have service dogs for the blind—how about service dogs for the middle-aged whose memories are going? I’m willing to bet that just about any dog can remember where you put your car keys better than you can if you’re over forty, and probably if you’re under forty, too.

  Or how about service dogs who remember where your kids left the remote control? I bet a dog could do this if you gave him the training.

  Of course, I don’t know this for a fact. I could be wrong. But for me, predicting animal talents is getting to be a little like astronomers predicting the existence of a planet nobody can see based on their understanding of gravity. I’m starting to be able to accurately predict animal talents nobody can see based on what I know about autistic talent.

  ANIMALS FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

  By the time I got to college I knew I wanted to learn about animals.

  That was the 1960s, and the whole field of psychology was B. F. Skinner and behaviorism. Dr. Skinner was so famous that just about every college kid in the country had a copy of Beyond Freedom and Dignity on his bookshelf. He taught that all you needed to study was behavior. You weren’t supposed to speculate about what was inside a person’s or an animal’s head because you couldn’t measure all the stuff inside the black box—intelligence, emotions, motives. The black box was off-limits; you couldn’t talk about it. You could measure only behavior, therefore you could study only behavior.1

  For the behaviorists this was no great loss, since, according to them, environment was the only thing that mattered.

  Some animal behaviorists took this idea to the extreme by teaching that animals didn’t even have emotions or intelligence. Animals only had behavior, which was shaped by rewards, punishments, and positive and negative reinforcements from the environment.

  Rewards and positive reinforcers are the same thing: something good happens to you because of something you did. Punishment and negative reinforcement are opposites. Punishment is when something bad happens to you because of something you did; negative reinforcement is when something bad stops happening to you, or doesn’t start happening to you in the first place, because of something you did. Punishment is bad, and negative reinforcement is good. Punishment makes you stop doing what you’re doing, although a lot of behaviorists believe that punishing a bad behavior isn’t as effective as rewarding a good behavior when it comes to getting an animal to do what you want him to do.

  Negative reinforcement is the hardest to understand. Negative reinforcement isn’t a punishment; it’s a reward. But the reward is negative in the sense that something you don’t like either stops or doesn’t start in the first place. Say your four-year-old is screaming and crying and giving you a headache. Finally you lose your patience and blow up at him, and he’s shocked into silence. That’s negative reinforcement, because you’ve made the crying go away, which is what you wanted. Now you’re probably more likely to blow up at him the next time he starts a tantrum, because you’ve been negatively reinforced for blowing up at him during this tantrum.

  Behaviorists thought these basic concepts explained everything about animals, who were basically just stimulus-response machines. It’s probably hard for people to imagine the power this idea had back then. It was almost a religion. To me—to lots of people—B. F. Skinner was a god. He was the god of psychology.

  It turned out he wasn’t much of a god in person. I met B. F. Skinner once. I was probably eighteen years old at the time. I’d written him a letter about my squeeze machine, and he’d written me back saying what impressed him was my motivation. Which is kind of funny when you think about it. Here was the god of behaviorism talking about my internal motivation instead of my behavior. I guess he was ahead of his time, since motivation is a hot topic in autism research today.

  After I got his letter I called up his office and asked if I could come see him. I wanted to talk to him about some of the research I had done.

  His office called and invited me down to Harvard for a visit. It was like going to see the Pope at the Vatican. Dr. Skinner was the most famous professor in all of psychology; he’d been on the cover of Time magazine.2 I was very nervous just about walking up to see him. I remember walking to William James Hall and looking up at the building feeling like “This is the temple of Psychology.”

  But when I went into his office, it was a big letdown. He was just a normal-looking man. I remember he had this plant wired up around his office, growing all around the room. We were sitting there talking, and he started asking really personal questions. I don’t remember what they were, because I almost never remember specific words and sentences from conversations. That’s because autistic people think in pictures; we have almost no words running through our heads at all. Just a stream of images. So I don’t remember the verbal details of the questions; I just remember that he asked them.

  Then he tried to touch my legs. I was shocked. I wasn’t in a sexy dress, I was in a conservative dress, and that was the last thing I expected. So I said, “You may look at them, but you may not touch them.” I do remember saying that.

  We did get to talk about animals and behavior, though, and finally I said to him, “Dr. Skinner, if we could just learn how the brain works.” That’s the other part of the conversation I remember specifically.

  He said, “We don’t need to learn about the brain, we have operant conditioning.”

  I remember driving back to school going over this in my mind, and finally saying to myself, “I don’t think I believe that.”

  I didn’t believe it because I had problems that sure didn’t seem to be coming from my environment. Also, I’d taken an animal ethology class at college—ethologists study animals in their natural environments—and Thomas Evans, the teacher, had taught us about animal instincts, which were hardwired behavior patterns the animal was born with. Instincts had nothing to do with the environment, they came with the animal.

  Dr. Skinner changed his mind when he got old. My friend John Ratey, a psychiatrist at Harvard who wrote the books Shadow Syndromes (with my co-author on this book, Catherine Johnson) and A User’s Guide to the Brain, told me a story about a lunch he had with Dr. Skinner near the end of his life.3 While they were talking John asked him, “Don’t you think it’s time we got inside the black box?”

  Dr. Skinner said, “Ever since my stroke I’ve thought so.”

  The brain is pretty powerful, and a person whose brain isn’t working right knows just how powerful. Dr. Skinner had to learn the hard way. His stroke showed him not everything is controlled by the environment. But back in the 1970s, when I was getting started, behaviorism was the law.

  I don’t want to sound like the enemy of behaviorism, though, because I’m not. In one way behaviorists weren’t that different from ethologists, because neither group looked inside the animal’s head. Behaviorists looked at animals in laboratory environments; ethologists looked at animals in their natural environment. But both were looking at animals from the outside.

  Behaviorists made a big mistake declaring the brain off-limits, but their focus on the environment was a huge step forward and is to this day
. Until behaviorism came along, probably no one understood how important the environment is. People still don’t. In the meatpacking industry, where I’ve worked for thirty years designing humane handling systems, a lot of plant owners don’t think twice about their cattle’s environment. If there’s a problem with the herd, it doesn’t even occur to them to look at the animals’ surroundings to see what’s going on. People want the equipment that I install, but they don’t realize that the equipment won’t work if the environment is bad.

  In a plant, the environment means the physical environment, and it also means the way the employees handle the animals. If the animal handling is bad, no amount of top-notch, well-maintained equipment is going to work.

  The center-track restraining system I designed, which has been installed in half of all the plants in North America, works only when you have good animal handling. My restraining system is a conveyor belt that goes under the animal’s chest and belly. The animals straddle it lengthwise the same way they would straddle a sawhorse.

  The reason plants have adopted my design is that animals are much more willing to walk onto it than they are the old V-shaped restraining systems, so it’s a lot more efficient. That was the only thing wrong with the old restraining systems: the animals didn’t like walking onto them. The V-restrainers work fine, and they don’t hurt the animals, but they squeeze the animal’s feet together, and animals don’t like to walk into a space where they feel like there isn’t enough space for their feet. My design innovation wasn’t technological, it was behavioral. It works better because it respects the animal’s behavior.

  But the plants don’t seem to realize that, so naturally they also don’t realize that if they have poor handling of their animals my equipment won’t work. They focus on the equipment.

  The other thing I like about behaviorists is that a lot of the time they’re natural-born optimists. In the beginning, behaviorists thought the laws of learning were simple and universal, and all creatures followed them. That’s why B. F. Skinner thought laboratory rats were the only animals anybody needed to look at, because all animals and people learned the same way.

  Dr. Skinner’s whole concept of learning was associationist, which meant that positive associations (or rewards) increased behavior, and negative associations (or punishment) decreased behavior. If you wanted to teach a really complex behavior, all you had to do was break it down into its component parts and teach each little, tiny step separately, giving rewards along the way. That was called task analysis, and it was a huge help not only for animal training (though animal trainers had always done this to some extent), but also for anybody trying to teach children or adults with disabilities. I’ve seen behavioral books for parents that take all the different things a child or adult has to do during the day, like get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and so on, and break each activity down into its component parts. A supposedly simple thing like getting your clothes on in the morning might involve twenty or thirty different steps or more, and a task analysis lists each one, and you teach each one separately.

  Doing a task analysis isn’t as easy as it sounds, because nonhandicapped people aren’t really aware of the very small, separate movements that go into an action like tying your shoe or buttoning your shirt. Typical kids pick these things up pretty easily, so parents don’t have to be especially skilled to teach them how to put their clothes on or tie their shoes. If you’ve ever tried to teach shirt buttoning to a person who has absolutely no clue how to do it, you soon realize that you don’t really know how to do it, either—not in the sense of knowing the sequence of tiny, separate motions that go into successfully buttoning a button. You just do it.

  The behaviorists’ belief that any animal or person could learn just about anything if the rewards were right led Ivar Lovaas to his work with autistic children. In his most famous study he took a group of very young autistic kids and gave one half of the children intensive behavior therapy while the other half got much less intensive treatment. Behavior therapy just meant classical operant conditioning, having the kids go over and over the behaviors Dr. Lovaas wanted them to learn and giving them rewards whenever they got something right. He published results showing that half of the kids who got the intensive therapy became “indistinguishable” from normal kids.4

  There’ve been years of controversy over whether Dr. Lovaas did or didn’t cure anybody, but to me, the fact that he brought those kids so far there could be an argument about it is what matters. Behaviorism gave parents and teachers a reason to think that autistic people were capable of a lot more than anybody thought, and that was a good thing.

  The other major contribution behaviorists made is that they were, and still are today, fantastically close observers of animal and human behavior. They could spot tiny changes in an animal’s behavior quickly, and connect the changes to something in the environment. That’s one of my own most important talents with animals.

  So for all of its problems, behaviorism had a lot to offer, and still does. Besides, the animal ethologists had their blind spots, too. For instance, both the ethologists and the behaviorists were in total agreement that practically the worst thing anyone could possibly do was to anthropomorphize an animal. Ethologists and behaviorists probably had different reasons for being against anthropomorphism—Dr. Skinner thought it was just as bad to anthropomorphize a person as an animal—but whatever the reasons, they agreed. Anthropomorphizing an animal was wrong.

  To a large degree they were right to stress this, because humans just naturally treat their pets as if they’re four-legged people a lot of the time. Professional trainers are constantly telling people not to assume their pets think and feel the same way they do, but people keep on doing it anyway. The dog trainer John Ross even has a story in his book Dog Talk about the first time he realized he was being anthropomorphic, and he’s a professional. He had an Irish setter named Jason who was a big “garbage dog,” constantly getting into the garbage whenever Mr. Ross wasn’t around. Mr. Ross figured Jason knew he was being bad because if there was a mess on the floor the dog would take off running the minute Mr. Ross got home. On days when he hadn’t gotten into the garbage he didn’t run, so Mr. Ross thought this meant Jason knew that strewing garbage clear across the kitchen was wrong, and ran away because he felt bad.

  He found out differently when a more experienced trainer had him try an experiment. He told Mr. Ross to go get into the garbage himself, when Jason wasn’t watching, and dump it out all over the floor. Then he was supposed to bring Jason into the kitchen and see what the dog did.

  It turned out Jason did what he always did when there was garbage on the floor—he took off running. He wasn’t running away because he felt guilty, he was running away because he felt scared. For Jason, garbage on the floor meant trouble. If Mr. Ross had stuck to behaviorist principles and thought about Jason’s environment instead of about his “psychology,” he wouldn’t have made this mistake.5

  A friend of mine had the same experience with her two dogs, a one-year-old German shepherd and a three-month-old golden retriever. One day the puppy pooped in the living room, and later on when the older dog saw the poop she got so anxious she started to drool. If the older dog had made the poop herself and then stood there drooling, her owner probably would have thought the dog knew she’d done something bad. But since the other dog had made the poop, her owner realized that the whole category of poop-on-living-room-floor was just plain bad news, period.

  Those stories are classic examples of why it’s not a good idea to anthropomorphize an animal, but that’s not all there is to it. In my student days, even though everyone was against anthropomorphizing animals, I still believed it was important to think about the animal’s point of view. I remember there was a great animal psychologist out of New Zealand named Ron Kilgour (he was an ethologist) who wrote a lot about the problem of anthropomorphizing. One of his early papers told a story about a person who had a pet lion he was shipping on an airplane. Someone thought
the lion might like to have a pillow for the trip, the same way people do, so they gave him one, and the lion ate it and died. The point was: don’t be anthropomorphic. It’s dangerous to the animal.

  But when I read this story I said to myself, “Well, no, he doesn’t want a pillow, he wants something soft to lie on, like leaves and grass.” I wasn’t looking at the lion as a person, but as a lion. At least that’s what I was trying to do.

  That kind of thinking was illegal for behaviorists, however, and wasn’t really encouraged by the ethologists, either. Both groups were environmentalists when you came right down to it, the big difference being which environment the animal was in while the researchers were studying him.

  In the end, I had a pretty good grounding in animal ethology from undergraduate college before I started graduate school at Arizona State University. It was a good thing I did, because Arizona State was a hotbed of behaviorism. Everything was behaviorism. And I did not like some of the very cruel experiments they did to mice, rats, and monkeys. I remember one poor little monkey that had a little Plexiglas thing shoved onto his scrotum that they were shocking him with. I thought that was terrible.

  I was not involved in any of the nasty experiments. I don’t endorse using animals as subjects in experiments unless you’re going to learn something incredibly important. If you’re using animals to find a cure for cancer, that’s different, especially since animals need a cure for cancer, too. But that’s not what they were doing at Arizona. I spent one year in the psych department studying experimental psychology, and I thought, “I don’t want to do this.”

  Even if the experiments had been fun for the animals, I still didn’t see the point. My question was, “What are you learning from this?” Dr. Skinner wrote a lot about schedules of reinforcement, which is how often and how consistently the animal receives a reward for a particular behavior, and they were running every different schedule of reinforcement they could think of. Variable reinforcement, intermittent reinforcement, delayed reinforcement; you name it, they were running it.