Animals in Translation Read online

  It was totally artificial. What animals do in labs is nothing like what they do in the wild—so what are you actually learning when you do these experiments? You’re learning how animals behave in labs. Finally people started doing things like letting a bunch of lab rats out in a courtyard and watching what they did. Suddenly the rats started developing complex behaviors no one had ever seen before.

  SEEING THE WAY ANIMALS SEE: THE VISUAL ENVIRONMENT

  The only research I was interested in doing at Arizona State was studying visual illusions in animals. I’m sure I was interested in visual illusions because I’m a visual thinker. I didn’t know it at the time, but being a visual thinker was the start of my career with animals. It gave me an important perspective other students and professors didn’t have, because animals are visual creatures, too. Animals are controlled by what they see.

  When I say I’m a visual thinker I don’t mean just that I’m good at making architectural drawings and designs, or that I can design my cattle-restraining systems in my head. I actually think in pictures. During my thinking process I have no words in my head at all, just pictures.

  That’s true no matter what subject I’m thinking about. For instance, if you say the word “macroeconomics” to me I get a picture of those macramé flowerpot holders people used to hang from their ceilings. That’s why I can’t understand economics or algebra; I can’t picture it accurately in my mind. I flunked algebra. But other times thinking in pictures is an advantage. During the 1990s I knew all the dot-coms would go to hell, because when I thought about them the only images I saw were rented office space and computers that would be obsolete in two years. There wasn’t anything real I could picture; the companies had no hard assets. My stockbroker asked me how I knew the two stock market crashes would happen, and I told him, “When the Monopoly play money starts jerking around the real money you’re in trouble.”

  If I’m thinking about a structure I’m working on, all of my judgments and decisions about it happen in pictures. I see images of my design going together smoothly, images of problems and sticking points, or images of the whole thing collapsing if there’s a major design flaw.

  That’s the point where words come in, after I’ve finished thinking it through. Then I’ll say something like, “That won’t work because it will collapse.” My final judgment comes out in words, but not the process that led up to the judgment. If you think about a judge and jury, all my deliberations are in pictures, and only my final verdict is in words.

  If I’m alone I’ll say the verdict out loud, though I don’t do it with other people around because I know I’m not supposed to. In college I did a lot of talking out loud because it helped me organize my thinking. A lot of autistic people talk out loud for the same reason. I’ll also do some extremely simple running commentary in words. I’ll say, “Let’s try this,” or, “Oh boy! I figured it out.” The language is always simple. It’s the pictures that are complex.

  When I talk to other people I translate my pictures into stock phrases or sentences I have “on tape” inside my head. Those kids who called me Tape Recorder were right about me. They were mean, but they were right. I am a tape recorder. That’s how I’m able to talk. The reason I don’t sound like a tape recorder anymore is that I have so many stock phrases and sentences I can move around into new combinations. All my public speaking has been a huge help. When I got criticisms saying I always gave the same speech, I started moving my slides around. That moved my phrases around, too.

  When I was young I had no idea that being a visual thinker made me different from anyone else. I thought everyone saw pictures inside their heads. So naturally, when I didn’t like the lab work I was doing and wanted to start learning about animals in their natural environments, I focused on the visual environment. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just what I naturally gravitated to.

  Being verbal thinkers, behaviorists hadn’t really thought about the visual environment. When they talked about the environment rewarding or punishing an animal in response to something it did, they usually meant food and electric shocks. That made sense for a Skinner box, where there’s nothing much to look at, and if you mess up you get a shock. (A Skinner box was a special cage, usually a Plexiglas box, behaviorists used to test and analyze a rat’s behavior. There was nothing in it except a lever and maybe some indicator lights that went on or off when a reward was available.) Most Skinner boxes didn’t shock the animals, but if punishment was part of the experiment, usually the punishment would be a shock.

  In the wild, though, there aren’t any electric shocks, and you can’t get food by pecking a lever. You get food by being highly attuned to the visual environment. Behaviorists finally started to catch on to the importance of vision to an animal when somebody did a famous experiment showing you could teach a monkey how to push a lever just by letting him look outside a window every time he hit the lever. They didn’t need to give the monkey a food reward, just a view. Animals need to see, and they want to see.

  While I was doing my research on visual illusions in the lab I started to hang out in feed yards with the cattle, where I noticed that a lot of times the animals didn’t want to go through the chutes, which are the narrow passageways the cattle go through on the way to the squeeze chute. When I saw cattle balking and acting scared I just naturally thought, “Well let’s look at it from the animal’s point of view. I’ve got to get in the chute and see what he’s seeing.”

  So I took pictures inside the chutes from the cattle’s point of view. I even put black-and-white film in my camera because we thought animals saw in black and white. (Later on we learned that they see colors, too, but not in as wide a spectrum as we do.) I wanted to see what they were seeing.

  That’s when I noticed that simple things, like shadows or chains hanging down, made the animals balk.

  The people at the feed yards thought my whole project was ridiculous. They couldn’t imagine why I’d get in there and try to see what the cattle were seeing. Now I realize that in my own way I was being just as anthropomorphic as those people who gave the lion the pillow. Since I was a visual thinker I assumed cows were, too. The difference was I happened to be right.

  When you’re trying to understand how the environment is affecting an animal’s behavior, you have to look at what the animal is seeing. I remember one time I went to a plant where they had a yellow metal ladder on a wall inside a building. The cattle had to go by it when they walked through a narrow alley. Those cattle just would not walk by that ladder. They’d plant their feet on the ground and refuse to move. Finally one of the yard people figured out the problem. He painted the ladder gray, and everything was fine. I work with management and with the employees down on the floor or in the yard, and I’ve found that a lot of times the guys in the yard are better at understanding animals than management.

  If a cow sees a yellow raincoat flapping on a fence, she’s in a panic. But if you aren’t a visual thinker, it can be hard to even notice that yellow raincoat flapping on the fence. It doesn’t jump out at normal people the way it does at me or at a cow.

  Since I didn’t realize other people thought in words instead of pictures, for a long time I could never figure out why so many animal handlers made such obvious, elementary mistakes. Not all of them do; I’ve met lots of good animal handlers in the meatpacking industry. But I was always surprised when I found an animal professional doing something that was just plain dumb. Why couldn’t they see what they were doing wrong?

  I remember one situation in particular, where the owner of a cattle-handling facility hired me as a last resort before they tore the whole place down and built it back up from the ground. He called me because his cattle wouldn’t walk inside the narrow passage leading to the squeeze chute.

  The problem wasn’t that the cattle were afraid of getting their shots. Most cattle don’t even know they’re going to be getting shots inside the chute. Besides, a lot of animals barely feel their shots anyway. New dog owners are a
lways surprised by this. They’ll watch their dog cower and cringe as the vet examines him, then not blink an eye when he sticks him with a needle. Some vets say that’s the difference between a dog, who isn’t anticipating pain, and a person, who is. Thinking about a shot makes it worse.

  The problem at the cattle-handling facility had to be something they were doing wrong, since those cattle were perfectly fine before they got there. But the owner couldn’t figure it out. He needed to fix the situation fast, too, because skipping vaccinations isn’t an option. Cattle aren’t like children, who get vaccinated against a lot of diseases like polio or whooping cough that are pretty hard to catch nowadays. Cattle are extremely susceptible to bovine viral diarrhea and to respiratory diseases like pneumonia. If they don’t get their shots, infectious disease will sweep through the herd and kill 10 percent of the animals. So you have to vaccinate, and in order to vaccinate you have to have your cattle walk into the squeeze chute. These cattle wouldn’t do it, and the owner was starting to panic.

  Things had gotten so bad the handlers were using cattle prods, which are fiberglass rods with two prongs on the end that deliver an electric shock to an animal. Prods will get an animal moving, but they’re stupid things to use because they can panic the animals and make them rear up, which is dangerous for the workers. Prods always stress an animal, and when an animal is stressed his immune system goes down and he starts getting sick, which means higher veterinary bills. Plus stressed animals gain less weight, which means less meat to sell. Dairy cattle who’ve been handled with prods give less milk.

  Stress is bad for human growth, too, although most people don’t realize it. The one thing people do know about is failure to thrive, when children who’ve been badly abused or neglected suffer stress dwarfism. The child’s biology is normal and he’s eating enough food, but he doesn’t grow. Stress dwarfism is pretty rare, but there’s evidence that stressed children, just like stressed animals, can grow more slowly than calmer children. Researchers have known for quite a while that anxious adults often have low levels of growth hormone, and a study in 1997 found that anxious girls, though not anxious boys, were more likely to be short than calm girls.

  My guess is that eventually we’ll find out anxious boys are smaller, too. Anxious male animals are smaller than calm male animals, and I don’t see any reason why human males should be different. I think the German orphanage story probably tells us stress is bad for boys, too. That’s the famous case of two orphanages in postwar Germany where one was run by a nice headmistress, while a mean lady who made fun of the children in front of their friends ran the other. She was nice only to the eight children who were her special favorites.

  None of the children had enough food, and all of them were smaller than they were supposed to be. Then a natural experiment happened when the government gave the children living with the nice lady extra rations—at the very same moment that the nice lady quit her job and left, and the mean lady was hired in her place. The eight teacher’s pets moved to the new orphanage with the mean director. Doctors were measuring all the children’s growth, and they found that even though the children in the first orphanage were getting extra food, now that they were stressed by a nasty adult they didn’t grow as well as the children in the other orphanage. They had more food but grew less. The eight favorites grew better than anyone. Both orphanages had boys as well as girls, so I assume the boys’ growth was slowed by stress, too.

  With animals there’s no ambiguity: stress is horrible for growth, period, which means stress is horrible for profits. So even a feedlot owner who doesn’t care about an animal’s feelings doesn’t like using prods, because a stressed animal means financial loss.

  When I got to the feedlot it took me about ten minutes to figure out the problem.

  To get to the squeeze chute, first the animals had to walk inside the barn door into a round holding area called a crowd pen. That part of the procedure went off without a hitch. The cattle didn’t have any problem stepping inside the pen.

  Next they were supposed to walk into a curved single-file alley (it’s also called a chute) that led to the squeeze chute. That was where the cattle balked. They just would not walk into the alley. It was the exact same alley feedlots all over the world were using without any trouble, so no one could figure out what the problem was. They couldn’t see anything about their setup that was different from any other setup.

  But to me it was obvious: the alley was too dark. The cattle were supposed to walk from broad daylight into an unlit indoor alley, and the contrast in illumination was too sharp. They were afraid to walk into pitch-black space.

  That might seem a little surprising, since prey animals, like cattle, deer, and horses, usually like the dark. They can hide in the dark and feel safe, or at least safer than they feel during the day. But the problem wasn’t the dark, it was the contrast of going from bright sunlight to a dark interior. Animals never like going from bright to dark. They don’t like any kind of experience that temporarily blinds them, and that includes looking into a bright light when they’re standing in relative darkness. I’ve found that cattle won’t even walk toward a glaring lightbulb. You have to use indirect lighting at the mouth of an alley to make it work.

  As soon as I saw the setup I figured that was the problem, and I confirmed my guess when I asked the owner how the cattle behaved at different times of the day, and in different kinds of weather. When he thought about it, he realized that the facility worked fine at night. Things weren’t too bad on cloudy days, either. It was the bright, sunny days that were impossible, but no one had noticed the pattern.

  I think a number of things are at work when an animal reacts that way. Cattle have excellent night vision and are used to seeing well in the dark, unlike people. So the experience of going temporarily blind in the seconds before their irises expand, which is something people take for granted, probably makes them panic. Also, cows don’t live in houses with electricity and drive around in cars at night the way we do, so they don’t develop a mental category called “eyes adjusting to an abrupt change in illumination.” Last but not least, animals are so intensely sensitive to the visual world that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that sudden huge changes in illumination are physically painful in some way. People don’t enjoy the experience of moving from brilliant light to a dark room, either, but for a cow it must be overwhelming.

  Maybe when those cattle started to walk out of the sun into the chute they felt like they were going blind for real. They might have been having the same reaction you or I would have if we were driving down the street and suddenly went blind every time we drove through an underpass. If you went blind every time you drove through an underpass you wouldn’t drive through underpasses.

  I always tell people: whenever you’re having a problem with an animal, try to see what the animal is seeing and experience what the animal is experiencing. There are lots of things that can upset an animal—smells, changes in routine, exposure to things he hasn’t experienced before—and you should consider all of them. Anything in the sensory realm can upset an animal. But don’t forget to ask yourself what your dog, cat, horse, or cow may be seeing that’s bothering him.

  At that feedlot, all they needed to do was get more light inside the barn. They could have fixed the problem themselves in five minutes if they’d been able to think about the chute from the animal’s point of view. The answer was right in front of them. I really do mean directly in front of them, because the people who built the barn in the first place had installed a big sliding garage door on the front of the barn that the owner had left closed.

  When I told him all they needed to do was open the door, it turned out that it hadn’t been opened once since the lot was built. They didn’t even know if they could open it after all this time. But they got a couple of guys to put their shoulders up against the door, and after a few minutes of straining and grunting they got the thing open. That was the end of the problem. The cows all walked into the
chute just as nice as could be.

  WHAT PEOPLE SEE AND DON’T SEE

  That feedlot consultation was the kind of thing that started to give me a reputation for having practically a magical connection to animals. Meanwhile I was always mystified by these situations, because to me the answers seemed so obvious. Why couldn’t other people see what the matter was?

  It took me fifteen years to figure out that other people actually couldn’t see what the problem was, at least not without a lot of training and practice. They couldn’t see it because they weren’t visually oriented the way animals and autistic people are.

  I always find it kind of funny that normal people are always saying autistic children “live in their own little world.” When you work with animals for a while you start to realize you can say the same thing about normal people. There’s a great big, beautiful world out there that a lot of normal folks are just barely taking in. It’s like dogs hearing a whole register of sound we can’t. Autistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can’t, or don’t.

  I don’t just mean this metaphorically, either. Normal people literally don’t see a lot of things. There’s a famous experiment by a psychologist named Daniel Simons, head of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois, called Gorillas in Our Midst, that shows you how bad people’s visual awareness is. In the experiment they show people a videotape of a basketball game and ask them to count how many passes one team makes. Then, a little while into the tape, while everyone is sitting there counting passes, a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the screen, stops, turns, faces the camera, and beats her fists on her chest.

  Fifty percent of all people who watch this video don’t see the gorilla!

  Even when experimenters ask them directly, “Did you notice the gorilla?” they say, “The what?” It’s not that they don’t remember the lady in the gorilla suit. Anyone who’s forgotten something he saw will remember it when you give him a prompt. These folks actually didn’t see the lady gorilla in the first place. She didn’t register.6