Animals in Translation Page 6

  SEEING COLOR AND CONTRAST

  A third area where animals and people diverge is in the ability to see color and contrast. At least ten of the eighteen distracters are high-contrast images, like a shiny reflection on metal, or a sparkling reflection in a puddle. Several of the other visual distracters, such as a white Styrofoam or plastic coffee cup on the floor or a piece of clothing hanging over a fence, involve contrast, too. I have some photographs of high-contrast distracters on my Web site. One is a picture of a white coffee cup on a brown floor; another is a pair of bright yellow boots against a gray floor and railing.

  Sharp contrasts are also a problem when you’re trying to move an animal toward an area that’s either too dark or too light. We already talked about the cattle that wouldn’t go into the squeeze chute building because it was too dark, but cattle will also refuse to walk directly into an area that is too bright. Strong changes in light are so distracting to cattle that you can’t have direct sources of lighting, like an unshaded lantern or lightbulb, at the mouth of an alley. They won’t walk toward it. You want overhead lighting with no shadows, like the light outdoors on a bright but cloudy day. Sometimes you can get that effect with skylights made out of white translucent plastic.

  Slowly rotating fan blades are also a high-contrast stimulus, because animals see contrast differently from the way we do. If the fan is turned on and is rotating so fast you can’t see the blades, there’s no problem. But when a fan blade is turning slowly it creates a flicker, and that flicker is a much higher contrast image for an animal than it is for us.

  Animals see more intense contrasts of light and dark because their night vision is so much better than ours. Good night vision involves excellent vision for contrasts and relatively poor color vision. I first learned about animals’ incredible contrast vision back when I was taking black-and-white pictures of the cattle chutes. There’d be a shadow on the ground that even I wouldn’t see until I got the pictures developed. The reason I could see it only in my photographs is that contrast is much sharper when you take away color. Shadows are so much clearer in black and white that during World War II the Allies recruited people who were completely color-blind—not just red-green color-blind, but people who didn’t see any color at all—to interpret reconnaissance and spy photos. They could spot things like netting draped over a tank to camouflage it that were invisible to people whose color vision was normal.

  Animals seem to see sharp contrast on the floor as a false visual cliff; they act as if they think the dark spots are deeper than the lighter spots. That’s why cattle guards work on roads. A cattle guard is a pit dug across a road, covered with metal bars. A car can drive over it and a cow could walk over it if it tried, but it won’t because it sees the two-foot drop-off between the bars.

  To a cow the contrast is so sharp the drop-off probably looks like a bottomless pit. In An Anthropologist on Mars Oliver Sacks has an essay about an artist who lost his color vision in a car crash. After that it was hard for him to drive, because tree shadows on the road looked like pits his car could fall into. Without color vision, he saw contrasts between light and dark as contrasts in depth.3 Since cows have much poorer color vision than normal people do and mainly see colors in the yellow-green range, they may see light-dark contrasts as contrasts in depth in an analogous fashion to Dr. Sacks’s color-blind artist.

  Whatever the reason, cows act like Dr. Sacks’s color-blind artist. Cattle guards are expensive to build, so a lot of times the Department of Transportation just uses a standard line-painting machine (that’s the machine they use to paint the center line on highways) to paint batches of bright white lines across the highway going in the same direction as a crosswalk. It’s a poor man’s cattle guard.

  When the cattle aren’t highly motivated to cross the road, a grouping of twenty white lines painted six inches apart will make them stay put, because the contrast scares them. If the cattle are highly motivated, it’s a different story. If you’ve got mama on one side and baby on the other, painted lines won’t work. Or if cattle are starving, they’ll cross the lines to get to better grazing on the other side of the road. But under normal circumstances, painted lines work just fine.

  You need to know something about animals’ color vision to predict what visual stimuli they’ll experience as high-contrast. The breakdown is pretty simple: birds can see four different basic colors (ultraviolet, blue, green, and red), people and some primates see three (blue, green, and red), and most of the rest of the mammals see just two (blue and green). With dichromatic, or two-color, vision the colors animals see best are a yellowish green (the color of a safety vest) and bluish purple (which is close to the purple of a purple iris). That means that yellow is the high-contrast color for almost all animals. Anything yellow will really pop out at them, so you have to be careful about yellow raincoats, boots, and machinery.4

  THE REAL PROBLEM IS NOVELTY

  Any sharp contrast between light and dark will draw the attention of a dichromatic animal, either distracting or scaring him. If he’s a big animal who you’re trying to move from Point A to Point B, a sharp contrast in light and dark will stop him in his tracks.

  However, not all high contrast will scare an animal, only high-contrast visual stimuli that are novel and unexpected. If dairy cattle are used to seeing bright yellow raincoats slung over gates every day when they enter the milking parlor there’d be no problem. It’s the animal who’s seeing a bright yellow raincoat slung over a gate for the first time at a slaughter plant or feedlot who’s going to balk. Novelty is the key.

  The anti-backup gates used in many cattle alleys have the same problem: the cattle have never seen them before, so they don’t want to go through them. Novelty is a huge problem for all animals, all autistic people, all children—and just about all normal grown-ups, too, though normal adults can handle novelty better than animals, autistic people, or kids. Fear of the unknown is universal. If you’ve never seen something before, you can’t make a judgment about it; you don’t know if it’s good or bad, dangerous or safe. And your brain always wants to make that judgment; that’s how the brain works. Researchers have found that even nonsense syllables spark positive and negative emotions; to your brain, there’s no such thing as neutral. So if you can’t tell what something is, you get anxious trying to decide whether it’s good or bad.

  Any novel object or image in a cow’s visual field will get her worried, and if you happen to be trying to move her in the direction of the novel object or image, forget it.

  It’s different when you don’t try to force things. On its own, an animal will always investigate a novel stimulus, even though new things are scary. I learned that back when I was writing stories and taking photographs for Arizona Farmer Ranchman Magazine. I noticed that if you just left a pile of camera equipment alone in the middle of the field, all the cows would come up to it and investigate. But if you walked toward them carrying the same equipment, they’d take off. Motion was a problem, so if I just stood there holding the equipment, the cows would come to me.

  I also noticed that if I got down low to the ground I was a lot less scary to them. At first I was just trying to get the cow’s head framed against the sky, without any grass showing in the frame, so I’d crouch down to get the shot I wanted. But then I noticed that when I crouched down, I could get close-ups of the cattle because they wouldn’t run away. Those photos were beautiful—big Black Angus heads silhouetted against the blue sky.

  Finally one day I decided to just lie down flat on my back and see what happened. They all came up to me and sniffed and licked and sniffed and licked. These were feedlot cattle who weren’t tame.

  When a cow comes up to explore you, it’s always the same. They’ll stretch out their heads toward you and sniff you; that’s always first. Then the tongue will reach out and just barely touch you, and as they get less afraid they’ll start licking you. They’ll lick your hair and chew on it, and they like to lick and chew your boots, too. I usually don’t
let them lick me on my face because cattle have extremely rough tongues and I could get a scratched cornea, although I sometimes just close my eyes and let them go ahead. I don’t mind if the tongue goes down my neck. That’s okay. And I let them lick my hands. I think they probably like the taste of the salt on your skin.

  Sometimes I’ll kiss them on the nose.

  I wasn’t the only person to figure out that it’s perfectly safe to lie down in the middle of a bunch of thousand-pound untamed animals. In the 1970s there were a lot of Mexicans coming over the border to work in the feedlots, and when the Border Patrol came around the Mexicans would hide inside the corrals, with the cattle. Five guys would lie down on the ground with a hundred head of Brahman steers surrounding them. Brahmans are the big huge cattle with the hump on their back. They’re nice animals, as long as you treat them well, but they’re scary-looking to anybody who doesn’t know cattle, so the Border Patrol guys wouldn’t dare go in those pens.

  But it never came to that, because the Border Patrol people never saw any of the illegal workers lying underneath all those cattle. The Mexicans had to lie perfectly still, because if they moved the cattle would run and give them away. And, of course, that would have been really dangerous for the five guys lying on the ground. You don’t want a thousand-pound Brahman steer and his ninety-nine friends stepping on you by accident when they’re trying to get away. It sounds dangerous, but I don’t remember a single person ever getting hurt.

  The reason cattle will approach something novel under their own steam is that they’re curious. All animals are curious; it’s built into their wiring. They have to be, because if they weren’t they’d have a lot harder time finding what they need and avoiding what they don’t need. Curiosity is the other side of caution. An animal has to have some drive to explore his environment in order to find food, water, mates, and shelter. People say curiosity killed the cat, and that’s probably true; curiosity can get an animal into a lot of trouble. But an animal or a person can be too cautious, too. If you’re too cautious to explore things, you miss out on things you need.

  Being too cautious might make you miss signs of danger, too. Animals and people need to avoid trouble before it happens, and one way to do that is to pick up on signs of danger and act on them now, instead of waiting until you’re face-to-face with a hungry wolf and then trying to get away. Curiosity drives an animal to explore its environment for signs of danger.

  So it makes sense that a cow would voluntarily explore a yellow raincoat hanging on a fence but dig in his heels if you try to force him to walk past one. Since anything new could be dangerous, an animal wants a clear escape route before he’s going to poke his nose into something he’s never seen before. When he’s being forced through a one-way alley, there’s no escape. So he refuses to move.

  You can use the exact same checklist with horses, too, partly because they’re prey animals like cattle and partly because their lives and environments are pretty similar. Since I spend most of my time with cattle I don’t have a good checklist of details that scare dogs or cats, but I can tell you that the same principle applies even though they’re predators and don’t have as many natural enemies to worry about. All animals, predator or prey, have a built-in sense of caution that is triggered by new things.

  With dogs, it’s a little hard to predict which new things might scare them, since dogs live with people and get exposed to so many new things all the time. A dog who’s not naturally timid can seem like he doesn’t mind high-contrast novel stimuli the way a cow does.

  But I don’t think that’s true. One of the good times to see the effects of novel visual stimuli on a dog is Halloween. My experience is that dogs do not like Halloween costumes! A friend of mine was sitting in her upstairs office one day, getting some work done, with the family Lab lying next to her, when her son walked up the stairs wearing his Scream costume. You probably know the one I mean: the costume is dark black, and the mask is bright white with a big red tongue hanging out of its mouth. You can’t get much higher contrast than that, unless you made the tongue yellow. The Lab jumped to her feet and started barking her head off.

  My friend was totally surprised, because she had recognized her son from his footsteps, which sounded the same way they always did. He wasn’t wearing a costume on his feet. But the minute the dog saw the mask she went nuts.

  This is another example of the cardinal rule of my checklist: just one of these distracters, out of eighteen, will throw an animal off. To the Lab, it didn’t matter that my friend’s son still sounded and smelled the same. He didn’t look the same, so he wasn’t the same, and that was that. Apparently animals use an additive system rather than an averaging system when they’re figuring out what something is and whether they should be afraid of it.

  That same Lab also went crazy when the neighbors put a Halloween scarecrow up in the front yard. My friend was taking her dog for a walk when they spotted the scarecrow, and the Lab started barking ferociously at the thing. Her hackles were up, too. That same house managed to throw my friend’s other dog into a panic with a piece of lawn sculpture they put in the backyard. The sculpture was a foot-high all-black iron frog, and when the other dog caught sight of it he had the same reaction his pack mate did to the scarecrow. He went nuts. Frantic barking, hackles up, straining at the leash.

  Dog and cat owners won’t have any problem recognizing the next category of common distracters: things that are moving. For any animal you can name, sudden movement is riveting, especially sudden rapid movement. Rapid movement stimulates the nervous system. It makes prey animals run away, and it makes predator animals give chase. It always grabs your attention. That’s why used car lots put flags or twirly plastic thingies up all around their lots. You can’t not look at a bunch of brightly colored, rapidly moving objects. Jiggling parts on feedlot equipment trigger a cow’s inborn impulse to flee, and all of a sudden you’ve got a whole herd of cows turning into the feedlot version of a forty-car pileup. It’s a disaster.

  SOUND

  Last but not least, you have your sound distracters. Any novel, high-pitched sounds will cause cattle to balk, because they activate the part of an animal’s brain that responds to distress calls. An intermittent high-pitched sound is that much worse. Intermittent sounds will drive anyone crazy; they’re much more upsetting than a constant, loud din, whether it’s high-pitched or not. You can’t relax, because you’re waiting for the next sound. And you can’t turn this response off, either, because intermittent sounds activate your orienting response. People aren’t so aware of this response in themselves, but if you live around animals you know it well. Anytime an animal of any species hears a sudden sound, something they weren’t expecting, they stop what they’re doing and orient to the source of the sound.

  When I worked with pigs at the University of Illinois I saw the orienting response every time a small plane would fly over the farm. The pigs couldn’t see the plane from inside the barn, but the minute that plane could be heard approaching the farm all activity in the barn would stop dead, and every animal stood perfectly still. After about two seconds of focused listening the pigs went back to their normal hubbub of activity. You can see the same thing at a horse stable when a garbage truck backs up to the dumpster. As soon as the backup warning starts beeping every horse will stick its head out of the stall at the exact same moment and stand at the alert. They look like they’re saluting the truck.

  I think the orienting response is the beginning of consciousness, because the animal has to make a conscious decision about what to do about that sound. If he’s a prey animal, should he run? If he’s a predator, does he need to chase something? A predator might need to flee, too, of course, so a predator actually has two decisions to make.

  Intermittent sounds keep hitting that orienting response. That’s why it’s impossible to get to sleep when you’re hearing an intermittent sound like a beeping elevator in a hotel or an intermittently beeping clothes dryer. A friend of mine with a nine-year
-old autistic boy told me a story about her son, who had gotten into opening and closing doors repetitively. She was exhausted one day, mostly because her son didn’t sleep well at night, and she needed to take a nap, but when she lay down her son started opening and closing the sliding pocket door to the laundry room next to her bedroom. He would wait a few seconds in between each new door closing, just long enough for her to start to drift off to sleep again, and then suddenly she’d hear a rumble-rumble-thump and the door would hit the doorjamb again. Even though the sound was muffled, she said she was frantic after about ten minutes of this. It’s the Chinese water torture principle. If you had water pouring on your head continuously you wouldn’t like it, but you could learn to ignore it. Having drops of water dripping on your head intermittently is literally torture.

  BEING OBLIVIOUS

  The funny thing about the checklist is that probably the only thing on it that would bother a herd of humans you were trying to move through a feed yard chute is the intermittent sounds. Humans wouldn’t bat an eye at anything else on the checklist—jiggling chains, sparkling puddles, shiny spots on metal, little pieces of moving plastic, slowly rotating fan blades, even a continuous high-pitched sound—nothing on this checklist would be any problem for human beings at all.

  They wouldn’t be a problem for humans, because humans wouldn’t take them in.

  I’ve mentioned the Gorillas in Our Midst video, in which a lady dressed in a gorilla suit walks onscreen during a basketball game pounding her chest and 50 percent of all viewers don’t see her. If 50 percent of normal human beings can’t see a lady dressed up like a gorilla, it’s small wonder employees in meatpacking plants don’t notice jiggly chains.