Animals in Translation (14 page)

Dogs are the ultimate example of the accidental breeding programs humans create for the animals they live and work with. Many experts believe that one of the reasons wolves turned into dogs was that nursing human mothers probably adopted orphaned wolf cubs and nursed them at their breasts along with their human babies. Under this theory, the
only
reason dogs exist at all is that early peo
ple really loved wolf puppies, which gave any full-grown wolves who happened to have a case of arrested development a reproductive advantage. Humans got along best with submissive, puppylike wolves, and over time that's what they got, the same way the multiplier unit with the bad scale got calmer, nicer pigs.

The interesting question is whether dogs made us evolve into a different kind of human at the same time we were making them evolve into a different kind of wolf. I'll get to that later on.

A
NIMALS
A
REN'T
A
MBIVALENT

Mammals and birds have the same core feelings people do. Researchers are just now discovering that lizards and snakes probably share most of these emotions with us, too. Just to give a couple of examples: the skink lizard in Australia is monogamous, and rattlesnake mamas here in the United States protect their young from predators the same way a mammal would. The fact that some snake mothers take care of their babies came as a big surprise, since researchers have always believed snakes weren't social at all and that mothers abandoned their babies after birth.
⁸
We still don't know much about the social lives of snakes, but at least now we know that they
have
a social life.

We know animals and humans share the same core feelings partly because we know quite a bit about how our core emotions are created by the brain, and there's no question animals share that biology with us. Their emotional biology is so close to ours that most of the research on the neurology of emotions—or
affective neuroscience
—is done with animals. When it comes to the basics of life, like getting eaten by a tiger or protecting the young, animals feel the same way we do.

The main difference between animal emotions and human emotions is that animals don't have
mixed emotions
the way normal people do. Animals aren't ambivalent; they don't have
love-hate
relationships with each other or with people. That's one of the reasons humans love animals so much; animals are loyal. If an animal loves you he loves you no matter what. He doesn't care what you look like or how much money you make.

This is another connection between autism and animals: autistic people have mostly simple emotions, too. That's why normal people describe us as
innocent.
An autistic person's feelings are direct and open, just like animal feelings. We don't hide our feelings, and we aren't ambivalent. I can't even imagine what it would be like to have feelings of love and hate for the same person.

Some people will probably think this is an insulting thing to say about autistic people, but one thing I appreciate about being autistic is that I don't have to deal with all the emotional craziness my students do. I had one fantastic student who flunked out of school because she broke up with her boyfriend. There's so much psychodrama in normal people's lives. Animals never have psychodrama.

Children don't, either. Emotionally, children are more like animals and autistic people, because children's frontal lobes are still growing and don't mature until sometime in early adulthood.
⁹
I mentioned earlier that the frontal lobes are one big association cortex, tying everything together, including emotions like love and hate that would probably be better off staying separate. That's another reason why a dog can be like a person's child: children's emotions are straightforward and loyal like a dog's. A seven-year-old boy or girl will race through the house to greet Dad when he comes from work the same way a dog will. I think animals, children, and autistic people have simpler emotions because their brains have less ability to make connections, so their emotions stay more separate and compartmentalized.

Of course, no one knows why an autistic
grown-up
has trouble making connections, since our frontal lobes are normal-sized. All we know right now is that researchers find “decreased connectivity among cortical regions and between the cortex and subcortex.”
¹⁰
The way I visualize it is that a normal brain is like a big corporate office building with telephones, faxes, e-mail, messengers, people walking around and talking—a big corporation has zillions of ways for messages to get from one place to another. The autistic brain is like the same big corporate office building where the only way for anyone to talk to anyone else is by fax. There's no telephone, no e-mail, no messengers, and no people walking around talking to each other. Just
faxes. So a lot less stuff is getting through as a consequence, and everything starts to break down. Some messages get through okay; other messages get distorted when the fax misprints or the paper jams; other messages don't get through at all.

The point is that even though autistic people have a normal-sized neocortex including normal-sized frontal lobes, our brains
function
as if our frontal lobes were either much smaller or not fully developed. Our brains function more like a child's brain or an animal's brain, but for different reasons.

When the different parts of the brain are relatively separate from each other and don't communicate well, you end up with simple, clear emotions due to compartmentalization. A child can be furious at his mom or dad one second, then completely forget about it the next, because being mad and being happy are separate states. A child hops from one to the other depending on the situation.

You see the exact same thing with animals. Strong emotions in animals are usually like a sudden thunderstorm. They blow in and then blow back out. Two dogs who live together in the same house can be snarling one second, then go back to being best friends the next. Normal people need a lot more time to get over an angry emotion, and even when a normal adult does get over a bad emotion he's made a lasting connection between the angry emotion and the person or situation that made him angry. When a normal person gets furiously angry with a person he loves, his brain hooks up
anger
and
love
and remembers it. Thanks to his highly developed frontal lobes, which connect everything up with everything else, his brain learns to have mixed emotions about that person or situation.

Another big difference between animals and people is that animals probably don't have the complex emotions people do, like shame, guilt, embarrassment, greed, or wanting bad things to happen to people who are more successful than you. There are different schools of thought about simple and complex emotions, but the definition I use is brain-based. Simple emotions are the primary emotions such as fear and rage that come from the reptilian and the mammalian brains. Complex emotions, or secondary emotions, also come from the reptilian and the mammalian brains, but they light up the neocortex as well. The secondary emotions build on the pri
mary emotions and involve more thought and interpretation. For instance, shame, guilt, and embarrassment probably all come out of the same primary emotion of
separation distress,
¹¹
which I'll talk about shortly. Your culture and upbringing teach you when to feel shame versus when to feel embarrassment or guilt, but all three start out in the brain as the pain of being isolated.

I don't want to give the impression that animals
never
have more than one feeling at the same time. Later on I'll talk about the fact that cows often feel curious and afraid at the same time. (Jaak Panksepp, author of
Affective Neuroscience,
classifies curiosity as a core emotion.
¹²
) Biologically it's possible for more than one basic emotional system to be activated in an animal's brain at the same time, so technically an animal is capable of experiencing a mixed emotion.

But in real life one emotion usually ends up completely replacing the other, and some of the core emotions probably do “turn off” others. For instance, brain research shows that play and rage are incompatible emotions, which anyone who has ever watched two dogs play fighting can tell you. Once in a while a play fight will turn into a real fight, and when that happens the two dogs don't show the slightest sign (friendly tail wags, toothy smiles) that they're experiencing happy play feelings along with angry fight feelings.
¹³
Once a play fight has turned real,
all
of the dog's body language and vocal communication is angry.

N
O
F
REUD FOR
D
OGS

Another huge difference between animals and people: I don't think animals have the defense mechanisms Sigmund Freud described in humans. Projection, displacement, repression, denial—I don't think we see these things in animals. Defense mechanisms defend against anxiety, and all defense mechanisms depend on repression in some way. Using repression, you push whatever it is you're afraid of down into your unconscious mind and focus your conscious mind on a stand-in. Or, in the case of the higher, more mature defense mechanisms, like humor, altruism, or intellectualization, you use humor, empathy, and thought to push away the “real” emotion, which is fear.

The reason I believe animals don't have Freudian defense mech
anisms is that animals and autistic people don't seem to have repression. Or, if they do, they have it only to a weak degree. I don't think I have any of Freud's defense mechanisms, and I'm always amazed when normal people do. One of the things that blows my mind about normal human beings is denial. When I see a packing plant getting into a bad situation I'll say, “That's not going to work,” and everyone will immediately think I'm being really negative. But I'm not. It would be obvious to anyone outside the situation that what they're doing isn't going to work, but people inside the bad situation can't see it because their defense mechanisms protect them from seeing it until they're ready. That's denial, and I can't understand it at all. I can't even imagine what it's like.

That's because I don't have an unconscious. Normal people can push bad things out of their conscious minds into their unconscious minds, but I can't. Normal people can't always
keep
the bad stuff locked up, of course, but at least they have more freedom from it than I do. That's why I can't watch any violent movies with rape or torture scenes. The pictures stay in my conscious mind. Once they're there, I can't get rid of them. The only way I can block a bad image is by thinking about something else, but the bad image still pops back up in my mind, like a pop-up ad on the Internet. The way I think about it is that a normal brain has a built-in pop-up zapper, but my brain doesn't. To get rid of the pop-up image I have to consciously click on another screen.

I don't know
why
my brain doesn't have an unconscious, but I think it's connected to the fact that pictures are my “native language,” not words. Lots of studies show that the language parts of your brain block your memory for images. Language doesn't
erase
your image memories; the images are still there, inside your head. But language keeps the images from becoming conscious. Psychologists call this
verbal overshadowing,
and I'll talk about it more in my chapter on animal thinking. For the time being, let's just say that while I don't know why I don't seem to have an unconscious, I think my problems with language have a lot to do with it. Language isn't a natural ability for me, so maybe the language parts of my brain don't have the same power to overshadow the pictures.

I know it's a leap to go from saying that I don't have an unconscious to saying I don't have defense mechanisms, but based on my personal experience I think it's true. No one has ever tried to test animals for defense mechanisms, but animals act as if they don't have them, either. You never see an animal act as if a dangerous situation is safe. You might see a dog act like he's not afraid when he is, but that's not the same thing. The dog knows there's danger and is using a standard dog strategy to avoid provoking the threatening dog any further.

A friend of mine has two dogs, one a gentle female collie and the other a macho golden retriever. (You might not have thought a golden retriever could be macho, but this one is.) When my friend walks the collie
alone
past the two ferocious-acting German shepherds down the street, the collie looks straight ahead and acts as if she's deaf and blind. She does this because staring is a provocation. She's averting her eyes to avoid challenging them.

The reason we can say the collie is only pretending not to be afraid of the other dogs when she's alone, instead of not feeling fear because she's repressed it, is that she stops orienting to motion. All animals orient to movement. It's automatic. Since no dog can be oblivious to two German shepherds who are charging straight toward her, the collie has to consciously override her most basic orienting response. She has to
actively
ignore the other dogs.

F
OUR
C
ORE
E
MOTIONS

Researchers have identified and mapped out four primal emotions, all of which mature not long after an animal is born. They are:

1. Rage
   
2. Prey chase drive
   
3. Fear
   
4. Curiosity/interest/anticipation
   

Most animals also have four primary social emotions, which are not as well mapped:

1. Sexual attraction and lust
   
2. Separation distress (mother and baby)
   
3. Social attachment
   
4. Play and roughhousing