Animals in Translation (16 page)

Some of the pigs figure out that it's the collar that lets them into the feeding pen, and if they see a loose collar lying on the ground they'll pick it up and carry it over to the pen and use it to get inside. In that case confirmation bias has led them to the correct conclusion about the nature of reality.

But other pigs develop superstitions, also based in confirmation bias, about the feeding trough inside the pen. I saw several who would walk over to the feeder and go inside when the door opened, then approach the feed trough and start doing some purposeful behavior like repeatedly stomping their feet on the ground. They kept doing this until their heads happened to move close enough to the pen scanner to read their tags and deliver their food. Obviously they had had food delivered a couple of times when they happened to be stomping their feet, and they'd concluded it was the foot stomping that got them food. People and animals develop superstitions the exact same way. Our brains are wired to see connections and correlations, not coincidences and happenstance. Moreover, our brains are wired to believe that a correlation is also a cause. The same part of the brain that lets us learn what we need to know and find the things we need to stay alive is also the part of the brain that produces delusional thinking and conspiracy theories.

A
NIMAL
F
RIENDS AND
F
AMILIES

On top of the four primal emotions, all animals and birds have four basic social emotions: sexual attraction and lust, separation distress, social attachment, and the happy emotions of play and roughhousing.

Sexual Attraction and Lust

Sex is another area where you see funky evolution thanks to human interventions. One example: American breeders have started select
ing for much leaner pigs, because Americans want to eat leaner cuts of meat. So far the leaner pigs are healthy, but their personalities are completely different. They're super-nervous and high-strung. No one knows why this happens, although it might have to do with myelin, which is the fatty sheath surrounding the nerve cell axons that helps signals pass from one brain cell to another. Myelin is made of pure fat, so it's possible that when you breed a pig to have less fat you interfere with myelin production in some way. Lower myelin levels could produce jumpy animals because
inhibitory
signals—the chemical signals that tell other neurons
not
to fire—don't get through from one neuron to another. The animal can't calm itself down. That's one theory, anyway.

Lean pigs are also a lot less sexual. In China the pigs are all fat, and the mama pig makes way more piglets. A fat Chinese mother pig will have a litter of twenty-one piglets compared to just ten or twelve piglets in a lean American sow's litter. And the fat Chinese boars are super-sexy. When they brought them to the University of Illinois the boars would magically slip out of their pens and breed the sows whenever the staff wasn't around, something no American pig would do. They had nonstop sex on their minds and they turned into Houdini to have sex. All the fat Chinese pigs were super-calm and super-sexy. The females were really good mamas, too.

Sex is a very strong drive in any animal, so humans who take care of animals always have to be dealing with their sexuality one way or another. Either you want to prevent your animals from breeding, or you're trying to get them to breed successfully, and both goals have their challenges.

You can prevent unwanted breeding easily enough by neutering an animal, but you can't necessarily prevent all the
behaviors
that go along with breeding, especially not if you neuter an animal relatively late in its life after all its mature sexual behaviors have come in. That happened with our Siamese cat BeeLee when I was little. We neutered him pretty late, after his spraying behaviors were well established. One time we moved to a new house where we stacked all our pictures in the hall, waiting to be hung on the walls. BeeLee saw his reflection in the glass of the pictures, and he sprayed every single one. There were about thirty-five pictures altogether, and he
completely ruined twenty of them. We had to throw them out. The rest were stinky, but we put them up anyway.

H
OW TO
M
AKE A
P
IG
F
ALL IN
L
OVE

Like all complex behavior, sexual attraction and mate selection depend on learning. The sex act itself is a hardwired
fixed action pattern,
like the rooster's courtship dance. It's hardwired into the brain, and an animal is born knowing how to do it. He doesn't have to be taught. But an animal does have to learn from other animals who he's supposed to mate with and who he's not supposed to mate with.

We know this partly because there've been so many stories over the years of animals who got mixed up in this area. There's a book called
The Parrot Who Owns Me,
written by an ornithologist at Rutgers University who adopted a thirty-year-old parrot after his owners died. The parrot got so attached to his new owner that he decided she was his mate. Every spring he would court her. He would shred newspaper to make a nest, he would kiss her, he would hoard food to share with her, and he would attack her husband if he saw him getting too affectionate with his wife. Then later on he'd act sorry for being mean to the husband.
¹⁸
There's also the famous story of
A Moose for Jessica,
about the moose in Vermont who fell in love with a Hereford cow named Jessica and courted her in her pasture for seventy-six days.
¹⁹

Breeding domestic animals can be easy or hard, depending on the animal.

Cows and sheep are the easiest. Some cow and sheep breeding is done au naturel; they just send the males out in the pasture with the females, and they breed. The one thing you do have to be careful about with cattle is dominance hierarchies with the bulls. The most dominant bull doesn't necessarily have the best semen or the best genes. So if the top bull is shooting blanks and chasing off all your good bulls, that's bad. You have to try to put enough bulls out with the cows that one dominant bull won't breed them all.

Most of the dairy cattle breeding is done by artificial insemination, which is easy with cattle. You don't have to do anything special
with the females. You just thread a catheter into their wombs and inject the semen and that's it.

There's a little more involved with some of the bulls, especially the Brahman bulls. Those are the white cattle with the big humps on their backs and the long ears. Brahman cattle are very affectionate toward people, and they love to be petted. They just eat it up. I love Brahman cattle. If you treat them nice, they'll treat you nice. They'll lick you all over your face and body. But if you treat them bad, look out. They'll kick you or charge you.

Brahman bulls are so affectionate that when you collect semen from a Brahman bull you have to pet them a
long
time first. They'll refuse to give the semen for twenty minutes because they want twenty minutes of throat and butt scratching; that's the stuff they really care about. Then they'll give it to you. They'll delay the sex in order to get some good, serious stroking. With some of them you have to walk away and leave or they won't give you the semen at all. You have to let them know that if they don't give the semen they're not going to get stroked.

Pigs could be bred naturally, too, but a lot of the time breeders use artificial insemination instead. Breeding pigs commercially is an art. I talked to a man who had one of the most successful records for breeding sows out there and he told me things no one's ever written in a book as far as I know. Each boar had his own little perversion the man had to do to get the boar turned on so he could collect the semen. Some of them were just things like the boar wanted to have his dandruff scratched while they were collecting him. (Pigs have big flaky dandruff all over their backs.) The other things the man had to do were a lot more intimate. He might have to hold the boar's penis in exactly the right way that the boar liked, and he had to masturbate some of them in exactly the right way. There was one boar, he told me, who wanted to have his butt hole played with. “I have to stick my finger in his butt, he just really loves that,” he told me. Then he got all red in the face. I'm not going to tell you his name, because I know he'd be embarrassed. But he's one of the best in the business—and remember, this
is
a business we're talking about. The number of sows successfully bred by the boars translates directly into the profits a company can make.

This same man also told me he had to deal with the female pigs the same way. With a cow you can just take a catheter and insert it into her womb and she'll have babies. She doesn't have to be turned on or interested. But you have to get the sow turned on when you breed her so her uterus will pull the semen in. If she isn't fully aroused she'll have a smaller litter because fewer eggs will get fertilized.

So the breeder has to be able to tell exactly when the female pig is ready. One of the signs you look for is that when a pig is sexually receptive her ears will go “blink!” and pop straight up. That's called
popping.
Also, when you put pressure on her back, which is what she would feel when the boar mounts her, she'll stand perfectly still. Breeders call that “stand for the man.” A good breeder knows when his sows are ready to stand for the man, and he usually sits on each sow's back when he inserts the semen so she feels that pressure on her back. Some breeders put weights on the sow's back to accomplish the same thing.

Pig breeders used to ignore all these psychological factors, but now they pay attention. One thing that's really important: the man who does the breeding
cannot
be involved with any nasty things, like vaccinations or any kind of veterinary care. (Nasty from the pig's point of view, I mean.) If he does any of that stuff, the pigs will reject him. He might still be able to breed them, but they'll have smaller litters. Paul Hemsworth, from Australia, showed that sows who are afraid of people have 6 percent fewer piglets than sows who aren't afraid of people, and the piglets don't do as well on weight gain after they're born.
²⁰
The people attending the farrowing also have to be people the pig trusts completely. So the employee handling the breeding has to do only the breeding and nothing else.

H
ORSES IN
S
UPER
-M
AX
P
RISONS

Pig breeders respect the animals' nature, and they do a good job with their animals. But I have a lot of complaints about horse breeders. They keep the stallions locked up alone in their stalls all day long, where they go crazy with nothing to do and no one to interact with. Horses are social herd animals, and they need to be with other horses. The super-max prisons we keep stallions in distort their sexuality.

Out on the range, a stallion who wants to mate a mare walks up to her and whinnies. He's saying, “Would you like to have sex?” and he has to ask very nicely to breed her. If the female doesn't cooperate he isn't going to get anywhere.

But a stallion who's been locked up in a stall turns into an aggressive sex maniac. The mating procedures owners use are horrible. They tie up the mare so she can't run away, and then they hobble her feet so she can't kick the stallion if she doesn't like him. Then they let the stallion out and he just runs up to her and rapes her. It is disgusting.

I understand why the breeders don't want to do things the natural way. They're afraid the mare will kick the stallion and injure him. But turning stallions into horse rapists is wrong. It's completely abnormal, and keeping the stallions locked up the way they do is terrible. A racehorse who's been reared in isolation probably does need his own stall for protection, but that's because his character has already been warped. Horses don't need private stalls; they need other horses. The owners may be sparing no expense providing food and shelter, but they're just not thinking.

H
ORMONES OF
L
OVE

We know a fair amount about the brain basis of sexuality. Everyone has heard of testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone, and probably most people know that both sexes have all three hormones, though in different amounts. Two other important hormones aren't as well known:
oxytocin
in females and
arginine vasopressin
(AVP), or
vasopressin,
in males. (Some readers may have heard of AVP from their pediatricians. AVP is also called antidiuretic hormone, or ADH, because it increases water retention. Doctors sometimes prescribe it for children who wet the bed.)

Oxytocin shoots up right before a mother animal gives birth and helps her be a good mother, and both oxytocin and vasopressin shoot up in male brains as well as female brains during sex. (Oxytocin is more important in the female brain and vasopressin is more important in the male brain.) These are very, very old chemicals. Both of them evolved from
vasotocin,
which controls sexual behavior
in frogs and other amphibians. If you put just a little bit of vasotocin into a frog's brain the frog will immediately start performing courtship and mating behaviors. There's only one amino acid difference between vasotocin, oxytocin, and vasopressin, so when it comes to sex, we still have our frog brains working for us.

Vasopressin and oxytocin aren't just sex hormones. They're motherhood, fatherhood, and love hormones, too. Some science writers have called vasopressin the monogamy hormone, because prairie voles, who mate for life, have much higher levels of vasopressin than their cousins the montane voles, who don't mate for life. (Only 3 percent of all mammals are monogamous.) Mother and father prairie voles build nests together and raise their babies together. Thomas Insel, a neuroscientist who has done a lot of the research on vasopressin and voles, has found that when you put high-vasopressin prairie voles together in a big roomy cage the male and female mates will spend half their time close together. When you put low-vasopressin montane voles inside the same cage, they spend almost all of their time alone and only 5 percent of their time physically close to another vole.
²¹