Animals in Translation (27 page)

But that very night Paddy went out into the pasture and killed a bunch of livestock, and from then on he had to live in a cage. He had learned that he was a lion, not a big house cat. That one moment of experiencing his power over another creature, when he knocked down the little girl, was enough to wake up his real nature.

Triggering a predator animal's aggressive nature is so dangerous that big cat handlers can use a trained lion or tiger only a few times in TV shows and movies if the scenes involve knocking down a human being. Even when a trained lion or tiger gently bumps against a human being
on command
it will soon become too dangerous to work with.

The moral for lion tamers is, Don't let this kitty ever find out that he weighs seven hundred pounds. You can arrest an animal's emotional development by not giving it a chance to figure out its strength and power, but you can't make him
un
-learn his strength and aggression once he knows it.

H
ANDLING
F
EAR
A
GGRESSION

Not all dogs who bite are dominant.
Shy biters
bite people because they're afraid, not because they are dominant. German shepherds who bite are usually shy biters. They are nervous animals.

Shy biters are somewhat less dangerous than dominant biters. They are dangerous mainly when the owner is around to give them courage. If a shy biter sees a stranger or a neighbor he's afraid of when he's alone, he'll usually just try to get away. If he can't get away, he will bite the stranger from behind because that's less frightening than having to meet the person's eyes. Shy dogs will avoid eye contact with everyone but their owners at all costs. That's just as well, since if you're going to get bitten by a dog it's better to get bitten on the ankle or the thigh than in the face. All in all, shy dogs are probably not as dangerous as they seem.

A
dominant
scared dog is different. Dogs who are both dominant and fearful can bite any time and place. They will bite with their owners present, or with their owners long gone. And when they bite, they can go straight for the face. Because they are dominant by nature, running away isn't an option. They have to attack. I don't think anyone knows exactly why a shy dominant dog is as potentially dangerous as he is. Is it just because he has two different reasons, fear and dominance, to bite people, which raises the odds that he will? Is it because when you mix fear and dominance together the dog's emotions are heightened and his ability to control himself is impaired?

I do know one neutered male dog who's highly dominant and fearful. He's not a shy biter, because his owners realized how dominant he was early on and did everything right, so he knows he's not the alpha.

But he's a big problem with other dogs. He'll try to attack any dog he sees on walks with his owners, and he can never be let off a leash in public or taken to a dog park. This is a dog who was well socialized to other dogs as a puppy, and yet was so dominant by nature that he still managed to get into two fights with the neighbor's dog. He won the first fight but lost the second one, and has been acting more and more terrified of other dogs ever since.

If he were a submissive dog by nature, that might not matter, because he would just avoid looking at the dog who was scaring him. But since he's dominant by nature, the instant he feels threatened by another dog he attacks—and he feels threatened all the time. Just the sight of another dog minding its own business seems to threaten him. This dog's behavior reminds me of a well-known study of anxious children versus oppositional children. (Children with
oppositional defiant disorder,
or ODD, are kids who are so angry and disobedient that their behavior disrupts their school or home life.) Both groups of children interpret ambiguous situations as being more threatening than typical kids do, but where an anxious child copes by avoiding the threat the oppositional child will become aggressive.
²⁴
I don't think a dominant dog is the same thing as an oppositional child, but the fearful dominant dog I know seems both to exaggerate threats
and
to react aggressively to threats once he's blown them up out of all proportion in his mind.

Regardless of what makes a shy dominant biter tick, once
any
dog has begun to bite out of fear, you have an animal who is never going to be completely safe again, because no animal can be completely trained out of fear.

 

If you've never lived with a dog, by now you may be thinking the best idea for anyone who's especially safety-minded is to just stay away from any animal larger than a small cat.

But that would be the wrong conclusion. The human relationship with domestic animals goes back a long way, and people need animals in their lives. Until recently most experts believed that humans and dogs paired up together 14,000 years ago, but more recent research on dog DNA shows that humans and dogs may have been keeping company for over 100,000 years. Dogs really are man's best friend.

The reason dogs don't kill humans more often than they do isn't that owners are brilliant trainers. A lot of owners don't know the first thing about obedience training. The reason dogs don't kill humans is that in 100,000 years of evolution dogs have developed a lot of ability to inhibit aggression against humans, and humans have
developed a lot of ability to
manage
dog aggression, whether they've ever read a book on obedience training or not. I think humans have probably evolved some innate ability to read dog language, or at least to learn to read it quickly.

A friend of mine told me an interesting story about this. She adopted a puppy from an animal shelter who quickly began showing signs that he was destined to be a highly dominant dog. When the puppy was only a few months old it started to growl at her seven-year-old son. A couple of weeks later the puppy bared his teeth and growled at a six-foot-four plumber who came to the house to fix the toilet.

The first time the puppy growled at her son my friend was sitting in another room and she called out to her son, “Why did Buddy growl at you?”

Her son, who had never lived with a dog in his life, said matter-of-factly, “Because I was on his chair.”

He was right. Buddy had growled because he was lying comfortably on his favorite chair, which naturally was the biggest, softest chair in the house, seeing as how he was such an alpha kind of guy—
and then the boy came in and sat down on it with him!
Buddy didn't like that, and he told the boy he didn't like it in no uncertain terms.

And the boy understood. He knew exactly why his family's new dog had growled at him without having to be taught—without even having to think about it. He got the message.

Through all the years dogs have been living with humans they've developed a lot of ability to read people, to know what people are thinking and what they're likely to do. We know this from research comparing dogs to wolves. Even a wolf who has been hand-reared by human beings never acquires the ability to read people's faces the way any normal dog does. A human-reared wolf mostly doesn't look at his master's face, even when he's in a situation where he could use his master's help. Dogs
always
look at their owner's faces for information, especially if they need help.
²⁵

I think that as dogs were learning how to read us, we were learning how to read them. The reason dogs don't hurt people more often is that dogs and people belong together.

P
eople who love their pets usually feel like they have a pretty good idea what an animal needs to have a good life. The basic necessities of life for pets are the same as they are for us: food, safety, companionship.

That's a good start, but if that's all you know about animals you can still get into trouble. Just to give you the first example that pops into my head: anyone who's gone out and bought himself a Border collie—or who's thinking about going out and buying himself a Border collie—is missing one big item from the Border collie list, and that is a
job.
Border collies aren't built for a life of leisure, and they can get nutty if that's what you give them. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't find this out until after they've got the dog. Then they have to spend the next ten years trying to give their pet something useful to do.

It's doubly hard for ranchers, feedlot managers, and sometimes even veterinarians to know exactly what they should do to treat the animals in their care responsibly. What does a cow headed to slaughter need in order to have a happy life?

If I had my druthers humans would have evolved to be plant eaters, so we wouldn't have to kill other animals for food. But we didn't, and I don't see the human race converting to vegetarianism anytime soon. I've tried to eat vegetarian myself, and I haven't been able to manage it physically. I get the same feeling you get with hypoglycemia; I get dizzy and light-headed, and I can't think straight. My mother is exactly the same way, and a lot of people with processing problems have told me they have this reaction, too, so I've always wondered if there's a connection. If there's something different about your sensory processing, is there something different about your metabolism, too?

There could be. It's possible that a brain difference could also involve a metabolic difference, because the same genes can do different things in different parts of the body. A gene that contributed to autism might contribute to a metabolic difference, or any other kind of difference. Parents have
always
said that their autistic children have lots of physical problems, too, usually involving the gut, and mainstream researchers haven't paid a lot of attention to this.

So until someone proves otherwise I'm operating from the hypothesis that at least some people are genetically built so that they
have
to have meat to function. Even if that's not so, the fact that humans evolved as both plant and meat eaters means that the vast majority of human beings are going to continue to eat both. Humans are animals, too, and we do what our animal natures tell us to do.

That means we're going to continue to have feedlots and slaughterhouses, so the question is: what should a humane feedlot and slaughterhouse be like?

Everyone concerned with animal welfare has the basic answer to that: the animal shouldn't suffer. He should feel as little pain as possible, and he should die as quickly as possible.

But although the principle is obvious, putting it into operation isn't, because it's hard to know how much pain an animal feels. It's hard to know how much pain a person feels when you get right down to it, but at least a person can tell you in plain language that he feels horrible. An animal can't do that.

The problem isn't just that animals don't talk. Animals also
hide
their pain. In the wild any animal who's injured is likely to be finished off by a predator, so probably animals evolved a natural tendency to act as if nothing's wrong. Small, vulnerable prey animals like sheep, goats, and antelope are especially stoic, whereas predator animals can be big babies. Cats can yowl their heads off when they get hurt, and dogs scream bloody murder if you happen to step on their paws. That's probably because cats and dogs don't have to worry about getting killed and eaten, so they can make all the noise they want.

Prey animals can be incredibly uncomplaining. A few years ago my student Jennifer and I saw a bunch of bulls being castrated. The vet was using a rubber band procedure, wrapping a tight band around
the bull's testicles and leaving it there for several days. That sounds horrible, but vets use it because it's less traumatic than surgery, although there are individual differences in how cattle react to it. Some bulls act perfectly normal, while others repeatedly stamp their feet. I interpret foot stamping as a sign of discomfort but not overwhelming pain.

A few bulls, though, act as if they're in agony. They lie down on the ground in strange, contorted positions and they moan—but they do this only when they're alone. When we were at the lot, one of the bulls was having a bad pain reaction, and when Jennifer walked up to his pen he jumped to his feet and greeted her as if nothing was wrong. The other bulls, who didn't seem to be especially bothered by the procedure, didn't change their behavior one way or another. When they thought they were alone—I was watching them from inside the scale house so they couldn't see me—they didn't act any different.

Sheep are the ultimate stoics. I once observed a sheep who'd just had excruciating bone surgery. I would have had no way of knowing how much pain that animal was in based on the way she was acting, and a hungry wolf would have had no reason to pick her out of a flock. An injured animal in terrible pain will actually
eat food
—something all our theories of stress tell us shouldn't happen. Physiologically, bad injuries and pain are severe forms of stress, and severe stress normally diverts bodily resources away from eating and reproduction. I warn vets about this all the time: there's no way to know how much pain an animal is in when you're right there in the room with him. Animals mask pain.

Predator animals like dogs are less likely to mask their pain, but even they do it to some degree. Pain masking may be why a lot of vets will neuter a female dog and send her home without any painkiller. Any human who's ever had abdominal surgery will tell you it's agonizingly painful, but vets say that dogs sure don't act like they're feeling anywhere near as bad as a human does. We don't know whether they're masking their pain or whether they just don't feel as much pain as we do in the first place. Either way it's a problem, because animals need some pain to keep them quiet so they can recover. If dogs do mask surgical pain it's especially dangerous,
because a dog won't spend any time alone if she can help it. A lot of vets will tell you they don't like to give pain medication because they want your dog to have
enough
pain to slow it down for a while. That's not a concern you'll ever hear from a doctor who operates on humans.

A friend of mine found this out the hard way. She had a young female Lab who was used to playing with three other young dogs. You put four very young dogs together, and you've got some wild and woolly play, which is what went on every day in my friend's backyard. The Labrador had her surgery in the afternoon, then went home the same night. She was groggy and out of it, but the first thing she did when she got home was jump up on the sofa at the end of her owners' bed and from there up onto the bed. No human being five hours out of abdominal surgery will jump onto a couch,
ever.
That's something you just don't see.

So my friend and her husband gave the Lab doggie tranquilizers for a couple of days to keep her quiet, but she still played so vigorously with the other dogs that she didn't heal properly. Instead of developing a thin red scar where the incision had been made, the surgical wound kept getting wider, turning into a concave area of shiny, moist tissue.

Unfortunately, my friend didn't know what the wound was supposed to look like and didn't realize until almost too late that it wasn't healing right. She was inspecting the wound every day to see if it looked infected, and while it didn't look good to her, the incision didn't look infected, either. She was getting more and more worried, but she thought she was just being an anxious owner.

Finally she got so worried she took her dog back to the vet. He took one look at the dog's belly and told my friend that if she hadn't come in that day her dog's intestines would have been “lying on the floor” by nighttime. There was no infection, but the skin tissue was completely broken down, and there was only a thin veneer of it left holding the viscera inside. My friend was horrified. You can see why vets worry about too little pain instead of too much. That Lab could have died from a routine spaying procedure all because she wasn't showing any pain, so she didn't slow down her social life with the other dogs for even one day.

D
O
A
NIMALS
H
URT
?

The short answer is yes. Animals feel pain. So do birds, and we now have pretty good evidence that fish feel pain, too.

We know animals feel pain thanks both to behavioral observation and to some excellent research on animals' use of painkillers. Starting with behavior, dogs, cats, rats, and horses all limp after they've hurt their legs, and they'll avoid putting weight on the injured limb. That's called
pain guarding.
They limit their use of the injured body part to guard it from further injury. Chickens who've just had their beaks trimmed peck
much
less, another obvious form of pain guarding. (Ranchers trim chickens' beaks because chickens get in horrible fights and will peck each other to death. The vet trims off the sharp point so the chicken can't use it as a knife blade.)

We think insects probably don't feel pain, by the way, because an insect will continue to walk on a damaged limb.

Up until recently nobody knew whether fish felt pain or not, but two researchers in Scotland have shown that they almost certainly do. The study used electrical measurements of the brain backed up by behavioral observation. First they anesthetized some fish and applied painful stimuli like heat and mechanical pressure to their bodies while running a brain scan. They found neurons in the fish's brains that fired in a pattern very close to pain firing in a human brain. Assuming this study can be replicated, it shows that fish have at least the
sensory
component of pain, though it doesn't tell us whether the fish were actually feeling it consciously. Humans with certain kinds of brain damage can have the sensory component of pain without the “suffering” component, which I'll get to in a moment.

In the second part of the study, the researchers used behavioral observation to figure out what the fish were probably feeling. They injected either bee venom or vinegar into the fishes' lips, which would be painful for humans and other mammals, and then watched to see what the fish did. The fish acted exactly the same way mammals act when they're in pain. It took the fish an hour and a half longer to begin eating again than it did fish who'd had painless saline water injections, a classic sign of pain guarding. Their lips
hurt, so they didn't want to eat. They also showed other signs of pain. They rocked their bodies, something you see zoo animals do when they hurt, and they kept rubbing their lips against the side and bottom of the tank.

These obvious behavioral changes are strong evidence that the fish were consciously experiencing pain, although the fish brain is so different from the mammalian brain that we can't say for sure. Fish don't have any neocortex at all, and most neuroscientists think you have to have a neocortex to be conscious. Still, the fact that a fish doesn't have a neocortex doesn't have to mean that a fish isn't conscious of pain, because different species can use different brain structures and systems to handle the same functions.

We have more evidence that animals feel pain from the experiments Francis C. Colpaert did on animals and pain medication in the early 1980s. He injected rats with bacteria that produce a temporary bout of arthritis we know is painful in humans, then gave them a choice between a bad-tasting liquid analgesic and a sweet, sugary-tasting liquid rats normally like. The rats chose the bad-tasting painkiller over the sugar solution, a pretty good sign they were choosing it for its painkilling properties. They definitely weren't choosing it for its taste.
¹

Once their arthritis cleared up they switched to the sugar drink, another sign they were using the painkiller to treat pain. If they'd been choosing the painkiller just because they liked it—maybe the same way humans can use painkillers as a recreational drug—they would have kept on using it after their arthritis cleared up. But they didn't. When their joints were inflamed they chose a yucky-tasting painkiller; when their joints returned to normal they stopped choosing the yucky-tasting painkiller.

Somebody needs to do Colpaert's experiment with fish. That would tell us a lot.

H
OW
M
UCH
D
OES
P
AIN
H
URT
?

I think the real question isn't whether or not animals (and birds and fish) feel pain. It's pretty obvious they do.

The real question is
how much does pain hurt?
Does an animal
with the same injury as a person feel
as bad as
a person does? We should be talking about degrees.

I think the answer to whether the same injury in an animal feels as bad as it does to a person is often no, for a couple of reasons. For one, even when they're alone animals usually—not always, but usually—act as if an injury or disease hurts them less than the exact same injury or disease would hurt a person. That's important.

Beyond that, a lot of what we know about the brain leads me to think animals may have a different experience of pain than people do. I remember being struck a year or so ago when I came across a study saying that chronic pain is associated with
widely spread prefrontal hyperactivity.
²
That surprised me. Pain seems like such a basic sensation I'd just naturally thought of it as a primitive reaction all creatures have to have to protect themselves from injury. To me, pain seemed like an ancient,
lower-down
brain function. Since the frontal lobes are as high up as you can get, I wasn't expecting to read that pain is associated with high frontal lobe activity. That study made me wonder whether an animal's conscious pain may be less intense than a person's, because an animal's frontal lobes are smaller and less developed.