Animals in Translation (3 page)

The behaviorists' belief that any animal or person could learn just about anything if the rewards were right led Ivar Lovaas to his work with autistic children. In his most famous study he took a group of very young autistic kids and gave one half of the children intensive
behavior therapy
while the other half got much less intensive treatment. Behavior therapy just meant
classical operant conditioning,
having the kids go over and over the behaviors Dr. Lovaas wanted them to learn and giving them rewards whenever they got something right. He published results showing that half of the kids who got the intensive therapy became “indistinguishable” from normal kids.
⁴

There've been years of controversy over whether Dr. Lovaas did or didn't cure anybody, but to me, the fact that he brought those kids so far there could be an argument about it is what matters. Behaviorism gave parents and teachers a reason to think that autistic
people were capable of a lot more than anybody thought, and that was a good thing.

The other major contribution behaviorists made is that they were, and still are today, fantastically close observers of animal and human behavior. They could spot tiny changes in an animal's behavior quickly, and connect the changes to something in the environment. That's one of my own most important talents with animals.

So for all of its problems, behaviorism had a lot to offer, and still does. Besides, the animal ethologists had their blind spots, too. For instance, both the ethologists and the behaviorists were in total agreement that practically the worst thing anyone could possibly do was to
anthropomorphize
an animal. Ethologists and behaviorists probably had different reasons for being against anthropomorphism—Dr. Skinner thought it was just as bad to anthropomorphize a person as an animal—but whatever the reasons, they agreed. Anthropomorphizing an animal was
wrong.

To a large degree they were right to stress this, because humans just naturally treat their pets as if they're four-legged people a lot of the time. Professional trainers are constantly telling people not to assume their pets think and feel the same way they do, but people keep on doing it anyway. The dog trainer John Ross even has a story in his book
Dog Talk
about the first time he realized
he
was being anthropomorphic, and he's a professional. He had an Irish setter named Jason who was a big “garbage dog,” constantly getting into the garbage whenever Mr. Ross wasn't around. Mr. Ross figured Jason knew he was being bad because if there was a mess on the floor the dog would take off running the minute Mr. Ross got home. On days when he hadn't gotten into the garbage he didn't run, so Mr. Ross thought this meant Jason knew that strewing garbage clear across the kitchen was wrong, and ran away because he felt bad.

He found out differently when a more experienced trainer had him try an experiment. He told Mr. Ross to go get into the garbage
himself,
when Jason wasn't watching, and dump it out all over the floor. Then he was supposed to bring Jason into the kitchen and see what the dog did.

It turned out Jason did what he always did when there was
garbage on the floor—he took off running. He wasn't running away because he felt guilty, he was running away because he felt scared. For Jason, garbage on the floor meant trouble. If Mr. Ross had stuck to behaviorist principles and thought about Jason's environment instead of about his “psychology,” he wouldn't have made this mistake.
⁵

A friend of mine had the same experience with her two dogs, a one-year-old German shepherd and a three-month-old golden retriever. One day the puppy pooped in the living room, and later on when the older dog saw the poop she got so anxious she started to drool. If the older dog had made the poop herself and then stood there drooling, her owner probably would have thought the dog knew she'd done something bad. But since the other dog had made the poop, her owner realized that the whole category of poop-on-living-room-floor was just plain bad news, period.

Those stories are classic examples of why it's not a good idea to anthropomorphize an animal, but that's not all there is to it. In my student days, even though
everyone
was against anthropomorphizing animals, I still believed it was important to think about the animal's point of view. I remember there was a great animal psychologist out of New Zealand named Ron Kilgour (he was an ethologist) who wrote a lot about the problem of anthropomorphizing. One of his early papers told a story about a person who had a pet lion he was shipping on an airplane. Someone thought the lion might like to have a pillow for the trip, the same way people do, so they gave him one, and the lion ate it and died. The point was: don't be anthropomorphic. It's dangerous to the animal.

But when I read this story I said to myself, “Well, no, he doesn't want a pillow, he wants something soft to lie on, like leaves and grass.” I wasn't looking at the lion as a person, but as a lion. At least that's what I was trying to do.

That kind of thinking was illegal for behaviorists, however, and wasn't really encouraged by the ethologists, either. Both groups were environmentalists when you came right down to it, the big difference being which environment the animal was in while the researchers were studying him.

In the end, I had a pretty good grounding in animal ethology
from undergraduate college before I started graduate school at Arizona State University. It was a good thing I did, because Arizona State was a hotbed of behaviorism.
Everything
was behaviorism. And I did not like some of the very cruel experiments they did to mice, rats, and monkeys. I remember one poor little monkey that had a little Plexiglas thing shoved onto his scrotum that they were shocking him with. I thought that was terrible.

I was not involved in any of the nasty experiments. I don't endorse using animals as subjects in experiments unless you're going to learn something incredibly important. If you're using animals to find a cure for cancer, that's different, especially since animals need a cure for cancer, too. But that's not what they were doing at Arizona. I spent one year in the psych department studying experimental psychology, and I thought, “I don't want to do this.”

Even if the experiments had been fun for the animals, I still didn't see the point. My question was, “What are you learning from this?” Dr. Skinner wrote a lot about schedules of reinforcement, which is how often and how consistently the animal receives a reward for a particular behavior, and they were running every different schedule of reinforcement they could think of. Variable reinforcement, intermittent reinforcement, delayed reinforcement; you name it, they were running it.

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.

S
EEING THE
W
AY
A
NIMALS
S
EE
: T
HE
V
ISUAL
E
NVIRONMENT

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.