Animals in Translation (31 page)

It seems like Mother Nature thinks an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And emotions are essential to prevention. A healthy fear system keeps animals, and people, alive by allowing them to predict the future.

When you think about emotions as a prediction system, it stands to reason that close-up smell would be wired to fear. But it's still not obvious why nature would wire up a rat's brain so that it
doesn't
feel fear when it smells a real live cat off in the distance. Shouldn't a rat who
knows
there's a cat in the detectable distance be motivated to put even more distance between itself and death-by-cat?

I don't think so. Fear is such an overwhelming emotion for an animal that evolution probably selected for brain systems that keep it under control. Propagating a species takes more than just not getting eaten. All creatures need to eat, sleep, mate, have babies, and feed and protect the young until they're big enough to fend for themselves. To do all that, a rat has to have some time off from fear. If rats froze in place every time they smelled a cat in the distance they could be frozen around the clock, depending on the neighborhood where they live.

My explanation is ad hoc, of course. You can't know why one thing evolved and another thing didn't, and it's a mistake to assume that everything we see in nature serves a purpose. Evolution can be random, and some things are probably just the side effects of other characteristics that did give animals an edge when it came to survival. But I think wiring close-up smell to fear probably did confer an evolutionary advantage. Until someone else comes up with a better idea, it makes sense to me.

The same basic principle (close-up = fear; distant = calm) probably applies to other senses as well. Take vision, for instance. People are always struck by how nonchalant prey animals are when they see a predator who can't get to them—not just nonchalant but sometimes downright provocative. A friend of mine once watched a squirrel in a tree tease a cat way down on the ground for a full half hour. The
squirrel would creep down the trunk, getting closer and closer to the cat, looking it straight in the eye, until finally the cat sprang. Then the squirrel would scamper back up to safety and the cat would have to drop back down to the ground, because the trunk was too long for the cat to make it all the way up to where the branches began. There's no way for me to know what was in that squirrel's brain, but to my friend it sure looked like the squirrel was deliberately taunting the cat. He definitely wasn't frightened, because a frightened squirrel, just like a frightened rat, displays very specific behaviors like freezing in place. This was not a frightened squirrel.

He was definitely using his vision (he was probably smelling the cat, too), because he was staring at the cat intently. So obviously the sight of a predator out of the range of danger does not activate a squirrel's fear system. I suspect that if you surgically removed his close-up smell system and put him eyeball-to-eyeball with a cat, he'd panic. Distant predators don't fire up fear; close predators—or close
signs
of predators, like smell—do.

You see the same thing with dogs. Dogs know when other dogs are on a leash. Another friend of mine lives with a young male dog named Jazzie who's part Rottweiler. Jazzie is an extremely dominant dog, so he's always trying to get in fights. My friend's husband says Jazzie takes offense at any dog who's not “minding his own business,” which means a dog foolish enough to look Jazzie in the eye. According to Jazzie, a dog who happens to enter his body space is supposed to bow his head and avert his eyes. Maybe a cat can look at a king, as the saying goes, but a dog definitely cannot look at Jazzie. He's going to get chomped if he does.

Jazzie lives next door to an unneutered golden retriever named Max whom he's tangled with a couple of times. For a while after that everything was fine because Max acknowledged Jazzie as the leader. Whenever Max got within a certain distance of Jazzie he would avert his eyes and then, if the distance between them got even smaller, drop to the ground. Both dogs seemed to know how close it was okay for the two of them to be without Max having to look away or drop to the ground.

But if Jazzie happened to be on a leash, forget it. Max would
drop all his submissive behaviors and carry on like Jazzie was no more threat than a flea. Max would also act outrageous whenever Jazzie was behind the sliding glass doors looking at him. My friend said it was hilarious watching the two of them. Max would look straight at Jazzie—just like that squirrel—then wander nonchalantly around the deck, peeing all over the place.

It's the same story with deer, who are some of the most timid animals on the planet. Jazzie's house has an invisible fence and the deer know exactly where the electronic perimeter is. They'll calmly stand outside the boundary munching grass. Every once in a while they'll give Jazzie a direct stare, a challenging behavior no prey animal would ever do to a dog close enough to strike. Those deer know Jazzie can't get to them, so they aren't afraid. Distant-sense sensory systems do not activate fear.

The total disconnect between distance sensing and fear is really striking in the wild. A herd of antelope won't show the tiniest concern about a pride of lions sunning themselves not too far away. When you observe these animals you see that prey animals are very aware of whether or not a predator is stalking them. They know what stalking behavior looks like, and if they don't see stalking behavior they don't worry.

So we have a lot of evidence that animals are put together in such a fashion that they have a good chance of not getting frightened any more often than they have to. Nature seems to have tried to wire animals and people to have
useful
emotions, useful meaning emotions that keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Emotions keep us alive by letting us make good predictions about the future, and good predictions let us make good decisions about what comes next.

H
OW
D
O
A
NIMALS
K
NOW
W
HAT'S
S
CARY
?

There's a fair amount of research showing that certain basic fears are built into animals and people. The visual cliff experiments I described in Chapter 2, showing very young children and animals refusing to crawl or walk over what looks to them like a cliff, are an example of an innate, inborn fear. No one has to teach young humans or animals to fear heights. They already know.

More recently, Jaak Panksepp found that laboratory-reared rats who've never seen or smelled a cat stop playing the instant you put a tuft of cat hair in their play space. Since frightened animals don't play, that's a good indication that those rats are afraid. “The animals moved furtively,” Dr. Panksepp says in
Affective Neuroscience,
“cautiously sniffing the fur and other parts of their environment. They seemed to sense that something was seriously amiss.”
¹⁷

This experience got Dr. Panksepp to thinking about how many research laboratories might be messing up their results due to researchers' coming to work smelling like their pet cats. The Pet Food Institute says there were 75 million pet cats living in the United States in 2002. That's a lot of cats. Since a huge amount of what we know about the psychology of learning and behavior comes from lab rats, you have to wonder how much of that knowledge came from terrified rats. This is an extremely important question, because learning done in a state of fear is different from learning done in a state of calm. I'll get to how it's different shortly.

Dr. Panksepp didn't have a pet cat, but he did have a dog, a Norwegian elkhound named Ginny. He realized he had to find out whether his own research was being affected by the fact that he was coming to work every day smelling like elkhound. So he covered his rats' play space with a massive amount of Ginny's hair, and—nothing happened. The rats kept right on frolicking and playing. Dr. Panksepp thinks this is evidence that ancient rats weren't hunted too much by ancient dogs.
¹⁸

U
NIVERSAL
F
EARS

We know what most of the almost certainly innate fears are. All children under the age of two are afraid of sudden sounds, pain, strange new objects, and losing physical support.
¹⁹
After age two, children lose these fears. That's decent evidence that these fears are innate. Every child has them at the same age, then every child loses them at the same age.

Older children and adults also have a set of universal fears that may or may not be innate: sudden sounds, a stranger walking toward you with an angry look on his face, snakes, spiders, dark places, and
high places. Animals have whole sets of similar fears. Most mammals don't like snakes, and all animals are frightened by sudden sounds. Animals don't like anything sudden at all.

Other animal fears are more specific to each species. Mice and rats, for instance, don't like well-lit open spaces. If you plop a lab rat down in the middle of an open room in broad daylight he'll freeze and defecate. That makes sense for a small prey animal like a rat whose best bet for not getting killed is to stay out of reach and out of sight. All those old Tom and Jerry cartoons are ethologically correct: mice like mice holes. Small prey animals are happiest in small, dark places where larger predators can't get to them.

Big prey animals like cows and horses, on the other hand, are fine with wide-open spaces. They'd have to be or they couldn't get enough food to eat. If you're a thousand-pound animal trying to live on grass, you need a lot of grazing space. To stay safe, herd animals like horses and cows create their own “small space” by clustering together in groups. You'll always find the dominant animals standing in the middle of the herd where it's safest, too. That way they've got a lot of animal shields standing between them and whatever predator comes along.

Predator animals like wolves seem to be perfectly happy out in the open, but even they like to nap and sleep together inside a small den, where other predators can't get at them. In short, all animals, predator or prey, have natural-seeming fears of the natural dangers their worlds present.

I
T'S
E
ASIER TO
L
EARN
S
OME
F
EARS THAN
O
THERS

But the story doesn't end there, because animals (and people) also have a number of fears that fall somewhere between innate and learned. These are fears that are extremely easy to pick up, like snake phobias in people. Snake phobias are common, and no snake has ever bitten most of the people who have them. Some people with snake phobias may never even have seen a snake outside a photograph. And yet they're terrified by the very thought of a snake.

That wouldn't necessarily seem like evidence that snake phobias
are semi-innate if it weren't for the fact that people
don't
easily develop phobias to all kinds of things that are much more dangerous nowadays, like automobiles or electrical outlets. I'm not even sure a person
can
develop a car phobia per se. People who've been in bad accidents can and do develop post-traumatic stress syndrome, but they don't feel fear just looking at a photograph of a car, as people with snake phobias do looking at a picture of a snake. They're terrified of
riding
in a car, but the fear doesn't spread any further.

Animals show the same bias toward certain fears and against others. Psychologist Susan Mineka's experiments with monkeys and snakes at Northwestern University are probably the most important evidence we have of this. She started with the fact that monkeys living in the wild are terrified of snakes, while monkeys raised in labs are not.
²⁰
Show a live snake to a bunch of wild-reared monkeys and they explode. They make faces, flap their ears, grip the bars of their cages, and their hair stands on end (piloerection). Wild-reared monkeys refuse to even look at the snakes; that's how aversive the presence of a snake is to a wild-reared monkey.

But show the same snake to a monkey who grew up in the lab and nothing happens. He's not worried. So obviously monkeys don't come into the world already knowing snakes are bad. Somebody has to teach them.

What Dr. Mineka showed is that it's super-easy to teach a lab monkey to be just as terrified of snakes as any monkey living out in the wild. When Dr. Mineka exposed her fearless monkeys to wild-reared monkeys acting afraid of snakes, the lab monkeys instantly got scared themselves, and they stayed scared. All they had to do was watch one snake-scared monkey, and they were snake-scared for life themselves. It took only a few minutes. Moreover, the lab-reared monkeys learned the same level of fear the
demonstrator monkeys
showed. If the demonstrator monkey was scared but not panicked, the
observer monkey
learned to be scared but not panicked, too. If the demonstrator monkey was terrified, the observer monkey learned to be terrified.

And, after learning snake fear through observation, the lab-reared monkey was just as good a fear model for other lab-reared monkeys as the wild-reared monkey had been for him.

Dr. Mineka also showed that it's impossible to teach a monkey to be afraid of a flower using the same technique. She showed her lab monkeys videotapes of a flower followed by a shot of a monkey acting terrified, making it look like the monkey on the tape was terrified of the flower. That tape had no effect. Watching a video of a monkey acting afraid of a snake scared the lab monkeys to death; watching a video of a monkey acting afraid of a flower didn't faze them.

Most researchers have concluded that the fear of snakes is
semi
-innate. Monkeys aren't born fearing snakes, but they
are
born ready to fear snakes at the first hint of trouble. Animal behaviorists call snakes a
prepared stimulus,
meaning that monkeys have been prepared by evolution easily to acquire a fear of snakes.