Animals in Translation (33 page)

But as far as his unconscious emotional memory is concerned, the crash and the stuck horn could have happened yesterday. Now, whenever he hears a honking horn, his body tenses up and he feels scared, but he doesn't know why. So his conscious mind associates his bodily fear reactions with whatever perfectly innocent things are going on around him, like walking down a busy street, or trying to find the elevators inside a crowded mall parking lot. It could be anything at all. Having forgotten what he was originally scared of, he's developing all kinds of brand-new, totally irrational fears that aren't based in anything real.

In Dr. LeDoux's view, this is one reason why therapists see so many fears without any obvious cause in their patients. What they're seeing are secondary
downstream
fears that developed after the conscious content of the original fear was forgotten. The new fears are like stand-ins, or substitutes, for the old one. This may sound strange, but it happens a lot, especially to people with phobias. As Dr. LeDoux says, “phobics can sometimes lose track of what they are afraid of.”
²⁴

Another thing that could happen, once the conscious details of the original frightening experience have faded, is that a person can start having conscious feelings of fear that aren't attached to anything he can pinpoint. They just seem to come out of nowhere. Say he hears a honking horn somewhere in the distance. He doesn't pay any attention to it and then starts to feel anxious without realizing it's the horn that caused the emotion. His conscious memory has forgotten all about the horn, but his amygdala hasn't, and he could end up thinking of himself as an anxious person.

Dr. LeDoux thinks the differences between the fast fear and slow fear systems probably lead to lots of the different anxiety disorders psychiatrists treat. As he points out, the slow fear system is probably the reason a person develops a fear of a harmless car horn in the first place. The stuck horn didn't cause the car crash; the car crash caused the stuck horn. But the amygdala doesn't make the distinction, and everything about the scene of the accident can become contaminated with fear. All kinds of irrational fears probably develop because the amygdala reacts so fast based on such crude analyses of a situation.

This process happens to animals all the time. I got a call to work with a horse who was terrified of garage doors. When I talked to the owners I found out that the first time they tried to collect semen from the horse, he'd fallen on his butt. To collect semen you have the horse mount a dummy, and somehow this horse had fallen backward. It was a freak accident, and the people working with him got crazy and hit him with the whip and yelled at him, so now he was traumatized.

The reason he was terrified of garage doors was that he'd been looking at a garage door when he fell. The garage door had nothing to do with the fall, but his amygdala made the crude association: garage door–traumatic fall.

The next time they tried to breed the horse they kept him out in the open away from any buildings and he was fine. But a horse who's going to go berserk anytime he sees a garage door is a dangerous horse to ride or handle anywhere outside his home corral.

A
NIMAL
F
EARS
A
RE
D
IFFERENT

Although the basic fear mechanisms in an animal's brain are the same as in a person's brain, the difference in frontal lobe size and complexity means that animal fears and human fears end up being different.

The single most important thing to remember is that animals are afraid of tiny details in their environments. I like to use the term
hyper-specific
to describe animal fears. It comes from autism research, because
autistic people are extremely hyper-specific.
It's one of the main things that separate them from typical people. I'll be talking
more about hyper-specificity in autistic people and in animals when we get to animal genius, so for now all I need to say is that being hyper-specific means you see the differences between things a lot better than you see the similarities. You see the trees better than the forest. A lot of times you might not see the forest at all. Just trees, trees, and more trees. Animals are like that.

My favorite example of a hyper-specific fear is the black hat horse. I met the black hat horse when his owner came to me for a consultation. She said her horse was terrified of people wearing black hats. That was all, just black hats.

Now that is an extremely specific fear. It was so specific I was amazed a normal human being had managed to figure it out. It might seem easy to notice that a horse is bolting every time he sees a black hat, but it's not. If you think about it logically, there's almost an infinite amount of data coming into our senses every second of the day. The only reason the world isn't a total blur is that your nervous system automatically filters out a huge amount of stuff, and automatically focuses on some things and not others. That's what inattentional blindness is all about, filtering out the stuff you don't care about.

Normally, a typical human nervous system is not set to focus on black hats or any other extraneous detail. It's just not. But an
animal's
nervous system is set to focus on detail, because his frontal lobes are so much less developed than a typical human's frontal lobes. That's why an animal can become terrified of black hats: (a) because he notices them in the first place, and (b) because he has less frontal lobe power available to analyze and suppress a fear of black hats once the fear gets going.

I was impressed that the horse's owner had managed to figure out that black hats were the problem. She had managed to see through her horse's eyes, and the ability to do that is rare.

She and I worked with the horse together. We wanted to know two things: what were the exact parameters of his fear, and could we train him out of it? We found out pretty quick that he was really focused on that black hat. We tested him on all the hats we had between us: a red baseball cap, a light blue baseball cap, and a white cowboy hat. The only thing that bothered him was a black cowboy hat, and it had to be black.

He was so scared of the black hat that I didn't even have to be wearing it to set him off. If I stood perfectly still in front of him just holding a black hat quietly at my waist, he would start to rear. He was looking straight at me, but the only thing he was taking in was the hat. That made me bad. He was sensitive to the position of the hat, too. The closer I held it to my head, the more trouble he had.

So the problem was the black hat, and only the black hat. After that we tried to desensitize the horse. When it comes to fear, there are only two techniques that work with animals at all, and neither works very well:
desensitization
and
counter-phobic training.
Desensitization is exactly what it sounds like. You expose a person or an animal to tiny doses of the thing he fears, building up gradually to larger and larger doses. Counter-phobic training means pairing the thing an animal or person fears with something he likes, such as food. You're trying to build in some good associations to counter the bad associations.

We did a long session of desensitization with the black hat horse, and we made some progress. By the end I was able to have the owner put the black hat on the ground, and I could lead the horse up to it. We even got him to touch it with his nose. But that was as far as we could go.

That is a classic example of the kind of hyper-specific fear animals develop all the time. The horse's category for
bad
and
scary
was
black hats on people.
Not white hats, not red hats, not blue hats. Just people wearing or holding a black hat, although he wasn't exactly keen on the sight of a black hat lying on the ground, either.

You see this all the time with animals. I met a ferret once who was afraid of the sound of a nylon ski jacket. Someone wearing one had probably abused him, and what he focused on was the sound of the person's jacket. So that's what set him off, the sound of nylon swishing against nylon. Another time I went to a zoo where the keepers told me their chimpanzees were terrified of burlap cloth. They'd been tied up inside burlap bags after they were captured, and if you put a piece of burlap in their cage they'd immediately bury it under the straw, out of sight so they couldn't see it. Then they all felt a lot better.

B
EING
H
YPER
-S
PECIFIC

It's extremely important to understand how hyper-specific animals are, because you won't socialize your animals properly if you don't. I've watched animals at meatpacking plants go berserk when they saw a man on foot for the first time in their lives. Up to that point the only men they'd ever seen were men riding horseback. These were beautifully handled animals who'd been worked with quietly and gently, but when they saw a man on foot they panicked and almost trampled him. The mental category they'd formed was man-on-horseback, or maybe just man-horse, like a centaur. They didn't automatically expand their man-on-horseback-is-safe category to include man-on-foot-is-safe.

Another example. Richard Shrake, the famous horse trainer who developed resistance-free training, says it's important to train a horse to let you mount him either from the left side
or
the right. You have to do that because to the horse these are two completely different things. A horse that suddenly has to be mounted from the right when he's always been mounted from the left could buck or bolt. It's dangerous.

Same thing with dogs. I had an interesting talk recently with a lady who keeps wolf hybrids for pets, something I don't recommend. She told me that if you're going to have a wolf hybrid as a pet, you
have
to socialize it between four to thirteen weeks of age that
all
men are okay, not just the male owner. Otherwise they'll think the owner is okay, all other men are the enemy. You have to do the same thing with women, children, toddlers, and babies, and you have to socialize the animal to different members of each category
separately.
It's not just the owner's little toddler who's okay,
all
little toddlers are okay. It's not just the owner's wife who's okay,
all
women are okay. And so on.

Another way to think of this is that animals don't generalize well. They don't generalize from male-owner-is-okay to male-owner-and-mailman-are-okay. Normal human beings are almost exactly the opposite: normal human beings tend to err on the side of over-generalizing, not under-generalizing. That's what a stereotype is, an over-generalization. All women are X or all men are Y. It's natu
ral for normal humans to think that way, but you have to actively
teach
an animal to group all women inside the category “women.” (Animals do form categories, which is a kind of generalization. We'll get to that in the next chapter.)

I find that even people who work with animals professionally don't tend to pick up on this aspect of animal minds. It's just too foreign to their own way of processing the universe. Even when a trainer or handler gets pretty good at analyzing what's scaring an animal it's still hard for a normal person to get a sense of animal emotions. What's it like being so vulnerable to tiny details?

Even though I'm fairly hyper-specific myself, I don't know the answer. But I
think
it has something to do with fear of the unknown.

Fear of the unknown is universal. Everyone has
some
fear of the unknown, although of course people also like novelty and variety within limits. Animals do, too. They're afraid of the unknown, but they're also drawn to it.

If you think about it, animals are constantly confronting the unknown. For an animal who's never seen a man off a horse,
a man walking on his own two legs is an alien.
So I think a good way to try to get inside an animal's head, to the extent that's even possible, is to be constantly asking yourself, “How would I feel if what I were looking at right now was something I'd never laid eyes on before in my life?”

A friend of mine came up with an analogy to the cattle who panicked when they saw a man walking on two feet. “If I were sitting in my living room reading a book,” she told me, “and I looked up and saw a stranger walking down the sidewalk and up to my front door
on his hands,
acting as if there was nothing out of the normal going on, I'd probably be scared half to death.” She said it gave her the creeps just thinking about it.

That would probably scare anybody. When you see something you've
never
seen before, something you never expected to see, you're going to feel some fear. That's because we're wired for survival, so when we confront the unknown our survival brain gets activated and starts screaming at us, “What is it!? What is it!?” And,
“Is it dangerous?!”

F
EAR AND
C
URIOSITY

I talked about cows being curiously afraid in Chapter 3.

What's interesting about animals being curiously afraid is that it's the most fearful animals who are also the most curious. You'd think it would be the exact opposite. A fearful prey animal like a deer or a cow ought to just get the hell out of there whenever it sees something strange and different that it doesn't understand.

But that's not what happens. The more fearful the animal, the more likely he is to investigate. Indians used this principle to hunt antelope. They'd lie down on the ground holding a flag, and when the antelope came up to investigate they'd kill it. I've never heard of Indians lying down on the ground holding a flag to catch buffalo, and my bet is that's because they never did it. Buffalo are big-boned animals, and we know for a fact big-boned animals are less fearful than animals with small bones. I'm guessing, but I don't think a buffalo is going to be as compelled to investigate a flag flying in the middle of the prairie as an antelope is, because he's not as fearful as an antelope is. He's a great big strong buffalo; what does he have to worry about? But a delicate little antelope has a
lot
to worry about, and that's why he's always looking into things.