Animals in Translation (34 page)

You see the same difference in horses, too. Arab horses are fine-boned and flighty, while Clydesdales are calm. If you put Arab horses together with a bunch of Clydesdales, and hang a flag on the fence, it's the Arab horses who'll walk up to the flag first. The Clydesdales will always be the last. Curiosity and fear go together.

Fear
seems
to correlate with intelligence, too, although no one can say that for sure. I mention this because any horse trainer will tell you Arab horses are the smartest. If we were to find out that high-strung animals are more intelligent than placid animals, the difference may be due to the fact that nervous animals investigate their environments more, learn more, and get smarter in the process.

T
HE
N
EW
N
EW
T
HING

I think what all of this means is that animals probably spend a lot more time being suddenly exposed to something brand-new they've
never seen before than humans do. First of all, animals have more limited lives than people do, if only because they don't read books and watch TV. They haven't had the huge amount of vicarious experience we have. Most of us have never seen a pyramid in Egypt, but we wouldn't be shocked if we did, because we've seen the pyramids in pictures.

But second, animals' hyper-specificity also means they're constantly coming face-to-face with new things they haven't seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted before. If you're hyper-specific and you've seen a few big dogs in your life, but you've never seen a dachshund, then a dachshund doesn't automatically seem like a dog the first time you do see one. We don't know
how
hyper-specific animals are, but we do know they're a lot more hyper-specific than nonautistic humans are. I think that probably has to mean that animals encounter more new things than people do, if only because people automatically assign most new things to old categories.

That's why seeing a dachshund for the first time when I was little completely threw me off—because I'm hyper-specific. To me, that dachshund was brand-new, whereas to a nonautistic person it would have been just another dog.

H
OW AN
A
NIMAL'S
F
EARS
G
ROW

Animal fears spread like crazy.

People's fears spread, too, as I mentioned, but
animal fears spread in a hyper-specific way.

Here's my best example. Mark's dog, Red Dog, is deathly afraid of hot air balloons. She starts going crazy when a hot air balloon is just a tiny speck miles away in the sky.

We have a lot of hot air balloons in Colorado, and originally Red Dog got spooked when one of them revved its burner right over her house. Since that one bad experience she's gotten more and more frightened of the balloons, exactly the way Dr. LeDoux describes. Her fear has gotten stronger, not weaker, and it's spread out to all other hot air balloons, no matter how far away.

People's fears can grow that way, too. But now Red Dog is branching out in a way I don't think people do. Just lately she's got
ten terrified by the sight of those red aerial marker balls they put on power lines so airplanes won't hit them. She goes nuts when she sees one of those things.

Then the other day all of a sudden she went crazy when she saw the rear end of a gasoline tanker.

I hadn't given much thought to Red Dog's choice of objects to be terrified of until I reread Dr. LeDoux's book. Halfway through I suddenly realized that the things Red Dog is afraid of are just different versions of the same thing: all three of them are round, red objects seen against the blue sky. The tankers are round and painted red on the back, and Red Dog sees them when she's riding with Mark in his truck. From her angle, she's probably seeing them surrounded by sky.

When human fears spread from the original scary thing to other objects or situations that should be neutral Dr. LeDoux calls it
over-generalizing.
The fear generalizes too far. A Vietnam vet who jumps out of his skin when he hears a car backfire is over-generalizing from the sound of gunfire to the sound of cars backfiring.

That's what Red Dog was doing, but she was over-generalizing in a hyper-specific way.

People can make hyper-specific over-generalizations, too. That's what the Vietnam vet is doing when he jumps at the sound of a car backfiring. But animals do it all the time. I don't think any human would go from being scared of red hot air balloons to being scared of the red ends of tanker trucks.

Animals seem to over-generalize within the sensory channel that first frightened them. That's why Red Dog keeps generalizing out to things she can
see.
People probably do this, too, but my impression is that people's over-generalized fears are often more logical and more
conceptual
than an animal's. For instance, I've heard of people going from fear of flying to fear of elevators. That's different from a hot air balloon fear spreading to aerial markers. If an elevator crashed with you inside, that would kill you just as surely as a plane crash would, but no aerial marker is going to rev up its burner over your house and startle you half to death. An airplane and an elevator are linked
conceptually
; a red hot air balloon and a red aerial marker are linked only
perceptually.

Some of the difference between animal fears and human fears is probably due to the fact that animals know less about the world than we do, seeing as how we built it and they didn't. Red Dog doesn't know the purpose of hot air balloons, aerial marker balls, or liquid nitrogen tankers.

But even if that's true, you always need to keep in mind that animals are going to generalize their fears out to things that are in the same
sensory
category, not the same
conceptual
category. The black hat horse generalized to other black cowboy hats, not to hats in general. (I wish to heck I'd thought to test him with a big black purse, too. I'd love to know whether anything with the general shape of a black cowboy hat would have frightened him.) Animal fears are hyper-specific, and they spread hyper-specifically, too.

K
EEPING
F
EAR
O
UT OF
A
NIMALS
' L
IVES

With animals, just like with people, there's a difference between traumatic fears and plain old everyday fears. Traumatic fears in animals are always bad news; they last forever, and they can spread. Even if you do manage to put together a fairly effective counter-phobic behavior program, you're going to be doing that program for the rest of the animal's life. It's a lot of hard work, without a lot of gain.

Everyday fears are different. Unless an animal is anxious by nature, an everyday run-of-the-mill fear won't wreck his life or yours, either. The problem is that it's hard to predict which experiences will traumatize an animal and which experiences will just give him something to think about.

Dog owners face this mystery when it comes to deciding whether to install an invisible fence. An invisible fence, for anyone who doesn't know, is a perimeter created by a radio signal broadcast to a receiver the dog wears on his collar. When the dog gets close enough to the perimeter he hears a warning beep; if he ignores the beep and keeps going he gets a shock.
²⁵
You can think of it as a
beep-and-shock
fence instead of a wire fence. Most of the time invisible fences work great.
²⁶
I'd recommend that every dog owner buy one, if I weren't worried about people holding me responsible when they spend anywhere from a couple hundred to fifteen hundred dollars
putting in an invisible fence that turns out to be more trouble than it's worth for their particular pet.

The reason some dogs don't do well with an invisible fence relates to pain levels as well as fear levels. A low-fear, low-pain dog like a retriever, either golden or Labrador, can sometimes just run through them. I knew one family whose golden retriever would bound through the perimeter on his way out of the yard but then refuse to come through it on the way back. He didn't want to get shocked. Apparently he didn't mind getting shocked when he was making his Great Escape, but getting a shock just to come home again wasn't worth it.

It was a huge nuisance, because there was one family down the street who was terrified of that dog, even though he'd never done anything bad to them. Naturally that was the one house he'd always make a beeline for whenever he was done with his travels. He'd plop himself down on their doorstep and just lie there waiting for his owners to come get him and take him home. Probably he'd noticed that his owners always seemed to show up the fastest when he landed at the scared family's house. That was true, of course, because the instant the scared family saw the dog they'd start frantically calling the owners every five seconds—and naturally the owners would race over to retrieve the dog the minute they got the call, because they knew how upset the scared family was. Until the owners arrived, the scared family would be locked up inside their house, too terrified to come out. Naturally the owners lived in fear of having this happen sometime when they weren't home. What if there was an emergency and the scared family was trapped inside their house because the dog had busted through the invisible fence again?

I heard about another dog, a little Jack Russell terrier, who would get through the fence just because his fellow-dog, another retriever, could go through it. The retriever would sail through unscathed, and the Jack Russell would lower himself to the ground and stare at the place where he knew he'd get the shock. Finally he'd bolt. The lady who told me about him said, “He'd decide to take the hit.” I'm sure if that dog had lived alone, or at least in a house whose other dog wasn't a retriever, he would have stayed put. But he wasn't going to let his pal take off without him.

Those are the problems you can have with dogs who are low-fear (or low-pain). They're unusual, but they do happen. The problems that can crop up with a high-fear dog are more difficult to manage. I've never heard of a dog getting out-and-out traumatized by an invisible fence, but I've seen some come close. Some dogs will get so scared of the perimeter that they'll refuse to ever go through it, whether the collar is on or off, and including when you put them on a leash to take them for a walk. You have to carry or drag them through the perimeter.

That's not so horrible, but I also heard about a two-year-old collie who got so scared of her own yard that she lost her house-training and started pooping inside the house. If her owners would force her to go outside she'd just stand on the deck barking until her owners finally gave up and let her back in. Then she'd poop on the carpet.

These are all unusual cases. Most dogs live happily inside an invisible fence and don't panic when you walk them through the perimeter on a leash. But even when an invisible fence works perfectly, you still have to keep on top of the situation. Although animal fears, like human fears, are permanent, animals
will
reality-test a fear that falls short of a phobia.

I know that happens with invisible fences. I talked to a woman who bought an aboveground invisible fence for her two young dogs. It worked like a charm, but remembering to put their collars on every morning was a pain. (She didn't like the dogs to sleep in the collars at night, because one of them had sensitive skin and the metal prongs were rubbing it raw.) So she figured she'd be vigilant for a couple of months until the dogs took it for granted that they couldn't leave the yard without getting a shock. Then she wouldn't have to worry about whether one of the dogs got out of the house without the collar on. She said she based this on some story she read back in college about how B. F. Skinner once trained some sheep to stay inside a fence, then replaced the fence with a symbolic wire strung between posts. Supposedly the sheep never tried to get past the wire, even though they easily could have.

I don't remember ever seeing that story in Dr. Skinner's work myself, and I'd be surprised if that's what he found. In my experi
ence some animals don't test fences, but others do. That lady turned out to have fence-testing dogs. At first everything seemed to be working out. The dogs never went near the boundaries, whether they were wearing their collars or not. They didn't act like they associated the shocks with the collar, either, because every time she took their collars off to take them for a walk she'd have to pull them through the perimeter. They were scared of getting a shock whether they had the collars on or off.

So after a while she just stopped worrying about getting the collars on first thing in the morning. Big mistake. One morning she was sitting outside reading the newspaper when she noticed the dogs running a couple of feet up the hill beside her house, then coming back down again. They seemed to be doing this repeatedly, although she wasn't paying close enough attention to be sure. She thought they were getting awfully close to the shock perimeter, but since she figured they'd been permanently conditioned like Dr. Skinner's sheep, she didn't worry about it.

The next thing she knew, both dogs were gone. They stayed away for hours and probably had a nice romp around the pond a little ways from her house. She's been having problems with them ever since. As long as she has the collars on and the batteries are working, they stay home. But if she slips up—either forgets to check the batteries or slacks off on putting the collars on in the morning—it doesn't take too long for the dogs to figure out they're free.

I don't know how they manage it, but it sounds like they're doing their own doggie version of reality testing. The owner has observed that every time she forgets the collars for a few days the same sequence unfolds. First the dogs stay well within the invisible fence boundaries, collar or no collar. Then they start expanding the perimeter, going a little bit farther than the collar would let them go, but no farther. Then, not too long after that, they're gone.