Animals in Translation (35 page)

What she couldn't figure out was, how do the dogs know it's okay to expand the perimeter? They're still acting scared when she takes them through the perimeter on a walk, so why do they test it on their own?

I think they are probably picking up signals a human can't perceive. I'm guessing they get some kind of little vibration or early
warning buzz from the receiver
before
they reach the spot where the warning sound beeps. They get a warning before the warning. Once the dogs stop perceiving the pre-warning sound or sensation, they start testing the boundaries.

The reason I think this is that the dogs
never
set off the warning beeps. That has to mean that somehow they know it's safe to start pushing out the boundaries. If they were just sporadically testing from time to time, to see whether the perimeter was still there, they would set off beeps on days when their collars are on, which is most days.

However those two dogs are doing what they're doing, the Mark Twain saying about the cat on a hot stove is true only as far as it goes. “She will never sit down on a hot lid again—and that is well;” he said, “but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” That's true only of a cat who got burned badly enough to be traumatized by the experience, or of a cat who didn't get burned too badly but doesn't have any good reason to sit on the stove apart from the fact that cats like to be up high. If the cat isn't flat-out terrified of the stove, just leery, and if there's a plate full of yummy meat sitting up there, I predict most cats are going to be back up on that stove.

F
EAR
M
ONSTERS

Temperament is everything. An animal with too much fear by nature—or too little fear—can be hard to live with and manage. Owners and trainers have to match their approach to temperament. The wrong kind of handling with large prey animals like cows and horses can actually make them dangerous. You can take a perfectly normal horse or cow and turn it into a spin-and-kick animal—an animal who will spin around and kick a human being with both hooves. When that happens you've taken a prey animal and turned him into a killer. It's ridiculous.

You see it happen when owners use rough training to teach a horse or cow to accept a halter and lead rope. They put a real strong halter and a six-foot lead on the animal, tie him up to a pole, and let him fight it out with the post until he's exhausted and gives up. The
owner is trying to teach the animal to walk calmly on a lead, but instead of just putting on the halter and lead and letting the animal wear them around the corral to get used to the feeling, they think they have to break the animal's resistance.

It's a horrible training method. But it has different effects depending on an animal's temperament, especially his level of inborn timidity. Calm animals, like Holstein cattle, will habituate. After rearing and bucking for a while they'll settle down and get used to the situation. It's still a stupid way to train them, but they can take it. A more sensitive, fearful animal can become scared, skittish, and unmanageable when you try to train him that way. That animal will
never
be okay with the halter and lead, for the rest of its life.

But it's the animals with the medium temperaments, in between calm and fearful, who become dangerous. When you tie them up to the post they get scared and stay scared,
but they don't lose control.
They're the ones who learn to spin and kick. A naturally calm animal like the Holstein doesn't care enough about being tied up to a post to
need
to learn to spin and kick, because he doesn't feel that his survival is threatened. Naturally timid cattle do feel that their survival is at stake, but they get too panicked to do anything about it. It's the in-between animals who have exactly the right amount of terror they need to learn how to kill a human being. After rough training to the halter and lead they've learned that they have two cannons for back hooves.

 

I call high-fear cattle fear monsters, because they get completely overwhelmed by panic. I've seen Saler cattle (Salers are French dairy cattle we use as beef cattle) get so frantic they'll fall on the ground and start rolling around. A Saler cow who gets her leg caught between the loading dock and the truck can actually rip her own leg off just below the knee in panic. I saw this happen one time. It was horrible. An Arab horse can do the same thing. These animals are fear monsters. They get so terrified they destroy themselves.

A couple of good things about Saler cows, though: they're excellent foragers, and they're wonderful mothers. Saler cattle are dairy cows who were developed in the French mountains, and they'll go
anywhere to find grass. They'll climb up into nooks and crannies a fat old Hereford wouldn't think of even trying to get to. And they'll fight off anything that threatens their calf; they'll fight off a coyote every time. Of course that means they'll fight you off, too, if you try to do anything to the baby. So you have to be careful.

Holstein cows, on the other hand, are so calm now they're terrible mothers. They've been selectively bred to be calm and to be huge milk producers, and we've bred their protective maternal instincts right out of them. If a coyote really wants their calf, the coyote can have him. Nothing gets a Holstein excited. Meanwhile Holstein bulls can be dangerous because they have no fear.

I
S
I
T
B
AD
B
EHAVIOR OR
I
S
I
T
F
EAR
?

A big problem I see with a lot of trainers and owners is that they don't know when an animal's bad behavior is motivated by fear. I knew a dog with fear-based aggression who, when her owner took her out for a walk, would start barking like crazy anytime anyone came near. The dog was barking because she was scared, but the owner didn't understand. When the dog kept barking and ignoring her owner's commands to “hush,” the owner would start getting upset herself and would eventually start yelling at the dog. That made things worse, because the dog thought her owner was screaming for protection, so she got even more crazed.

In that case the owner was lucky, because she figured out what was going on before too much damage had been done. Once she realized the dog was being aggressive because she was scared, she started a whole new program. One of the things she did was that anytime a bicycle rode by she'd stop walking and have the dog sit down. She'd stroke her and talk quietly, telling the dog everything was okay. She was able to get a lot calmer behavior out of her dog that way. (Bicycles were especially hard because not only is a bicycle something that's being ridden by a
scary stranger,
it's in motion, and that sets off a dog's natural drive to chase moving objects.)

I mentioned earlier that I'm not a big fan of punishment as a teaching method no matter what an animal's temperament, except in the case of prey-drive-motivated chasing of joggers and bicyclists
and the like. But punishment is worse for some animals than for others. There are calm animals who can deal with punishment just fine, and there are nervous animals who totally fall apart if they experience a lot of anger from their human owners.

You have to match your handling to the animal. High-fear animals need super-gentle handling. Low-fear animals don't need harsh handling, but they don't fall apart if they get it. I saw some Paso Fino horses down in Argentina who could take just about anything their owners dished out. The trainers really abused them. They beat the horses into submission, and they put wires attached to
tie-downs
around their noses. A tie-down is a short strap on either side of the horse's face that is attached to the girth of the saddle. Normally the tie-down is
loosely
fastened to a broad leather strap that goes across the horse's nose. People use tie-downs to keep a horse from tossing his head, and some trainers think tie-downs keep a horse from rearing. But tie-downs make horses crazy, so there's no reason to put one on tightly and there's certainly no reason to attach it to a wire that would cut the horse's nose.

Every one of those horses had a quarter-inch dent in its nose. If you did that to an Arab horse, he'd be crazy and unrideable for life. The Paso Fino horses are low-fear, and they habituated—but they hated people. The minute I touched their forelocks, they pinned their ears back and bared their teeth. That was as far as it went, because they knew they'd be beaten if they bit me. But there's no good reason to make a horse hate humans that way.

Some trainers swear rough handling is effective. But what's interesting about these trainers is that if you check out their horses, they're all big-boned, low-fear horses who habituate fast to treatment that would crush a high-strung animal. Mark noticed this one time at the racetrack. The rough trainers were all working with big, heavy horses, and they all think Arab horses are crazy. The gentle trainers were working with the fine-boned, nervous animals.

B
RINGING
U
P
B
ABY

A while ago I read an article about the Homeland Security alerts that had a good line in it: “Once you scare people, it's hard to un
scare them.” Since it's just about impossible to un-scare a seriously scared animal, you should do whatever you can to fright-proof your animals.

That means, first of all, you have to expose any pet or animal you own to other animals and other people he's likely to come across—and you need to do this
when the animal is young.
I've already talked about how important it is to socialize animals to other animals and other people, in order to prevent them from developing aggression. But it's also important to expose them to other animals and other people to prevent them from developing hard-to-manage fears.

If you own a riding horse, you should train him to be as comfortable with novelty and change as possible. You can introduce novelty into a grazing animal's life by doing things like tying a yellow raincoat to the fence one day, or having him close by when you raise the hood of your car. It can be anything. You're trying to get him to expect the unexpected, or at least not go ballistic when the unexpected happens.

It's easier to do this when an animal is young and you can just have it trail along after its mom. If the mother isn't afraid of the new things you're showing the calf, the calf won't be, either. (This is what Dr. Mineka found in her research with lab-reared monkeys and snakes.)

The fact that animals can be inoculated against fears by other animals is something your vet probably won't think to mention. There are two sides to this coin. First, when you get a new pet you have to be careful about the other animals he meets in the beginning. I know a situation right now, a couple with two Pomeranians they got at different times, that's shaping up to be really depressing because the first dog is teaching the second dog all the wrong lessons.

The first Pomeranian, who was around two years old when they got him, was scared to death of the husband from the minute the wife brought the dog home. That's not uncommon; a lot of animals are scared of men, I find. But this dog was so neurotic about the husband that they think he may have been abused by the teenage son in its previous home. They've worked and worked with that dog, trying to get him to relax around the husband, but two years later he's still scared. When he has to be alone in the house with the husband he hides out in his crate.

Then a couple of months ago their older dog died suddenly, and they got a second Pomeranian to take her place. This time they made sure the dog didn't have any emotional problems with men or anyone else before they brought him home.

For the first week or so everything was fine. The new dog wasn't afraid of the husband, and he adjusted great. Then almost overnight his attitude changed. All of a sudden the new dog is afraid of the husband, too. The husband hasn't done anything bad to him, but the new dog is scared. So now when the wife's away
both
dogs are cowering inside their crates. It's pretty demoralizing being alone in your house with two dogs who won't talk to you.

I'm sure the new dog learned his fear from the first dog. The only owner he'd had to this point was a woman, so he probably hadn't seen many men, and he hadn't learned that men were okay. Since animals learn whom to be afraid of from other animals, the scared Pomeranian apparently taught the new dog that the husband was someone to fear.

What they should have done was have the new dog and the husband spend some time alone together without the scared dog around to mess things up, preferably in the company of another dog who wasn't scared of men. They needed to inoculate the new dog against husband fear before he got home and learned it from their other dog.

Using animal role models to calm animal fears is an old trade secret in horse racing. In her book on Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand says Seabiscuit was a “train wreck” when Charles Howard bought him; the horse was burned-out and mean. His first trainer said Seabiscuit could run but wouldn't, and he chalked it up to laziness. Seabiscuit's other problem was that he refused to exercise hard enough to get in shape. More laziness. The trainer had dealt with it by whipping Seabiscuit like crazy all through every race, and entering him in more races than horses normally run. He figured Seabiscuit spent so much time resting that he was up to it, and besides, the horse was so intelligent he'd “back off if he became overworked.”
²⁷

It didn't work. Seabiscuit was a medium-type horse by temperament, so being whipped all the time and raced too hard got him just upset enough to make him mean as spit.

His new trainer, Tom Smith, decided right away to pair him up with an animal friend to help “defuse” him. Laura Hillenbrand writes that all kinds of stray animals have lived with racehorses, from German shepherds to chickens to monkeys. Tom Smith picked a nanny goat for Seabiscuit and put her in the horse's stall. You can get a good idea of what a mistake it is to mistreat a medium-fear horse from reading what happened next: “Shortly after dinnertime, the grooms found Seabiscuit walking in circles, clutching the distraught goat in his teeth and shaking her back and forth. He heaved her over his half door and plopped her down in the barn aisle. The grooms ran to her rescue.”