Animals in Translation (36 page)

The goat was out, so Tom Smith brought in a lead horse called Pumpkin. Pumpkin was a classic low-fear animal; Ms. Hillenbrand says he was the kind of animal horse people called
bombproof.
Pumpkin had been a cow pony in Montana, and “out on the range [he'd] experienced everything, including a bull goring that had left a gouge in his rump. He was a veteran, meeting every calamity with a cheerful steadiness…. Pumpkin was amiable to every horse he met and became a surrogate parent to the flighty ones. He worked a sedative effect on the whole barn.” Tom Smith used Pumpkin as his general “stable calmer-downer,” and that's what Pumpkin was for Seabiscuit, too. The two horses stayed together for the rest of their lives. Pretty soon Seabiscuit also had a dog named Pocatell and a spider monkey called JoJo living with him in the barn, too.

That was the beginning of Seabiscuit's rehabilitation, and it's a principle anyone can use with a flighty animal. You don't need any special training, you just need to find the right match—and remember never to put a nanny goat in with a crazed thoroughbred.

F
IGHTING
F
IRE WITH
F
IRE

If an animal you own or manage does develop fears that interfere with his life or yours, your next step is almost certainly going to be setting up a desensitization or counter-phobia program. I won't go into those, because there are good books on how to do them, and because books may not be enough. You may need to hire a trainer.

There is one other approach you may be able to try if the circum
stances are right. That is to fight fire with fire by using an animal's hyper-specific nature to fight a hyper-specific fear. This is a neat trick I learned from a rancher who bought an abused horse nobody could ride. The horse had been abused with a snaffle bit. Snaffle bits have a joint in the middle that sits on the animal's tongue, so the new owner just put on a different bridle with a single-piece bit, and the horse was fine! (A single-piece bit doesn't have a joint; it's all in one piece.) Here was an abused animal, whose fear memories were permanent, and the owner turned him into a perfect riding horse in thirty seconds just by changing the bit. The horse's fear category was hyper-specific: “snaffle bits are bad,” not “all bits are bad.” He didn't make the connection between snaffle bits and the single-piece bit. They were two different things

I wish I'd known that years ago. When I was in college my aunt bought me a horse named Sizzler who was fine if you walked him or trotted, but would buck every third or fourth time you pushed him to a canter. She'd picked him up cheap from a dealer, and that was why. Sizzler was too dangerous for me to ride, and my aunt couldn't use him on her dude ranch. You can't have a horse who throws the guests. So we had to sell Sizzler back to the dealer.

If I'd known then what I know now, I would have gotten my English riding saddle from high school, and a different pad, and put those on his back. Sizzler was a Western-trained horse, and he'd always been ridden with a Western saddle. I bet if I'd brought out that English saddle, Sizzler would have been fine. He would have thought the English saddle was a completely different object on his back, and he would have been starting fresh.

The moral of the story is: if an animal in your life has a fear you can solve by completely removing the thing he's afraid of, you're in luck.

C
HOOSING A
S
TURDY
A
NIMAL

Fearful animals tend to be high-maintenance, so if you want an animal who's easy to fit into your life you should select for a calm, non-skittish temperament. That's not too hard to do, although if you're picking out a baby animal there are no guarantees, the same way there are no guarantees with human babies.

I've already said mutts are your best bet. Purebred dogs are being ruined by breeders, including even the good breeders, because when you over-select for any particular trait you always get problems. And, as you can see in the case of the rapist roosters, over-selection for single traits will eventually lead to neurological problems.

There are still some good breeds, and there are always individual dogs belonging to chancier breeds like Rottweilers and pit bulls who are good sweet dogs. But don't let people tell you that Rottweiler or pit bull aggression is a “myth.” It's not.
Temperament and appearance are connected.
We don't know much about how they're connected, unfortunately, but we know they are.

My favorite example of the connection between appearance and temperament is Dmitry Belyaev's silver fox breeding experiment in Russia. Dr. Belyaev was a geneticist who believed natural selection determined the traits we see in domesticated animals. Dogs got to be the way they are because dog behaviors helped them survive and reproduce.
²⁸

To test his hypothesis, he set up a natural selection study using silver foxes. He wanted to see if over several generations he could turn wild foxes into a domestic animal like a dog. So in each generation, he allowed only the most “tamable” animals—the foxes most willing to tolerate contact with humans—to mate.

He started this project in 1959 and when he died in 1985 another group of scientists picked up where he left off. Altogether the foxes have gone through forty years and more than thirty generations of selective breeding for tameness. Today the foxes are very tame, though not as tame as dogs. The researchers say that when these foxes are puppies they compete with each other for human attention, whine, and wag their tails. They're turning into domestic animals, just as Dr. Belyaev thought they would.

What's interesting is that their appearances have changed right along with their personalities. One of the first things to change was fur color: they changed from silver to black and white, liked a Border collie. They look quite a lot like Border collies in photos. Their tails also started to curl up, and some of the foxes developed floppy ears. The floppy ears are neat, because Darwin said there wasn't a single domesticated animal who didn't have floppy ears in at least
one country where it was found. I don't think that's true any longer, because I can't think of any breed of horse in any country that has floppy ears, although every other kind of domesticated animal does have at least one or two breeds with floppy ears. The only wild animal I know of with floppy ears is the elephant.

Looking at photographs of these animals, I think their bones also thickened, which is what I would expect given that fine-boned animals are more high-strung. Belyaev was breeding his foxes to be calm, so he probably started getting slightly bigger animals, with thicker bones.

The tame foxes developed brain differences right along with their physical and behavioral differences. Their heads are smaller, they have lower levels of stress hormones in the blood, and they have higher levels of serotonin, which inhibits aggression, in the brain. Another interesting change: the skulls of the male foxes have been
feminized.
Their heads are shaped more like a female fox's head than like a wild male fox's head.

Eventually some of his foxes developed neurological problems, just like you'd expect. They had epilepsy, and some of them started holding their heads back in a strange position. Some of the moms even ate their own puppies. Pure over-selection programs always bring trouble.

I worry about this happening with golden retrievers and Labradors who are bred to have calm temperaments. Recently they've started having some very unusual aggression problems in goldens, and I've had at least one owner tell me that goldens have become hyper animals. She's owned goldens for years, and she always has three or four goldens at the same time, so she's noticed a difference. That's just one person's experience, but what she's reporting goes along with Belyaev's experiment. That owner hasn't seen any changes in aggression, but you would expect to see super-calm dogs eventually develop an uptick in aggression, since fear is a check on aggression and goldens are selectively bred to be low-fear. Aggression is also connected to seizure activity in the brain, and if goldens are starting to develop some seizure-like brain activity (this wouldn't have to be obvious in big, grand mal seizures) you could have aggression.

When you're choosing a mutt, try to pick a dog who comes right up to you and can be friendly. A lot of mutts are horribly distracted inside a kennel or pound, so it can be hard to tell what they'll be like once they've adjusted to a new home, but even at the pound a dog with a good temperament doesn't act terrified.

On the other hand, the Monks of New Skete give different advice. They say that all litters have
loners, aggressors,
and
retreaters.
They say you shouldn't pick the first puppy who comes up to you, because that's the dominant puppy, and he's going to be most prone to having behavior problems. I don't completely agree with that, especially when it comes to mixed breeds. The Monks train German shepherds, so it's possible their observations are more relevant to dogs like shepherds and Rottweilers who've been bred to be guard dogs. If you're choosing a dog from a breed that's naturally nervous or shy, I think you definitely want the most outgoing puppy in the litter.

With all puppies, it's a good idea to give them a quick
startle test.
Clap your hands suddenly, or stomp your feet, and see what the puppy does. All puppies should flinch when they hear a sudden, loud sound, but you don't want a dog who's so terrified that he runs off to the corner of his cage or crate and cowers. Dog trainers use a version of this test to choose puppies who will be good service dogs. They drop a heavy piece of logging chain with four or five links on the floor about four feet away from the puppy. Puppies who get really upset by this aren't the best candidates to work as a service dog for a person with disabilities.

Bone size tells you a lot, too, so look for strong, sturdy bones. You don't have to adopt a hundred-pound monster; just try to find a puppy whose bones aren't tiny and delicate. The same principle applies to horses.

With horses, there's another physical trait you can use in judging a young horse's temperament: the location of his hair whorl. The hair whorl is the round patch of “twisty” hair all cows and horses have up at the top of their faces. The more nervous the animal, the higher the patch. Mark and I were the first to discover this, but trainers have said for a long time that horses with high whorls are more intelligent. What Mark and I realized is that the real difference
isn't intelligence, but fear levels. High-fear animals are often smarter, and that's what the trainers picked up on. That was the other thing Mark noticed when he matched up trainers with the kind of horse they were training. Rough trainers had horses with big bones and low hair whorls.

I've already mentioned that although hair color doesn't matter, you want to adopt or buy an animal whose skin isn't too light. I would avoid a puppy that has too many albino characteristics, such as blue eyes, a pink nose, and white fur on most of its body.

Most animals in the wild are either all one color or have an overall mottled, speckled color. Only domestic animals have piebald coloring, where large areas of fur are white. (Zebras and skunks are close, but they probably have too much black fur to be considered piebald.) Belyaev's foxes started out mostly gray and then, as they became domesticated, some of them developed the piebald black-and-white coloring you see in Border collies.

I've been keeping track of animals with white patches of fur, and I've noticed that animals with a white patch of fur someplace on their bodies seem to be less shy than animals without. Ben Kilham, a man who lived with wild bears in the wilderness, actually named one of the bears he knew White Heart because of the patch of white fur on her chest. White Heart was the friendliest bear, the one he could get closest to, and she was the first to be shot by hunters because she didn't have the same fear of people that all black bears did.
²⁹

Later on I saw a photo of dancing bears in Afghanistan, and every one of those bears had a white fur patch on its chest. I've even started to see this pattern in wildlife photography. Derek Grzelewski, who took a series of photos of otters, mentions that some otters are more “inquisitive” and less “wary” than others.
³⁰
If you look at his pictures of his two inquisitive otters, both of them have white fur at their throats, and one is looking straight at the camera. Those are the only close-ups in the whole batch of photographs, possibly because the solid-colored otters kept their distance.

I don't know whether that tells us anything about what kind of dog a black puppy with a little spot of white on his chest will grow up to be. But I'd be surprised if he was as nutty as some of the Dalmatians out there.

T
hose pigeons that poop on the cars at the Denver airport can tell the difference between Monet and Picasso. At night they roost in a man-made concrete rookery located over the most expensive parking spots at the airport. When wealthy travelers get back from their trips they find their Land Rovers and Lexuses dribbled over with pigeon poop. For travelers, those birds are a major nuisance, like rats with feathers.

They are also potential art connoisseurs. George Page, in his book
Inside the Animal Mind,
describes a famous experiment in which pigeons were taught to distinguish between paintings by Picasso and paintings by Monet.
¹
The birds learned the difference easily. A pigeon can quickly learn to peck at a painting by Picasso, instead of a painting by Monet, and vice versa. Not only that, but when the experimenters showed the birds a painting by
Manet
(not Monet), whose style is similar to early Picasso's, the pigeons pecked the Manet, too. The birds make the same mistake entry-level art students do.
²

Another experiment showed that pigeons who had never seen a tree in their lives, because they'd been born and raised in a lab, could easily learn to peck at a picture that contained a tree. That might not seem so amazing, except for the fact that they could also peck a picture that contained just one tiny part of a tree. They understood that a part of a tree was still a tree, even though technically a solitary leaf doesn't look anything like a whole tree.
³

Pigeons are a lot smarter than people think.

Animal researchers are finally beginning to catch up to the little old ladies in tennis shoes who say Fifi the poodle can think. But it's still a battle. The fights are always between a big group of experts
who think animals don't have a lot of feelings or aren't very smart, and a much smaller group of researchers who think there's a lot more going on inside an animal's head than we know. The really nasty fights always seem to go one way: it's always the animal “debunkers” who are on the attack. At least, I don't remember a single big academic fight where someone got fired or lost their funding for doing a study where the animal turned out to be
dumber
than people thought, and lots of studies like that have been done. Claiming that an animal
can't
do something isn't considered blasphemous.

Fortunately, it's gotten a lot more respectable to argue that animals are smarter than we realize. One of the main research teams we can thank for that is Dr. Irene Pepperberg and her twenty-five-year-old African gray parrot, Alex. Alex has now reached the cognitive level of a
normal four-to-six-year-old child.
⁴

His achievements are nothing short of revolutionary, because up until Alex came along no one had ever been able to teach birds much of anything at all. It wasn't because they hadn't tried, either. Bird researchers had spent hours and hours trying to teach birds concepts like color, and no bird had even come close to figuring it out. Birds couldn't even learn labels for familiar objects, something everyone agreed apes could do. Even though experts were extremely skeptical of the language abilities of apes like Kanzi, who was said to have
receptive language
equivalent to that of a two-and-a-half-year-old child, it was obvious that you could teach an ape a huge amount. But birds seemed like real birdbrains. (Receptive language means the language you can understand, as opposed to
expressive language,
which is the language you can use to speak or write.)
⁵

So it was a huge shock when Dr. Pepperberg succeeded where every single person before her had failed. Not only could Alex learn categories like color and shape, which no bird had ever done before, he learned them easily. Also, once he'd learned the categories, he could spontaneously answer questions like “What color?” and “What shape?” about brand-new objects he'd never seen before.

This means Alex was learning
abstract categories
like color and shape, not just
concrete categories
like “cat” and “dog.” Dr. Pepperberg says the difference between concrete categories and abstract categories
is the difference between
classification
and
reclassification.
We use simple classification, like sorting out dogs and cats, to form basic, concrete categories. Concrete categories are permanent and stable. A dog is never going to be a cat, and a cat is never going to be a dog.

But when you're using abstract categories to classify things, objects can jump categories. A blue triangle can be grouped with blue squares or with red triangles, depending on which abstract category, color or shape, you're using to make the classification.

A lot of researchers have shown that animals form concrete categories. It would be extremely surprising if they didn't, since an animal has to be able to distinguish between basic categories like food/not food and shelter/not shelter in order to survive.

But the research on whether or not animals can handle the most abstract categories still hasn't produced a firm answer. We know that abstract categories like color are hard for young children to learn. At first, a child will learn that grass and broccoli are green, and apples and roses are red, without figuring out that there's such a thing as
greenness
or
redness
as a separate category unto itself.
Greenness
and
redness
are just part of the apple. Animal behaviorists always assumed that if forming abstract categories is hard for children, it was probably impossible for animals. But now, thanks to Dr. Pepperberg and Alex, we know it's not.

Alex can reclassify objects on demand. If Dr. Pepperberg shows him a square piece of blue wood and asks him, “What color?” he'll say, “Blue.” Then if she asks him, “What shape?” he says, “Four-corner.” For Alex color and shape are abstract categories that can apply to any object, not just to the objects he's been taught.

D
O
A
NIMALS
H
AVE
T
RUE
C
OGNITION
?

I like the way Marion Stamp Dawkins, a researcher at Oxford who studies animal behavior and thinking, defines thinking in animals. She starts by saying what
true cognition
is not. True cognition is not hardwired instinctual behavior, and it is not learning a simple rule of thumb.
⁶

True cognition, Dr. Dawkins say, happens when an animal
solves a problem under novel conditions.

By that definition, birds are star performers. One of my favorite bird experiments is the one with about the thieving blue jays. Blue jays are famous food thieves who, in nature, know enough to hide their food so other jays won't get it.

The researchers set up a situation where a jay would have to hide some food in the presence of other jays who were watching him. They gave the first set of blue jays some mealworms and a refrigerator ice tray filled with sand. The jays all hid their worms in the trays, while the other jays watched.

Then the experimenters took the watcher jays away—and the blue jays immediately dug up their mealworms and re-hid them in other parts of the tray. They obviously knew the watcher jays would try to steal their food, and they also knew the other jays knew where they'd
hidden
the food. So they hid the food again.

That is true cognition. The blue jays were in a novel situation, and they figured out a solution.

Mark saw two magpies using a similar strategy on Red Dog. Red Dog was eating a marrow bone that the magpies wanted for themselves. So the birds teamed up to get Red Dog away from the bone. One bird would lure Red Dog into chasing him, and the other would fly down to the marrow bone and start eating it. Then when Red Dog came back to the bone and chased
that
bird away, the first bird would get its turn to eat some of the marrow. The birds were double-teaming Red Dog.

There's been one formal experiment on ravens tricking each other to get food. The researchers studied two ravens, a dominant male and a subordinate male. At the beginning of the experiment the subordinate male found most of the food the experimenters had hidden, and the dominant raven chased him away and took the food for himself. So the subordinate male started tricking the dominant male by heading off to boxes he already knew didn't have food. Then when the dominant male followed him and chased him off, the subordinate male had a head start to the boxes that
did
have food. That worked for a while until the dominant male stopped following him and looked for food on his own.
⁷

Crows are really smart birds, too. The Betty and Abel study shocked the world when it appeared in
Science.
⁸
In the study the
researchers were testing two crows, Betty and Abel, to see whether they would choose a hooked wire or a straight wire to use for getting some food out of a tube. During one session Abel snatched the hooked wire away from Betty, leaving Betty with only the straight wire to use. When she realized the straight wire wouldn't work, she bent it into a hook. She did this nine different times, using different techniques. She also made improvements to her hook after using it, changing the angle to make it just right.

No one had ever seen any animal do anything like this, ever. It wasn't that long ago researchers believed man was the only animal to use tools at all. Then, when people finally discovered chimpanzees using tools in the 1960s and 1970s, no one ever saw them actually
manufacture
a tool. The chimpanzees would just pick up an object in the environment, like a twig or a leaf, and stick it down a termite mound to fish out some termites to eat. Betty's tool creation is even more amazing when you consider the fact that Betty didn't know anything about wire or its properties and didn't have any
reason
to know anything about wire and its properties. In nature nothing bends and holds its shape the way wire does.

I heard another amazing crow story from a man I know. He's fed up with a crow who is damaging his house. I can really relate to that. There's a crow in my neighborhood who has spent the last five years of his life dismantling and pulling out the rubber weather stripping in my bathroom skylight. It's taken him five years to pull out a six-inch strip, and he just keeps at it. He's so dedicated to his project his behavior seems instinct-driven and almost obsessive-compulsive.

I can't get him to stop. I throw hats at the skylight from inside the bathroom to scare him off, but he always comes back. If he keeps doing it the skylight is going to leak, but what I really worry about is that if he finally gets all the weather stripping out he's going to eat it and get sick or die. This is where blind instinct overrides cognition: a bird that's so smart some of the time can be so stupid other times.

The man I know apparently has a similar situation with a crow at his house, only he's opted to use a weapon more dangerous than a soft hat. But he's never been able to shoot his invader, because the crow always knows when he's thinking about getting his gun. The
bird will be there in the man's yard attacking the house while the man does his yard work, but the minute the man goes inside the house to get his gun the bird is gone. This has happened over and over again. The homeowner is completely mystified. When he goes inside his house without any intention of getting his gun, the crow stays in the yard. When he goes inside his house with the intention of getting his gun, the crow takes off.

How does the bird know it's time to get out of there? Probably the crow has picked up on differences in the man's behavior. I'm guessing that when the man gets irritated enough to go get his gun, first he does a lot of angry staring at the bird. The crow knows that's dangerous and takes off.

No one has ever seen a dog make a tool, but dogs can problem-solve in novel situations. Guide dogs for blind people have to be able to respond appropriately in new situations. Some service dogs are better problem-solvers than others, of course. In one city, highway engineers wanted to save money on curb cuts for wheelchairs at intersections. Normally a street corner will have eight curb cuts, one on each side of the four corners. To economize, the engineers reduced the number to four, putting each curb cut at the
point
of each corner, facing diagonally across the intersection.

That was a problem for the service dogs, who had all been trained on eight-cut corners. Some dogs got confused by the new design and took their owners clear across the intersection on a diagonal. But the really smart dogs led their owners down the diagonal curb cut and then back around to where the curb cuts would have been located in the normal crosswalk design.
Then
they crossed the street. That's problem solving in a novel situation.

The wild dogs in Mexico City go our service dogs one better. They cross the street in packs, with the light, in the intersection. They probably learned how to do this by watching how people cross the street.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who wrote
The Hidden Life of Dogs,
discovered that her dogs had figured out on their own that intersections are dangerous.
⁹
To avoid getting hit by turning cars, her free-roaming dogs learned to cross the street in the middle of a block instead of at the intersection. That way they could see all the cars
that were coming toward them from a distance, and not be surprised by a car making a sudden right or left turn into their path.

In farming and ranching you see lots of situations where animals will learn something useful by accident, such as how to break through a fence or open a gate. This is probably not true cognition, but some of these animals are pretty clever, and in the field it's hard to say what's true cognition and what's not. Most cattle and horses will never touch gate latches to try to open them, even though they've seen people open the latch a thousand times. However, if an animal accidentally learns to open the gate he'll never stop. He won't
unlearn
it, and he generally can't be trained out of it. My aunt had a horse that learned to put his head through a gate and lift it off the hinges. The only way we could get him to stop was to install a bracket at the top of the fence. Once one animal figures out how to open a gate, the other animals can learn how to open the gate by observation.
Then
you've got a real problem on your hands.