Animals in Translation (38 page)

At first I tuned in to all the really minute details that attracted my attention. Bob, the plant superintendent, was surprised that I kept asking him questions about small details such as how they attached a chain to the hide during hide removal. Apparently nonautistic people could get the gist of the place without having to know every little thing about it. But I couldn't.

One disadvantage of my type of thinking that I probably share with animals is that it takes a long time to download enough details to learn a complex sequence. To do it, I have to create a computer video in my imagination. With the plant, all told, it took six months to download a complete videotape of the entire place into my head. Twenty-four Tuesday afternoons.

Then one day I was standing on the catwalk and suddenly it all seemed simple. I didn't have to worry about remembering the sequence anymore, because I could walk through the whole plant in my mind. Every step in the sequence was connected to the next step, so I didn't have to hold hundreds of different, separate details in my working memory at the same time. I just had to remember one step at a time, and that step brought up the next step.

For me, trying to learn a sequence or add numbers in my head is like having more than one window open on your desktop. If I'm trying to add 49 to 56, first I add 9 and 6 to get 15 and carry the 1. That's in the first window.

But then it takes a really long time for me to close the 9 plus 6 window and open a new window to handle 4 plus 5. By the time the new window is open I no longer remember the 4 and the 5. Or, if I do manage to remember the 4 and the 5 (plus the 1 I have to carry), it takes so long to close the 4 and 5 window and reopen the 9 and 6 window that I've forgotten the original 15. I can work inside only one window at a time, and it takes me forever to switch to a different one. I wonder if animals are like that, too.

The breakthrough with the meat plant came when I could put the whole plant in one window and not have to switch back and forth. Then I could understand and remember it, and after that when I visited other meat plants I could easily pick out the familiar machines even though the floor layout was different. A dog probably has to get any sequence he's learning into one window, too. I suspect that once that happens, the dog “gets it” the way a person “gets it.” He understands what he's doing and can apply it to new situations. That's my guess.

T
HE
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AN
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ORDS

In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” that researchers have been arguing about ever since.
¹³
I think most researchers, thirty years later, would say it's impossible to know what it's like to be a bat, although they disagree with each other about why.

To me, “What is it like to be a bat?” isn't the right question. It's too absolute. I'm never going to know what it's like to be a bat, and a bat's never going to know what it's like to be me. Of course, Professor Nagel wasn't just talking about empathy; he was talking about the scientific method and whether you could ever fully explain consciousness in terms of brain biology. But that doesn't change my point. The fact that it's impossible to know what it's like to be a bat doesn't mean it's impossible to know
anything
about being a bat.

Since almost all researchers believe that animals don't have language, a good place to look for an answer is in the lives of
people
who have no language. We've already seen that autistic people have a lot in common with animals, but another source of clues comes from normal people with normal brains who don't have language.
How do language-less human beings think?

There are probably lots of language-less people in the world. Usually they are people who were born deaf into communities too small to have anyone who spoke sign language, and too poor to have schools for the deaf. But there are also some language-less people who were born into middle-class American homes but were never taught sign. Their brains are normal, and they had normal parents with normal incomes who loved them. They weren't poor and they weren't abused. The only reason they don't have language is that they were never exposed to language. (Probably in many of these cases the parents believed that allowing their children to learn sign would prevent them from using whatever residual hearing they had.)

The strange thing is that practically no one has studied these people. When I did a Google search for the phrase “language-less people” only nine entries came up. It's bizarre. It's especially strange when you consider how much attention has been paid to feral children and to horribly abused children like Genie, the thirteen-year-old California girl who grew up without language because her father strapped her to a potty chair around the age of twenty months and didn't allow her to have any human interaction. When Genie's mother finally brought her to a welfare office, she had only two words, “stopit” and “nomore.”
¹⁴
A case like Genie's is extremely interesting, of course, but she was emotionally abused and nutritionally deprived. It's hard to tell how much relevance her cognitive skills have to a normal language-less animal or autistic person's cognitive skills.

Why aren't normal language-less people on the agenda?

The best book on a normal language-less person is
A Man Without Words
by Susan Schaller. Susan Schaller has spent twenty years traveling and researching language-less people completely on her own. The experts she tried to get help from when she first started out were dismissive, uncooperative, or hostile. She even got yelled at
by one researcher who shouted, “Who are you?” A graduate student told her, “Nobody's interested in that subject anymore—that was popular last century.”
¹⁵

Susan became interested in language-less people when she volunteered to teach Ildefonso, a deaf mute Mexican immigrant who was raised in a town that had no education for deaf children.
A Man Without Words
is the story of her work with him. Susan discovered that Ildefonso had no concept of language at all. Later she learned he had a deaf brother, and that the two of them had figured out some simple ways to communicate as children. But he had absolutely no idea that spoken or written language existed. He understood that the other children did something important with their schoolbooks, but he did not know what it was.

It took Ildefonso only six days with Susan to grasp the idea of language. In the book, he has a revelation that's a lot like the water pump scene in
The Miracle Worker
when Helen Keller suddenly understands what language is.

Although he got the
idea
of language quickly, it took much longer for him to be able to learn and use the language Susan was trying to teach him. One of the most powerful parts of the book, for me, is the day when Susan tries to teach him the words for color. Susan is teaching him the names for colors, like red, yellow, and green, but when they get to “green” suddenly he becomes highly agitated and mimes running and hiding while signing “Green!! Green!!”

Susan couldn't understand why he was so frantic, until she learned that green was the most important concept in Ildefonso's life. Ildefonso was an illegal immigrant who supported himself working harvesting crops and picking apples. All the good things in life and all the bad things in life were green. Green money and picking green crops let him feed his family in Mexico. Border Patrol agents wearing green uniforms and driving green trucks were the bad people who would grab him and take him back to Mexico, to the place where there was less work and food was scarce.

The most important thing in life was the Green Card that magically repelled the bad green men.

Susan writes that it was impossible for her to imagine Ildefonso's
world. I expect she knows a lot more about the world of language-less people now that she's spent two decades searching them out, and I'm looking forward to her next book. She did perceive differences in Ildefonso that I think directly apply to animals, as well as to people with autism.

The main difference between Ildefonso and people who have language is that he was missing a layer of abstract thinking. For instance, he didn't have the categories of
real
and
fake.
He just knew that some Green Cards worked to keep the green men from taking you back to Mexico, and some Green Cards didn't. He didn't know why.

He also didn't have
just
and
unjust
as abstract categories. It's not that he didn't have morals or a conscience. Susan doesn't say a lot about this, but she writes that Ildefonso became upset one day when she kept insisting on paying for his lunch after he had signed that he wanted to pay. Ildefonso got more and more angry until finally he signed, “God. Friend. Burrito buy I.”

“He connected
God
and
friend
and placed them above burrito buying,” Susan writes. “His anger was that of a religious instructor. I was properly rebuked for my concern for the material world. Who had more money was trivial.” Later on he asked her what “God” meant, but he had already figured it out on his own. Susan writes that he had guessed that the word “God” stood for “unseen greatness, apart from and more important than the tangible stuff in front of us.”

Although Ildefonso had the idea that there was something greater than the material world, he didn't seem to have any concept of human justice. He had no idea whether it was just or unjust for the green men to catch him and take him back to Mexico; he just knew that's what the green men did, so he needed to stay away from the green men. He was trying to understand the rules, without realizing there were principles
behind
the rules.

Ildefonso was an innocent. He didn't see all the good and bad that people do, and he didn't know there could be good and bad rules, either. After he learned language, he was sad to learn of the terrible things people do. Animals are innocents, too. Even when animals are treated badly by humans, or see other animals treated badly by humans, they don't seem to develop the abstract categories
of just and unjust. Like Ildefonso, animals try to learn the rules without seeming to realize there are principles behind the rules. Since they don't know there are principles underlying the rules they don't realize that the rule itself can be just or unjust, or that a person could be breaking abstract principles of justice. Animals live much closer to the plain facts of the situation.

But the important thing to realize is that Ildefonso's innocence was not the same thing as being stupid, or unable to think. Ildefonso wasn't stupid, and he functioned as a person of normal intelligence and reasoning ability or even above-average intelligence, given that he had been able to immigrate to a foreign country, find work, and manage his life while struggling with a huge disability.

This means that when it comes to animals, we should not equate innocence with lack of intelligence. The fact that a dog never rejects a nasty owner doesn't make him stupid. It makes him innocent. Dogs may well have lower reasoning ability and general intelligence than people do, but a dog's “blind devotion” isn't evidence one way or another.

Although Ildefonso didn't have an abstract sense of just and unjust, he did have an immediate, concrete sense of right and wrong, which he showed when he gave Susan the stern lecture on friendship. That shows that you don't have to have language to have a conscience, which means it's at least
possible
for an animal to have a conscience, too. Many owners have seen their dogs act remorseful after doing something wrong, but animal behaviorists always reject this interpretation. However, no one has shown that an innocent animal
can't
feel bad for doing something he knows is wrong, the same way an innocent child can feel bad for doing something he knows is wrong. We shouldn't assume that we know for a fact animals never experience the emotion of guilt, because we don't.

A friend of mine has a story about one of her dogs showing remorse that I think is probably right. She has two dogs, a male and a slightly younger female, and she had taken them for a walk with one dog on-leash and one dog off-leash. Unfortunately, when she got up the hill close to her house a neighbor saw them and started yelling at her about the loose dog.

Since she didn't have another leash with her, she had to thread the leash through one dog's collar and hook it to the other dog's collar, which meant their heads were pulled so close together they were touching. The dominant dog didn't like that at all, because dominant dogs guard their body space closely and need more of it. So this was a violation of his dominant-dog rule.

They had to walk all the way home like that, with the dominant dog looking more and more irritated and tense. Finally, when they got back to their own driveway, the dominant dog snapped. He burst out in a loud snarl and bit his housemate on the nose, something he had never done before. The younger dog shrieked.

My friend jumped over to the dogs and got them unhooked, but the dominant dog didn't run off to his freedom. He stayed right by the subordinate dog, licking and licking her on the lips. My friend said he looked mortified. She'd never seen him kiss his pack mate like that, and it was obvious to her, as well as to her next-door neighbor, who saw the whole thing, that he was sorry for what he'd done and was trying to make it up to his friend. He acted like he felt remorse, and I don't think you can rule it out. He was the alpha, and he didn't need to be kissing the subordinate dog to keep on being the alpha. If anything, it was the subordinate dog who should have been doing the groveling, not the dominant dog. But she didn't. She accepted his kisses, and they went back to being friends.