Animals in Translation (40 page)

The experiment was set up so that 70 percent of the time the dot was in the top of the screen. Since there wasn't any punishment for a wrong response, the smartest strategy was just to push the bar 100 percent of the time. That way you'd end up getting a reward 70 percent of the time, even though you didn't have a clue what the pattern was.

That's what the rats did. They just kept pressing the bar every time the screen changed.

But the humans never figured this out. They kept trying to come up with a rule, so sometimes they'd press the bar and sometimes they wouldn't, trying to figure it out. Some of them thought they
had
come up with a rule, which they then used to tell them when to press the bar and when not to press the bar. But they were deluded. They hadn't come up with the rule at all, and the rats ended up with lots more rewards than the humans.

I believe the rats did better than the humans either because of weaker frontal lobes or because rats don't have language or both. One thing we do know about humans is that the left brain, which is the conscious language part of the brain, always makes up a story to explain what's going on. Normal people have an
interpreter
in their left brain that takes all the random, contradictory details of whatever they're doing or remembering at the moment, and smoothes everything out into one coherent story. If there are details that don't fit, a lot of times they get edited out or revised. Some left brain stories can be so far off from reality that they sound like confabulations.

The interpreter probably got in the way on the lever-pressing experiment. The human subjects kept trying to come up with a story about the dots, and when they did come up with a story they stuck to it. Then the dot story kept them from realizing they should just forget about the dots and press the lever every time the screen changed.

A
NIMAL
W
ELFARE
: T
AKING
C
ARE OF
A
NIMALS THE
W
RONG
W
AY

Working in animal welfare, I constantly have to reason with normal humans who are too smart for their own good.

My most important contribution to the field has been to take the idea behind Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point analysis, or HACCP (pronounced
hassip
), and apply it to the field of animal welfare. The animal welfare audit I created for U.S. Department of Agriculture is a HACCP-type audit.

My HACCP system works by analyzing the
critical control points
in a farm animal's well-being. I define a critical control point as a
single measurable element that covers a multitude of sins.
For instance, when I'm auditing the animals on a farm, one thing I want to know is whether the animals' legs are sound. There are a lot of things that can affect a cow's ability to walk: bad genes, poor flooring, too much grain in the feed, foot rot, poor hoof care, and rough treatment of the animals. Some regulators will try to measure all of these things, because they think a good audit is a thorough audit.

But that's not my approach. I measure one thing only:
how many cattle are limping?
That's all I need to know, just how many cattle are limping. That one measurement covers the multitude of sins that can cause cattle to go lame. If too many animals are limping, the farm fails the audit and that's it. The only way the farm can pass the next audit is to fix whatever it is that's making their animals lame. If management knows what the problem is, they can get busy fixing it. If they don't know what the problem is, they have to hire someone who can tell them, and
then
fix it.

For my animal welfare audit, I came up with five key measurements inspectors need to take to ensure animals receive humane treatment at a meatpacking plant:

• Percentage of animals stunned, or killed, correctly on the first attempt (this has to be at least 95 percent of the animals).
  
• Percentage of animals who remain unconscious after stunning (
  this must be 100 percent
  ).
  
• Percentage of animals who vocalize (squeal, bellow, or moo, meaning “ouch!” or “you're scaring me!”) during handling and stunning. Handling includes walking through the alleys and being held in the restraining device for stunning (no more than 3 cattle out of 100).
  
• Percentage of animals who fall down (animals are terrified of falling down, and this should be no more than 1 out of 100, which is still more than would fall down under good conditions, since animals never fall down if the floor is sound and dry).
  
• Electric prod usage (no more than 25 percent of the animals).
  

I also have a list of five acts of abuse that are an automatic failure:

• Dragging a live animal with a chain.
  
• Running cattle on top of each other on purpose.
  
• Sticking prods and other objects into sensitive parts of animals.
  
• Slamming gates on animals on purpose.
  
• Losing control and beating an animal.
  

This is all you need to know to rate animal welfare at a meatpacking plant. Just these ten details. You don't need to know if the floor is slippery, something regulators always want to measure. For some reason whenever you start talking about auditing the plants everybody turns into an expert on flooring. I don't need to know anything about the flooring. I just need to know if any of the cattle fell down. If cattle are falling down, there's a problem with the floor, and the plant fails the audit. It's that simple.

The plants love it,
because they can do it.
The audit is totally based on things an auditor can directly observe that have objective outcomes. A steer either moos during handling or he does not.

Another important feature of my audit: people can remember two sets of five items. That level of detail is what normal working memory is built to hold on to.
²¹

But I find that people in academia and often in government just don't get it. Most language-based thinkers find it difficult to believe that such a simple audit really works. They're like the people in the lever-pressing experiments; they think simple means wrong. They don't see that each one of the five critical control points measures anywhere from three to ten others that all result in the same bad outcome for the animals.

When highly verbal people get control of the audit process, they tend to make five critical mistakes:

• They write verbal auditing standards that are too subjective and vague, with requirements like “minimal use of electric prod” and “non-slip flooring.” Individual inspectors have to figure out for themselves what “minimal use” means. A good audit checklist has objective standards that anyone can see have or have not been met.
  
• For some reason, highly verbal people have a tendency to measure
  inputs,
  such as maintenance schedules, employee training records, and equipment design problems, instead of
  outputs,
  which is how the animals are actually doing. A good animal welfare audit has to measure the animals, not the plant.
  
• Highly verbal people almost always want to make the audit way too complicated. A 100-item checklist doesn't work nearly as well as a 10-item checklist, and I can prove it.
  
• Verbal people drift into
  paper audits,
  in which they audit a plant's records instead of its animals.
  A good animal welfare audit has to audit the animals, not the paper and not the plant.
  
• Verbal people tend to lose sight of what's important and end up treating small problems the same way they treat big problems.
  

All five of these mistakes hurt the animals. When you make the audit process more complicated, the auditors veer off into all the fine detail that goes into making a humane slaughterhouse, which leads to wanting to micromanage the plants. Instead of looking at outcomes to the animals, they want to tell the plant how to build its floors. Then they want to send auditors out to inspect the construction to make sure the floors are right. The animal gets lost in the confusion. I don't care about floors. I care about cows. Are they falling down? That's all I need to know.

The other thing that happens is that auditors lose track of what's important. If you give an auditor a 100-item checklist, he'll tend to treat 50 of the items as if they're major, whereas maybe only 10 items are so critical that if the plant fails any one of those 10 it should fail the audit, period. When a plant fails 1 critical item out of 10, it's easy to fail the whole plant. But when it fails that same item on a list of 100, it doesn't look so bad.

Even worse, an auditor working with a long, overly complicated checklist can miss the huge problems completely, even though they're on the list. A friend of mine told me a horrible story about a plant where the stunning equipment wasn't working right, and they had live animals hanging from hooks going down the slaughter line. The USDA inspector missed it. He got focused on some worker who was whacking the pigs too hard on the butt, and he wrote them up for that. Meanwhile the plant had a hideous, enormous problem of live animals on the slaughter line that ought to mean an automatic fail. The inspector didn't see it, or maybe he did see it but it didn't
register
on him.

I think this kind of blindness must have to do with the limits on normal human perception. Somehow, when an inspector has to audit 100 different aspects of a plant's functioning, he stops seeing the lady in the gorilla suit. I'm not saying it's okay to be whacking the pigs, of course. It's not, and it should be corrected. But when the audit checklist is too long, auditors start hyper-focusing on small details and missing the great big details that matter the most.

I've seen this happen many times. About a year ago I visited plants in Europe, where the plants and the inspectors were supposed to continuously monitor and improve 100 different items on a checklist. The plants were horrible.

Sometimes the standards that verbal thinkers want to include aren't even connected to reality. For instance, I've been working with KFC—Kentucky Fried Chicken—to raise standards for animal welfare in the poultry industry, and one of the standards an abstract, verbal thinker will want to put on the audit form is that the lights have to be off for at least four hours every night. Well, how am I going to get out to the farm at 3:00
A.M
. to make sure the lights are off? I'm not. And I'm not going to trust the paperwork.

What I need to audit isn't the lights, it's the
outcome
of turning off the lights to the chickens' welfare. The lights have to be off because darkness slows down a baby chick's growth. Today's poultry chicken has been bred to grow so rapidly that its legs can collapse under the weight of its ballooning body. It's awful. Darkness slows down the baby chick's growth just enough to prevent this from happening, so getting those lights off is important, because lameness is a
severe problem in chicken welfare. I've been to farms where half of the chickens are lame. When I audit a chicken farm, what I want to know is, can the chickens on this farm walk? If the chickens are lame, something is wrong, and the farm fails the audit.

And I strongly object to paper audits, because anyone can change his paperwork if he wants to. However, a plant can't falsify things I can directly observe. I don't want to see the maintenance records on the stunner. If the stunner is well maintained, it's going to work. That's all I need to know. I've measured broken wings on chickens. I want to see the animals.

The other dangerous thing about paper audits and 100-item checklists is that they can set you up for a situation of things slowly getting worse without anyone knowing it. When you drift away from the animals themselves and start auditing the paperwork, the bad can become normal pretty quickly.

I want to stress this point. Maintaining animal welfare standards in a meatpacking plant is an ongoing responsibility.
The whole principle of HACCP is that you have to keep measuring standards and compliance or everything goes bad on you.
It's kind of like maintaining your weight: you have to keep on top of it. Paper audits end up masking small, incremental declines in standards that result in very large drops in animal welfare.

Unfortunately, to an abstract verbal thinker, a list with 100 different animal welfare items sounds more caring than a list with only 5. But I can prove beyond question that animals in plants undergoing 10-question audits are handled much more humanely than animals in plants undergoing 100-question audits. And it's not just that plants using my checklist do well on the big details. They also do better on the smaller details, because
the smaller details are part of the big ones.

Even though my list contains only five critical control points, it is so strict that most plants thought they wouldn't be able to pass. But then McDonald's started auditing the plants. In 1999 they threw a major plant off the approved supplier list for flunking the audit, and they suspended some other plants. After that the industry got religion, and boy has the cattle handling changed. Let me tell you, you go out there now and they're handling the cattle
nice.
All of the
plants being audited using my list treat their animals better than plants using 100-item checklists.

Most large plants are now audited by restaurant chains like McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's International. Just four years after McDonald's began requiring its suppliers to audit their plants according to my standards, almost every plant is passing easily. Now when you go into a plant it's like a magical change. I think of all the years up to 1999 as the pre-McDonald's era and the years since then as the post-McDonald's era. Up until 1999 the plants might buy the best equipment, but they didn't manage it. They'd let stuff break, and they didn't spend enough time and money training and supervising their staff or firing people who needed firing. Then as soon as McDonald's started auditing, they were hitting up my Web page to learn the stuff they had to do. There were light-years of change.