Animals in Translation (6 page)

Nancy Minshew, a research neurologist at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in autism, was coming out with her new work on autistic people's cognitive processing around the same time, and she confirmed my new insight into animals and detail. Her brain scans showed that autistic people are much more focused on details than on whole objects. Since I'd noticed so many similarities between animals and autistic people in my career, the fact that Nancy Minshew was finding a connection between autism and an orientation to detail gave me another reason to think I was right about animals.
¹

T
INY
D
ETAILS
T
HAT
S
CARE
F
ARM
A
NIMALS

Here's the checklist I give plant owners when their cattle or hogs are refusing to walk through an alley or a chute:

1. S
PARKLING
R
EFLECTIONS ON
P
UDDLES

I figured this out at a plant where the pigs were constantly backing up in the alley, so the employees were using electric prods to keep
them moving forward. The plant was failing its animal welfare audit, because workers were supposed to be using the prods on no more than 25 percent of the pigs, and they were using them on every single animal. Normally a pig has no problem walking through a chute, but in this plant every single pig was stopping and backing up.

I got down on my hands and knees and went through the chute the same way the pigs did. The managers probably thought I looked crazy, but that's the only way you can do it. You have to get to the same level as the animals, and look at things from the same angle of vision.

Sure enough, as soon as I got down on all fours I could see that there were lots of tiny, bright reflections glancing off the wet floor. Plant floors are always wet, because they're always being hosed down to keep them clean. Nobody could have seen those reflections even if they did know what to look for, because the humans' eyes weren't on the same level as the pigs'.

Once we knew what the problem was I got back down on my hands and knees again, and while I was pretending I was a pig the employees moved the big hanging lights overhead with a stick until each little reflection was gone. And that was that. Once the reflections were gone the pigs walked right up the chute, and the plant passed its audit.

2. R
EFLECTIONS ON
S
MOOTH
M
ETAL

I first saw this with cattle walking up a single-file chute that was made of shiny stainless steel. Every time the sides jiggled the shiny reflections from the lights would vibrate and oscillate, and the cattle would stop. In that plant all we had to do was move the lights, but in another plant with the same problem, we had to bolt the sides down so they couldn't move at all.

A still reflection is always less of a problem for an animal than a moving one, although any bright reflecting surface can scare an animal. A lot of times we have to move the lights
and
bolt down the metal sides. A number of things can cause reflections to move: machine vibrations, or cattle banging up against the metal, or water running off a ramp into the water that's already on the floor, making the reflections on the surface jump and move like a sparkling brook.

3. C
HAINS
T
HAT
J
IGGLE

I learned about jiggling chains in a big beef plant in Colorado that had a chain hanging down at the entrance of the chute. The chain was part of a gate latch, and it wasn't very long; maybe only one foot, and swinging back and forth three inches each way. But that was enough. The cattle would come around a curve, take one look at that chain, then stop and stare at it with their heads swinging back and forth in rhythm with the chain. You'd think that would be obvious to the employees, but it wasn't. The humans just didn't see it, even though the cows' heads were going back and forth in rhythm to the swinging of the chain. I'm not sure the employees even noticed that the cows' heads were moving; forget the chain. The employees were just using more force, zapping them with cattle prods, screaming and yelling and so on, to try to get the cattle moving.

4. M
ETAL
C
LANGING OR
B
ANGING

This one's universal. You see it everywhere in feed yards and plants—metal gates, sliding doors, squeeze chutes—everywhere. People in the industry call it
clatter,
and clatter is something you always have with metal equipment. I recommend plastic tracks for sliding doors, so you don't have metal sliding against metal, and now a company named Silencer makes an extra-quiet squeeze chute that's good, too.

5. H
IGH
-P
ITCHED
N
OISE

Examples: backup alarms on trucks and high-pitched motor whining.

I remember my first experience with this at a big beef plant in Nebraska where they'd just put in one of my cattle-handling systems. They used a hydraulic system that gave off a high-pitched whining noise, and the noise would get the cattle all agitated so my system didn't work. We changed the plumbing to eliminate the noise and the cattle became a lot calmer.

6. A
IR
H
ISSING

Another one you see everywhere. The problem with high-pitched sounds like hissing air and hydraulic squeals is that they're too close to distress calls, which are almost always high-pitched. High-pitched sounds are one of the few things humans will usually notice, espe
cially if they're intermittent, because we inherited a built-in alarm system from our animal ancestors that's still working. That's why humans choose high-pitched intermittent sounds when they want to make sure they get people's attention. Police cars, ambulances, garbage truck backup beeps—it's almost always a high-pitched intermittent sound. The people who design these systems instinctively go for the kind of sound animals use to signal danger.

7. A
IR
D
RAFTS
B
LOWING ON
A
PPROACHING
A
NIMALS

I don't know why cattle don't like this; I just know they don't. Whenever cattle are out in a big storm, they'll turn their bottoms to the wind. I also hear stories about dogs hating to have air blown into their faces or their ears. This seems to be something kids like to do to dogs, so I've heard quite a few of these stories.

8. C
LOTHING
H
UNG ON
F
ENCE

I say “clothing” because the problem almost always is clothing, but anything hanging on a fence can scare animals. Usually what happens is that people get hot, take off their jackets and shirts, and hang them on the fence. Sometimes people will drape towels or rags on the fence, which is just as bad. Once I went to a ranch that had a wiggling plastic jug wired to the fence and that was causing problems.

The worst is when you have yellow clothing hanging on fences. I first saw this happen at a plant in Colorado. It's the same problem as the bright yellow ladder against the gray wall I mentioned a while back. No cow will walk toward a sudden patch of bright yellow color.

9. P
IECE OF
P
LASTIC
T
HAT
I
S
M
OVING

Anything moving is a problem for animals, but usually I find the problem will be a piece of plastic. That's because people in the industry put plastic all over everything. They'll tape it over a window to keep the cold air out, or wrap it around a pipe because the pipe is dripping, and it always vibrates and jiggles. Plastic just has a way of getting stuck all over the place, especially now, with the new food safety rules. Employees pull plastic off big rolls and make raincoats out of it, or aprons and leg guards; the plants let the employees make anything they want out of the stuff. Then it ends up getting
caught on something where it jiggles and scares the animals. Paper towels will also scare pigs and cattle if the wind is blowing it. I had a paper towel problem at five or six different places.

10. S
LOW
F
AN
B
LADE
M
OVEMENT

I've seen this in several different places. Animals don't have a problem with an electric fan that's
turned on
the way autistic children do. A lot of autistic children are riveted by the motion of the blades, or by just about anything that's spinning fast. I don't know why this happens, but I think they may be seeing the flicker of the fan blades even at very high speeds. I've met a number of dyslexic people who can see the flicker, so I assume many autistic people see it, too. Dyslexics who can see the blade flicker say it's horribly distracting and fatiguing.

The motion is part of the attraction, too. I don't get hooked on fans myself, but I do get stuck on those geometric screen savers a lot of computers have. I can't stop looking at them, literally, so if I'm in an office where there's a geometric screen saver either I have to sit with my back to the screen, or ask the owner to turn it off.

With fans, what drives an animal crazy is when the fan is turned off, but the blades are rotating slowly in the breeze. You have to put up big pieces of plywood or metal so the animals can't see the fan. Otherwise, forget it. They're going to balk. I went to one ranch where they had a windmill that was messing up the animals. On windy days the animals wouldn't move.

11. S
EEING
P
EOPLE
M
OVING
U
P
A
HEAD

Another case for plywood. I mentioned this one earlier. Cattle are eighteen months old when they're slaughtered, and pigs are only five months old, so it doesn't pay to
train them to lead.
They're not like horses who've been trained to accept a halter and a lead rope and walk calmly alongside a human being.

12. S
MALL
O
BJECT ON THE
F
LOOR

Example: a white Styrofoam coffee cup on a muddy brown floor.

I had a bad experience with this one time when I was up on a catwalk above a cattle chute. An employee at the plant had been storing his white plastic water bottle on the catwalk, and I accidentally
kicked it off. The minute it hit the ground, I said a bad word. It landed right at the entrance to the chute, where I knew it was going to cause a problem, and it did. That little plastic water bottle lying harmlessly on the ground was as big a barrier for those 1,200-pound cows as if I'd dropped a big pile of boulders there.

We had to shut the whole line down, because no animal would walk over it, and it was too dangerous for anyone to go in there and try to pick it up. A crowd pen is a small space, and there were fifteen big animals in it, none of them trained to lead; a human going inside the pen could have been crushed. So the employees had to stand outside and run at the cattle and chase them until finally one of the cows stepped on the bottle and crushed it into the manure so that it turned brown, not white. Then the cattle were fine. They all stepped over it and went on into the alley. That part of the line was shut down for fifteen minutes, and the plant as a whole lost five minutes. At $200 a minute that was a $1,000 delay.

13. C
HANGES IN
F
LOORING AND
T
EXTURE

Example: cattle or pigs moving from a metal floor to a concrete floor or vice versa.

The problem is contrast.

14. D
RAIN
G
RATE ON THE
F
LOOR

Same problem again: contrast. The drain grate looks too different from the floor.

15. S
UDDEN
C
HANGES IN THE
C
OLOR OF
E
QUIPMENT

High-contrast color changes are the worst. You can't have the gates painted one color and the pens painted another. I've also seen problems with gray-painted alleys leading up to shiny metal equipment.

16. C
HUTE
E
NTRANCE
T
OO
D
ARK

Another contrast issue—going from light to dark.

17. B
RIGHT
L
IGHT
S
UCH AS
B
LINDING
S
UN

If you have the sun coming up over the top of a building just as the cattle are approaching there is nothing you can do. It is a hell of a problem
and there isn't any way to fix it except maybe extend the roof out over the yards. Otherwise you just have to suffer through it.

18. O
NE
-W
AY OR
A
NTI
-B
ACKUP
G
ATES

These are two different terms for the same thing.
Anti-backup gates
don't look like the normal gates the cattle are used to seeing on a ranch. Anti-backup gates hang down from overhead instead of being attached on one side, and basically look like a cow- or pig-sized dog door in a house. Plants install one-way gates in single-file alleys to keep the cattle from backing up into the long line of animals behind them. The pig or cow pushes through the gate—the same way a dog pushes through a dog door—and the gate falls down behind each pig or cow after it walks through. It's not flexible like a dog door, so you can't push it backward, only forward.

The animals hate having to push through the gate. That's the problem, the going-through. The anti-backup gates bother the animals so much I don't like to use them. I work with the cattle gently enough that they're all happy to keep walking forward, and I can just tie the doors up out of the way, where the cattle don't see them and don't have to deal with them.