Animals in Translation (8 page)

I also noticed that if I got down low to the ground I was a lot less scary to them. At first I was just trying to get the cow's head framed against the sky, without any grass showing in the frame, so I'd crouch down to get the shot I wanted. But then I noticed that when I crouched down, I could get close-ups of the cattle because they wouldn't run away. Those photos were beautiful—big Black Angus heads silhouetted against the blue sky.

Finally one day I decided to just lie down flat on my back and see
what happened. They all came up to me and sniffed and licked and sniffed and licked. These were feedlot cattle who weren't tame.

When a cow comes up to explore you, it's always the same. They'll stretch out their heads toward you and sniff you; that's always first. Then the tongue will reach out and just barely touch you, and as they get less afraid they'll start licking you. They'll lick your hair and chew on it, and they like to lick and chew your boots, too. I usually don't let them lick me on my face because cattle have extremely rough tongues and I could get a scratched cornea, although I sometimes just close my eyes and let them go ahead. I don't mind if the tongue goes down my neck. That's okay. And I let them lick my hands. I think they probably like the taste of the salt on your skin.

Sometimes I'll kiss them on the nose.

I wasn't the only person to figure out that it's perfectly safe to lie down in the middle of a bunch of thousand-pound untamed animals. In the 1970s there were a lot of Mexicans coming over the border to work in the feedlots, and when the Border Patrol came around the Mexicans would hide inside the corrals, with the cattle. Five guys would lie down on the ground with a hundred head of Brahman steers surrounding them. Brahmans are the big huge cattle with the hump on their back. They're nice animals, as long as you treat them well, but they're scary-looking to anybody who doesn't know cattle, so the Border Patrol guys wouldn't dare go in those pens.

But it never came to that, because the Border Patrol people never saw any of the illegal workers lying underneath all those cattle. The Mexicans had to lie perfectly still, because if they moved the cattle would run and give them away. And, of course, that would have been really dangerous for the five guys lying on the ground. You don't want a thousand-pound Brahman steer and his ninety-nine friends stepping on you by accident when they're trying to get away. It sounds dangerous, but I don't remember a single person ever getting hurt.

The reason cattle will approach something novel under their own steam is that they're curious. All animals are curious; it's built into their wiring. They have to be, because if they weren't they'd have a
lot harder time finding what they need and avoiding what they don't need. Curiosity is the other side of caution. An animal has to have some drive to explore his environment in order to find food, water, mates, and shelter. People say curiosity killed the cat, and that's probably true; curiosity can get an animal into a lot of trouble. But an animal or a person can be too cautious, too. If you're too cautious to explore things, you miss out on things you need.

Being too cautious might make you miss signs of danger, too. Animals and people need to avoid trouble before it happens, and one way to do that is to pick up on signs of danger and act on them
now,
instead of waiting until you're face-to-face with a hungry wolf and then trying to get away. Curiosity drives an animal to explore its environment for signs of danger.

So it makes sense that a cow would voluntarily explore a yellow raincoat hanging on a fence but dig in his heels if you try to
force
him to walk past one. Since anything new could be dangerous, an animal wants a clear escape route before he's going to poke his nose into something he's never seen before. When he's being forced through a one-way alley, there's no escape. So he refuses to move.

 

You can use the exact same checklist with horses, too, partly because they're prey animals like cattle and partly because their lives and environments are pretty similar. Since I spend most of my time with cattle I don't have a good checklist of details that scare dogs or cats, but I
can
tell you that the same principle applies even though they're predators and don't have as many natural enemies to worry about. All animals, predator or prey, have a built-in sense of caution that is triggered by new things.

With dogs, it's a little hard to predict which new things might scare them, since dogs live with people and get exposed to so many new things all the time. A dog who's not naturally timid can
seem
like he doesn't mind high-contrast novel stimuli the way a cow does.

But I don't think that's true. One of the good times to see the effects of novel visual stimuli on a dog is Halloween. My experience is that
dogs do not like Halloween costumes!
A friend of mine was sitting in her upstairs office one day, getting some work done, with the
family Lab lying next to her, when her son walked up the stairs wearing his Scream costume. You probably know the one I mean: the costume is dark black, and the mask is bright white with a big red tongue hanging out of its mouth. You can't get much higher contrast than that, unless you made the tongue yellow. The Lab jumped to her feet and started barking her head off.

My friend was totally surprised, because she had recognized her son from his footsteps, which sounded the same way they always did. He wasn't wearing a costume on his
feet.
But the minute the dog saw the mask she went nuts.

This is another example of the cardinal rule of my checklist: just
one
of these distracters, out of eighteen, will throw an animal off. To the Lab, it didn't matter that my friend's son still sounded and smelled the same. He didn't look the same, so he wasn't the same, and that was that. Apparently animals use an additive system rather than an averaging system when they're figuring out what something is and whether they should be afraid of it.

That same Lab also went crazy when the neighbors put a Halloween scarecrow up in the front yard. My friend was taking her dog for a walk when they spotted the scarecrow, and the Lab started barking ferociously at the thing. Her hackles were up, too. That same house managed to throw my friend's other dog into a panic with a piece of lawn sculpture they put in the backyard. The sculpture was a foot-high all-black iron frog, and when the other dog caught sight of it he had the same reaction his pack mate did to the scarecrow. He went nuts. Frantic barking, hackles up, straining at the leash.

Dog and cat owners won't have any problem recognizing the next category of common distracters: things that are moving. For any animal you can name, sudden movement is
riveting,
especially sudden rapid movement. Rapid movement stimulates the nervous system. It makes prey animals run away, and it makes predator animals give chase. It always grabs your attention. That's why used car lots put flags or twirly plastic thingies up all around their lots. You can't
not
look at a bunch of brightly colored, rapidly moving objects. Jiggling parts on feedlot equipment trigger a cow's inborn impulse to flee, and all of a sudden you've got a whole herd of cows turning into the feedlot version of a forty-car pileup. It's a disaster.

S
OUND

Last but not least, you have your sound distracters. Any novel, high-pitched sounds will cause cattle to balk, because they activate the part of an animal's brain that responds to distress calls. An
intermittent
high-pitched sound is that much worse. Intermittent sounds will drive anyone crazy; they're much more upsetting than a constant, loud din, whether it's high-pitched or not. You can't relax, because you're waiting for the next sound. And you can't turn this response off, either, because intermittent sounds activate your
orienting response.
People aren't so aware of this response in themselves, but if you live around animals you know it well. Anytime an animal of any species hears a sudden sound, something they weren't expecting, they stop what they're doing and orient to the source of the sound.

When I worked with pigs at the University of Illinois I saw the orienting response every time a small plane would fly over the farm. The pigs couldn't see the plane from inside the barn, but the minute that plane could be heard approaching the farm all activity in the barn would stop dead, and every animal stood perfectly still. After about two seconds of focused listening the pigs went back to their normal hubbub of activity. You can see the same thing at a horse stable when a garbage truck backs up to the dumpster. As soon as the backup warning starts beeping every horse will stick its head out of the stall at the exact same moment and stand at the alert. They look like they're saluting the truck.

I think the orienting response is the beginning of consciousness, because the animal has to make a conscious decision about what to do about that sound. If he's a prey animal, should he run? If he's a predator, does he need to chase something? A predator might need to flee, too, of course, so a predator actually has two decisions to make.

Intermittent sounds keep hitting that orienting response. That's why it's impossible to get to sleep when you're hearing an intermittent sound like a beeping elevator in a hotel or an intermittently beeping clothes dryer. A friend of mine with a nine-year-old autistic boy told me a story about her son, who had gotten into opening and closing doors repetitively. She was exhausted one day, mostly
because her son didn't sleep well at night, and she needed to take a nap, but when she lay down her son started opening and closing the sliding pocket door to the laundry room next to her bedroom. He would wait a few seconds in between each new door closing, just long enough for her to start to drift off to sleep again, and then suddenly she'd hear a rumble-rumble-
thump
and the door would hit the doorjamb again. Even though the sound was muffled, she said she was frantic after about ten minutes of this. It's the Chinese water torture principle. If you had water pouring on your head continuously you wouldn't like it, but you could learn to ignore it. Having drops of water dripping on your head intermittently is literally torture.

B
EING
O
BLIVIOUS

The funny thing about the checklist is that probably the
only
thing on it that would bother a herd of humans you were trying to move through a feed yard chute is the intermittent sounds. Humans wouldn't bat an eye at anything else on the checklist—jiggling chains, sparkling puddles, shiny spots on metal, little pieces of moving plastic, slowly rotating fan blades, even a continuous high-pitched sound—nothing on this checklist would be any problem for human beings at all.

They wouldn't be a problem for humans, because humans wouldn't take them in.

I've mentioned the
Gorillas in Our Midst
video, in which a lady dressed in a gorilla suit walks onscreen during a basketball game pounding her chest and 50 percent of all viewers don't see her. If 50 percent of normal human beings can't see a lady dressed up like a gorilla, it's small wonder employees in meatpacking plants don't notice jiggly chains.

In their book
Inattentional Blindness,
Arien Mack at the New School for Social Research in New York City and Irvin Rock, who was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, until he died in 1995, explain that people don't
consciously
see any object unless they are paying direct, focused attention to that object.
⁵
This means that a human being walking through an alley won't see, much
less be bothered by, sparkling puddles or shiny spots on metal or jiggling chains. None of that stuff is there for them unless they're
looking
for it. Normal human beings are blind to anything they're not paying attention to.

My experience with animals, and with my own perceptions, is that animals and autistic people are different from normal people. Animals and autistic people don't have to be paying attention to something in order to see it. Things like jiggly chains pop out at us; they
grab
our attention whether we want them to or not.

For a normal human being, almost nothing in the environment pops. That means it's practically impossible for a human being to actually
see
something brand-new in the first place. People probably don't like novelty any more than animals do, but people don't get exposed to much novelty, because they don't notice it when it's there.
Humans are built to see what they're expecting to see,
and it's hard to
expect
to see something you've never seen. New things just don't register.

The research on inattentional blindness was shocking, because psychologists had always thought there were all kinds of things in the visual world that automatically grabbed people's attention—like an airplane blocking a runway. But it turns out that's not true. There
are
a few things that seem to grab people's attention, like the sight or sound of your own name, or large-sized objects, or—this one took me by surprise—cartoon happy faces. Not cartoon
sad
faces; a cartoon sad face is just as invisible as everything else for people who aren't actively paying attention. But a cartoon happy face will snatch people out of their inattention.

I wish they'd done some comparative research with animals and autistic people, because my guess is that animals and autistic people either don't have inattentional blindness at all, or don't have nearly as much of it as normal people do. Animals definitely act like they see everything, because you can't get anything past a cow. That's one of the reasons why a ranch owner has to correct every wrong detail, because a cow will
see
every wrong detail.