People who love their pets usually feel like they have a pretty good idea what an animal needs to have a good life. The basic necessities of life for pets are the same as they are for us: food, safety, companionship.
That’s a good start, but if that’s all you know about animals you can still get into trouble. Just to give you the first example that pops into my head: anyone who’s gone out and bought himself a Border collie—or who’s thinking about going out and buying himself a Border collie—is missing one big item from the Border collie list, and that is a job. Border collies aren’t built for a life of leisure, and they can get nutty if that’s what you give them. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t find this out until after they’ve got the dog. Then they have to spend the next ten years trying to give their pet something useful to do.
It’s doubly hard for ranchers, feedlot managers, and sometimes even veterinarians to know exactly what they should do to treat the animals in their care responsibly. What does a cow headed to slaughter need in order to have a happy life?
If I had my druthers humans would have evolved to be plant eaters, so we wouldn’t have to kill other animals for food. But we didn’t, and I don’t see the human race converting to vegetarianism anytime soon. I’ve tried to eat vegetarian myself, and I haven’t been able to manage it physically. I get the same feeling you get with hypoglycemia; I get dizzy and light-headed, and I can’t think straight. My mother is exactly the same way, and a lot of people with processing problems have told me they have this reaction, too, so I’ve always wondered if there’s a connection. If there’s something different about your sensory processing, is there something different about your metabolism, too?
There could be. It’s possible that a brain difference could also involve a metabolic difference, because the same genes can do different things in different parts of the body. A gene that contributed to autism might contribute to a metabolic difference, or any other kind of difference. Parents have always said that their autistic children have lots of physical problems, too, usually involving the gut, and mainstream researchers haven’t paid a lot of attention to this.
So until someone proves otherwise I’m operating from the hypothesis that at least some people are genetically built so that they have to have meat to function. Even if that’s not so, the fact that humans evolved as both plant and meat eaters means that the vast majority of human beings are going to continue to eat both. Humans are animals, too, and we do what our animal natures tell us to do.
That means we’re going to continue to have feedlots and slaughterhouses, so the question is: what should a humane feedlot and slaughterhouse be like?
Everyone concerned with animal welfare has the basic answer to that: the animal shouldn’t suffer. He should feel as little pain as possible, and he should die as quickly as possible.
But although the principle is obvious, putting it into operation isn’t, because it’s hard to know how much pain an animal feels. It’s hard to know how much pain a person feels when you get right down to it, but at least a person can tell you in plain language that he feels horrible. An animal can’t do that.
The problem isn’t just that animals don’t talk. Animals also hide their pain. In the wild any animal who’s injured is likely to be finished off by a predator, so probably animals evolved a natural tendency to act as if nothing’s wrong. Small, vulnerable prey animals like sheep, goats, and antelope are especially stoic, whereas predator animals can be big babies. Cats can yowl their heads off when they get hurt, and dogs scream bloody murder if you happen to step on their paws. That’s probably because cats and dogs don’t have to worry about getting killed and eaten, so they can make all the noise they want.
Prey animals can be incredibly uncomplaining. A few years ago my student Jennifer and I saw a bunch of bulls being castrated. The vet was using a rubber band procedure, wrapping a tight band around the bull’s testicles and leaving it there for several days. That sounds horrible, but vets use it because it’s less traumatic than surgery, although there are individual differences in how cattle react to it. Some bulls act perfectly normal, while others repeatedly stamp their feet. I interpret foot stamping as a sign of discomfort but not overwhelming pain.
A few bulls, though, act as if they’re in agony. They lie down on the ground in strange, contorted positions and they moan—but they do this only when they’re alone. When we were at the lot, one of the bulls was having a bad pain reaction, and when Jennifer walked up to his pen he jumped to his feet and greeted her as if nothing was wrong. The other bulls, who didn’t seem to be especially bothered by the procedure, didn’t change their behavior one way or another. When they thought they were alone—I was watching them from inside the scale house so they couldn’t see me—they didn’t act any different.
Sheep are the ultimate stoics. I once observed a sheep who’d just had excruciating bone surgery. I would have had no way of knowing how much pain that animal was in based on the way she was acting, and a hungry wolf would have had no reason to pick her out of a flock. An injured animal in terrible pain will actually eat food—something all our theories of stress tell us shouldn’t happen. Physiologically, bad injuries and pain are severe forms of stress, and severe stress normally diverts bodily resources away from eating and reproduction. I warn vets about this all the time: there’s no way to know how much pain an animal is in when you’re right there in the room with him. Animals mask pain.
Predator animals like dogs are less likely to mask their pain, but even they do it to some degree. Pain masking may be why a lot of vets will neuter a female dog and send her home without any painkiller. Any human who’s ever had abdominal surgery will tell you it’s agonizingly painful, but vets say that dogs sure don’t act like they’re feeling anywhere near as bad as a human does. We don’t know whether they’re masking their pain or whether they just don’t feel as much pain as we do in the first place. Either way it’s a problem, because animals need some pain to keep them quiet so they can recover. If dogs do mask surgical pain it’s especially dangerous, because a dog won’t spend any time alone if she can help it. A lot of vets will tell you they don’t like to give pain medication because they want your dog to have enough pain to slow it down for a while. That’s not a concern you’ll ever hear from a doctor who operates on humans.
A friend of mine found this out the hard way. She had a young female Lab who was used to playing with three other young dogs. You put four very young dogs together, and you’ve got some wild and woolly play, which is what went on every day in my friend’s backyard. The Labrador had her surgery in the afternoon, then went home the same night. She was groggy and out of it, but the first thing she did when she got home was jump up on the sofa at the end of her owners’ bed and from there up onto the bed. No human being five hours out of abdominal surgery will jump onto a couch, ever. That’s something you just don’t see.
So my friend and her husband gave the Lab doggie tranquilizers for a couple of days to keep her quiet, but she still played so vigorously with the other dogs that she didn’t heal properly. Instead of developing a thin red scar where the incision had been made, the surgical wound kept getting wider, turning into a concave area of shiny, moist tissue.
Unfortunately, my friend didn’t know what the wound was supposed to look like and didn’t realize until almost too late that it wasn’t healing right. She was inspecting the wound every day to see if it looked infected, and while it didn’t look good to her, the incision didn’t look infected, either. She was getting more and more worried, but she thought she was just being an anxious owner.
Finally she got so worried she took her dog back to the vet. He took one look at the dog’s belly and told my friend that if she hadn’t come in that day her dog’s intestines would have been “lying on the floor” by nighttime. There was no infection, but the skin tissue was completely broken down, and there was only a thin veneer of it left holding the viscera inside. My friend was horrified. You can see why vets worry about too little pain instead of too much. That Lab could have died from a routine spaying procedure all because she wasn’t showing any pain, so she didn’t slow down her social life with the other dogs for even one day.
DO ANIMALS HURT?
The short answer is yes. Animals feel pain. So do birds, and we now have pretty good evidence that fish feel pain, too.
We know animals feel pain thanks both to behavioral observation and to some excellent research on animals’ use of painkillers. Starting with behavior, dogs, cats, rats, and horses all limp after they’ve hurt their legs, and they’ll avoid putting weight on the injured limb. That’s called pain guarding. They limit their use of the injured body part to guard it from further injury. Chickens who’ve just had their beaks trimmed peck much less, another obvious form of pain guarding. (Ranchers trim chickens’ beaks because chickens get in horrible fights and will peck each other to death. The vet trims off the sharp point so the chicken can’t use it as a knife blade.)
We think insects probably don’t feel pain, by the way, because an insect will continue to walk on a damaged limb.
Up until recently nobody knew whether fish felt pain or not, but two researchers in Scotland have shown that they almost certainly do. The study used electrical measurements of the brain backed up by behavioral observation. First they anesthetized some fish and applied painful stimuli like heat and mechanical pressure to their bodies while running a brain scan. They found neurons in the fish’s brains that fired in a pattern very close to pain firing in a human brain. Assuming this study can be replicated, it shows that fish have at least the sensory component of pain, though it doesn’t tell us whether the fish were actually feeling it consciously. Humans with certain kinds of brain damage can have the sensory component of pain without the “suffering” component, which I’ll get to in a moment.
In the second part of the study, the researchers used behavioral observation to figure out what the fish were probably feeling. They injected either bee venom or vinegar into the fishes’ lips, which would be painful for humans and other mammals, and then watched to see what the fish did. The fish acted exactly the same way mammals act when they’re in pain. It took the fish an hour and a half longer to begin eating again than it did fish who’d had painless saline water injections, a classic sign of pain guarding. Their lips hurt, so they didn’t want to eat. They also showed other signs of pain. They rocked their bodies, something you see zoo animals do when they hurt, and they kept rubbing their lips against the side and bottom of the tank.
These obvious behavioral changes are strong evidence that the fish were consciously experiencing pain, although the fish brain is so different from the mammalian brain that we can’t say for sure. Fish don’t have any neocortex at all, and most neuroscientists think you have to have a neocortex to be conscious. Still, the fact that a fish doesn’t have a neocortex doesn’t have to mean that a fish isn’t conscious of pain, because different species can use different brain structures and systems to handle the same functions.
We have more evidence that animals feel pain from the experiments Francis C. Colpaert did on animals and pain medication in the early 1980s. He injected rats with bacteria that produce a temporary bout of arthritis we know is painful in humans, then gave them a choice between a bad-tasting liquid analgesic and a sweet, sugary-tasting liquid rats normally like. The rats chose the bad-tasting painkiller over the sugar solution, a pretty good sign they were choosing it for its painkilling properties. They definitely weren’t choosing it for its taste.1
Once their arthritis cleared up they switched to the sugar drink, another sign they were using the painkiller to treat pain. If they’d been choosing the painkiller just because they liked it—maybe the same way humans can use painkillers as a recreational drug—they would have kept on using it after their arthritis cleared up. But they didn’t. When their joints were inflamed they chose a yucky-tasting painkiller; when their joints returned to normal they stopped choosing the yucky-tasting painkiller.
Somebody needs to do Colpaert’s experiment with fish. That would tell us a lot.
HOW MUCH DOES PAIN HURT?
I think the real question isn’t whether or not animals (and birds and fish) feel pain. It’s pretty obvious they do.
The real question is how much does pain hurt? Does an animal with the same injury as a person feel as bad as a person does? We should be talking about degrees.
I think the answer to whether the same injury in an animal feels as bad as it does to a person is often no, for a couple of reasons. For one, even when they’re alone animals usually—not always, but usually—act as if an injury or disease hurts them less than the exact same injury or disease would hurt a person. That’s important.
Beyond that, a lot of what we know about the brain leads me to think animals may have a different experience of pain than people do. I remember being struck a year or so ago when I came across a study saying that chronic pain is associated with widely spread prefrontal hyperactivity.2 That surprised me. Pain seems like such a basic sensation I’d just naturally thought of it as a primitive reaction all creatures have to have to protect themselves from injury. To me, pain seemed like an ancient, lower-down brain function. Since the frontal lobes are as high up as you can get, I wasn’t expecting to read that pain is associated with high frontal lobe activity. That study made me wonder whether an animal’s conscious pain may be less intense than a person’s, because an animal’s frontal lobes are smaller and less developed.
When I started looking into the literature on frontal lobes and pain I found out that psychiatrists have known about this connection for years. The idea that active frontal lobes mean active pain was so well established that in the 1940s and 1950s a few psychiatrists began treating cases of severe and intractable chronic pain by surgically disconnecting the patient’s frontal lobes from the rest of his brain. The operation they did was called a leucotomy, and basically it was a less-invasive lobotomy. Where a lobotomy removed the frontal lobes completely, a leucotomy left the frontal lobes in place but cut the connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.
Both operations had a lot of horrible side effects, but the positive effect on a pain patient’s suffering was almost miraculous. A couple of days after the operation patients who’d been completely disabled by pain would be up and about, doing the things they used to do. The “recoveries” were so dramatic that Antonio Egas Moniz, who invented the operation, won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1949.3
I put “recovery” in quotation marks because leucotomy patients didn’t exactly recover. They acted like they’d recovered, but whenever people asked how they felt, they’d always say the pain was still there. What was different after surgery wasn’t the pain; it was their feelings about the pain. They didn’t care about it anymore. Antonio Damasio has a description of one of these patients in his book Descartes’ Error.4 The first time Dr. Damasio saw him, the patient was in such bad shape he was “crouched in profound suffering, almost immobile, afraid of triggering further pain.” Two days after the operation the man was sitting in a chair, playing cards with another patient. He looked completely relaxed.
When Dr. Damasio asked the patient how he was doing his answer was, “Oh, the pains are the same, but I feel fine now, thank you.” You can read story after story exactly like that one in the literature on leucotomy and pain. After their operations, leucotomy patients stopped caring about their pain. Dr. Damasio says they kept their pain but lost their suffering.
It’s impossible to imagine what it would feel like to have severe pain but not be bothered by it, because for the rest of us severe pain means severe suffering, period. They aren’t two different things. I’m sure that’s because our frontal lobes integrate sensory pain pathways so totally with frontal, emotional pathways of suffering that we can’t perceive any separation at all. It’s a little like stereoscopic vision: if your vision is working right you can’t separate what your right eye is seeing from what your left eye is seeing without closing one eye.
Even though we can’t feel what the leucotomy patients were feeling, it seems like they were still feeling something like what we would call pain, because they still asked for painkillers. On the other hand, after the operation they stopped asking for really strong painkillers like morphine. All they needed was aspirin. It’s possible they were feeling something similar to what the rest of us feel when we have pain mild enough to ignore. Mild pain is still pain, but it doesn’t ruin your life, whereas severe pain hijacks your attention system. That’s almost the definition of severe pain, that it commands all of a person’s attention.
Another piece of evidence the leucotomy pain patients were still feeling “real” pain, at least to some degree, is that if you suddenly poked one of these patients with a pin they would shriek in pain. They would actually shriek louder than a normal person with normal pain perception. Most researchers chalk this up not to greater pain but to lower impulse control. The frontal lobes censor and control outbursts of any kind, including screams of pain. Since these patients had lost their mental brakes, they screamed at a mild poke.
I think injured animals are probably somewhere in between a leucotomy patient and a normal human being. They do feel pain, sometimes intense pain, because their frontal lobes haven’t been surgically separated from the rest of their brains. But they probably aren’t as upset about pain as a human being would be in the same situation, because their frontal lobes aren’t as big or all-powerful as a human’s. That’s why they don’t slow down after surgery the way we do. They don’t feel bad enough to slow down. I think it’s possible that animals may have as much pain as people do, but less suffering.
AUTISM AND PAIN
A lot of autistic people are the same way, which is another reason I tend to think animal pain is less severe than human pain on average. As I’ve mentioned more than once, whenever I come across a difference between animals and normal people that involves the frontal lobes, I’ve usually found the same difference in autistic people. We have a lot in common with animals. So I’m expecting to find the same thing with pain perception.
Just like animals, quite a few autistic people—not all, but many—act like they feel less pain than nonautistic people. This happens so often that insensitivity to pain is listed on most symptom checklists for autism. It’s especially shocking with little kids who are self-injurious. Some of them can slap their heads hard with their hands and not seem to feel any pain at all (other autistic children slap their heads and then cry). There’ve even been reports of autistic children burning their hands on hot stoves and not reacting, although fortunately that’s extremely rare. Autistic children don’t have such low pain sensitivity that they’re in danger of injuring themselves without knowing it.
Another interesting thing: a lot of parents tell me their autistic children don’t have normal sensitivity to cold, either. They can spend hours in the deep end of a freezing cold swimming pool while all the other kids just splash around for a few minutes and then go warm up on the deck. I don’t know whether animals have lower cold sensitivity on the whole. Animals in northern climates do better in winter cold than people do, but they have nice fur coats to keep them warm and people don’t. A wolf’s coat is so thick snow doesn’t melt on its body.
So I have no way of knowing how cold perception compares between animals and people with autism. Also, I want to make sure I’m not implying to parents or teachers or anybody else that autistic people are impervious to everything that comes their way. The autistic sensory system is abnormal for a person, while an animal’s sensory system is normal for an animal, so I don’t know where the similarities begin and end. I do know that while some things are less painful for autistic people than for typical people, other things, especially certain types of sounds, are more painful. I remember one autistic woman saying she found the sound of the ocean excruciating. (There might even be stimuli that are more dangerous for people with autism, though we don’t know that. A few years ago I talked to a woman involved in autism research who said she was concerned that some autistic people might be more susceptible to heat stroke. I’d never heard that before, and she based her comment on just a couple of families, so I don’t want parents to start worrying about it. I bring it up because I don’t want to minimize the discomfort an autistic person could be feeling.)
I don’t remember how I reacted to pain as a child, but as an adult I’ve been told that I’m a lot less sensitive to pain than nonautistic people. When I was “spayed” (I had a full hysterectomy, medically the exact same procedure as spaying a dog, that left an eight-inch scar across my stomach) I acted more like my friend’s Lab than a post-surgical human being. The nurses said I didn’t use anywhere near the amount of IV painkiller other patients did. Then when I went home, I took one prescription pain pill and that was it. I didn’t need any more.
In the hospital I ran a little experiment on myself. When I was sure the nurses weren’t around, I got out of bed and got down on all fours like a dog. The staff would have had a fit if they’d seen me. I found out that as long as I held still my pain was a lot less than it was standing up or sitting down. Crawling felt terrible, but not as bad as walking did. Still, even on all fours I didn’t feel like jumping up on a sofa, so obviously I’m not as impervious to pain as a Labrador retriever. Then again, no dog is as impervious to pain as a Labrador retriever, either. Labs are notorious for their high pain threshold, which is one of the reasons they make such good pets for children. A little kid can jump all over them and maul them half to death and they feel nothing. (Not that I’d recommend any child being allowed to do that. It’s bad manners, and with other breeds it could be dangerous.) Try stepping on any normal dog’s paw and you get an ear-splitting yelp so loud that for a moment you think you’ve killed your pet. Step on a Lab’s paw and he doesn’t even blink. Labs are built for racing through bramble and brush to retrieve game, or jumping into freezing cold water to retrieve fish. Nothing fazes them.
Back to my experiment, it’s possible there’s something about being a four-legged creature instead of a two-legged creature that makes the pain of physical injuries less intense. But even if that turns out to be true, I expect it’s going to be only part of the explanation for why animals act as if they have less pain than we do for the same injury. Eventually we’ll find out that the real explanation for the difference in behavior is a difference inside the brain.
FEAR IS WORSE THAN PAIN
A lot of effort has been put into creating humane slaughter systems so the animal doesn’t suffer. That part was easy, relatively speaking. If all you had to do to eliminate suffering was to make sure the animal died instantly, today almost all of our slaughterhouses would have to be considered humane.
But eliminating pain isn’t enough. We have to think about animals’ emotional lives, not just their physical lives. We’re responsible for slaughterhouse animals; they wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for us. So we have to do more than just take away physical pain.
The single worst thing you can do to an animal emotionally is to make it feel afraid. Fear is so bad for animals I think it’s worse than pain. I always get surprised looks when I say this. If you gave most people a choice between intense pain and intense fear, they’d probably pick fear.
I think that’s because humans have a lot more power to control fear than animals do. My guess is that animals and normal humans are opposites when it comes to fear and pain, and for roughly the same reason: different levels of frontal lobe functioning. This idea first popped out at me when I read two studies back-to-back on the frontal lobes in pain and in fear.5 What struck me was that while an active prefrontal cortex was associated with increased pain, it was also associated with reduced fear (though not with reduced anxiety). Pain and fear, at least in these studies, were opposites.6
The story isn’t that simple, of course, but it’s close enough that, until we learn more, I believe animals have lower pain and higher fear than people do. My other reason for believing this at least provisionally is that it’s the same with autistic people. As a general rule, we have lower pain, higher fear, and lower frontal lobe control of the rest of our brain than nonautistic people. Those three things go together. (I’m not saying that autistic people have no pain at all and don’t need painkillers. I don’t want to give that impression.)
You almost have to work with animals to see what a terrible emotion fear is for them. From the outside, fear seems much more punishing than pain. Even an animal who’s completely alone and giving full expression to severe pain acts less incapacitated than an animal who’s scared half out of his wits. Animals in terrible pain can still function; they can function so well they can act as if nothing in the world is wrong. An animal in a state of panic can’t function at all.
I also think intense fear is an easier state for animals to get into than it is for normal human beings—a lot easier. Animals feel intense fear when they’re threatened in any way, regardless of whether they’re predators or prey.
While all animals can be overwhelmed by terror, prey animals like cows, deer, horses, and rabbits spend a lot more time being scared than predators do. You’ve heard the expression “like a deer caught in the headlights”—that pretty much sums up the prey animal’s psyche. They are very nervous animals, because the only way a prey animal can survive in the wild is to run. Since a prey animal has to start running before the lion does, that means it has to be hyper-alert all the time, keeping a watch out for danger.
You have to be gentle when you’re working with prey animals. I’ve seen so many animals ruined by owners who traumatized them through rough or ignorant handling. The whole idea of breaking a horse is a perfect example. If you break a horse, he’s broken. He’s traumatized for life and usually no use to anyone after that, including himself a lot of times. Just like the horses at my school.
That’s another thing autistic people have in common with animals: we have long memories, especially for fear. Clara Barton had a famous saying: “I distinctly remember forgetting that.” No autistic person would have come up with that. We can’t forget bad stuff on purpose, and neither can animals.
I’m sure that’s why I relate to prey animals like cattle as strongly as I do: because my emotional makeup is similar. Fear is a horrible problem for people with autism—fear and anxiety. Fear is usually defined as a response to external threats, while anxiety is a response to internal threats. If you step on a snake you feel fear; if you think about stepping on a snake you feel anxiety.
It’s not clear whether the brain system underlying fear and anxiety is the same. I think most researchers have assumed that it is, but recent research by Ned Kalin, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has found a difference between our “initial responses to fearful stimuli” and an “anxious temperament.”7 The amygdala handles fearful stimuli, but the prefrontal cortex is responsible for an anxious temperament. When the amygdala is damaged the anxious temperament doesn’t go away.
Based on my own observation of animals and of myself, I think nature created at least two different emotional systems to handle threats: fight-or-flight fear and the orienting response I talked about in Chapter 2. The fight-or-flight corresponds to fear, and I wonder whether the orienting response might correspond to anxiety or to the anxious temperament.
I say that because if I’m God and I’m designing an animal I don’t want to give him only a fight-or-flight system. I want to give him vigilance as well, because I want him to keep a lookout. I need two different systems because if he just chronically flees every potential threat, he’s going to use up his energy reserves. The reason I think vigilance may be linked to anxiety is that anxious people are always on guard, always watching for trouble.
I don’t know what the research will show, but I do know that antidepressants have separated my orienting response from my fear response. One reason I say this is that I take antidepressants, and they’ve gotten rid of my fear but not my orienting response, which makes me think the two responses are based in separate systems in my brain. If you take something like the high-pitched back-up alarm on a garbage truck, before I took medication I would almost have a panic attack hearing that sound. On medication I don’t panic, but the beeping turns on my orienting response and I can’t turn it off. If I’m trying to sleep and I hear a back-up beep I can’t not orient to it; I have to pay attention. There’s no way I can fall asleep. It’s as if the medication split my system apart chemically. Intense fear got turned off; orienting and hyper-vigilance stayed on.
Autistic people have so much natural fear and anxiety—I’m almost comfortable saying it’s universal—that when they’re young they can be like little wild animals. For years people thought autistic children were unteachable because they were so uncontrollable, and a lot of people think that the feral children we’ve heard about over the years—children said to have been raised by wolves—were actually autistic. No one would call an autistic child feral today, but the word is a pretty accurate description of the way a lot of these children—not all, but quite a lot—appear to normal people who’ve never dealt with them before.
Autistic children seem “wild” for a lot of different reasons, not all of which relate to animals. A huge problem for autistic children, though not for animals, is scrambled sensory processing. The world isn’t coming in right. So young autistic children end up looking wild for the same reason Helen Keller looked wild: parents and teachers can’t get through to them. In some ways it’s almost like they have to raise themselves. A lot of them do a good job of it, because over the years they seem to start piecing things together. One mother told me she felt as if her son had to “learn to see,” and I bet there’s a lot of truth to that.
But one of the biggest reasons autistic children (and more than a few autistic adults) seem so “untamable” is that they’re terrified of so many things. It can take years for an autistic child to lose his fear of the most ordinary events, like getting a haircut or going to the dentist, if he ever does. There are plenty of autistic adults who have to be given general anesthesia to have their teeth worked on. They’ve never gotten over their terror.
This is what we have in common with animals. Our fear system is “turned on” in a way a normal person’s is not. It’s fear gone wild. In my own case, overwhelming anxiety hit at puberty. From age eleven to age thirty-three, when I discovered antidepressant medication, I felt exactly the way you feel when you’re about to defend your dissertation, only I felt that way all day long, every single day. I was in a constant, daily state of emergency. It was horrible. If I hadn’t gone on medication I couldn’t have had a life at all. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to have a career.
FREEDOM FROM FEAR
It seems likely that animals and autistic people both have hyper-fear systems in large part because their frontal lobes are less powerful compared to the frontal lobes in typical folks. The prefrontal cortex gives humans some freedom of action in life, including some freedom from fear. As a rule, normal people have more power to suppress fear, and to make decisions in the face of fear, than animals or (most) autistic people.
The frontal lobes fight fear in two ways. First, the frontal lobes are the brakes. The frontal lobes tamp down the amygdala, a tiny, evolutionarily ancient structure in the middle of the brain that produces fear. The amygdala tells the pituitary to pump out stress hormones such as cortisol; the prefrontal cortex tells the pituitary to slow down. I don’t know for a fact that an animal’s or autistic person’s frontal lobe braking system is weaker than a nonautistic person’s, but my guess is that it is. We could certainly discover that different species have different levels of frontal control over fear, too.
Even if we find out animal frontal lobes do just as good a job of suppressing stress hormones as the human brain, the frontal lobes have a second means of combating fear that we know almost to a certainty is different in animals and in typical humans, and that is language. Nonautistic people use language to talk themselves out of fear.
There’s probably more to it than that. I have come to believe, from my own experience and from published research, that mental images are far more closely connected to fear and panic than words. Ruth Lanius, an assistant professor psychiatry at the University of Western Ontario, did a brain scan of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.8 She scanned the brains of eleven people with PTSD as a result of sexual abuse, assault, or car crashes and thirteen people who had suffered the same experiences without developing PTSD. The main difference she found between the two groups was that one group remembered their trauma visually and the other remembered it verbally, as a verbal narrative. Their scans backed this up. When people with PTSD remembered the trauma, visual areas of their brains lit up (along with other areas), and when people without PTSD remembered their traumas, verbal areas lit up.
Somehow words are associated with lower fear. This is one of the meanings of the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.” A picture of a scary thing is a lot more frightening than a verbal description of a scary thing. By the same token, a visual memory of a scary thing is more frightening than a verbal memory. No one knows why or how words are less frightening, or how this works in the brain. But I think that when it comes to managing their fear, animals and autistic people are at a big disadvantage because they have to rely on pictures.
I don’t know whether it’s easier to traumatize an animal than a human being overall. I think it probably is. I do know that once an animal has become traumatized it’s impossible to un-traumatize him. Animals never unlearn a bad fear.
There’s no reasoning with an animal who’s been scared half out of his wits. Here’s a classic example. When she was little, a friend of mine had a collie who became deathly afraid of the basement. Apparently the dog had gotten really sick when she was a puppy, and my friend’s parents put her in the basement so she wouldn’t mess up the house. Afterward the dog associated the basement with being horribly sick.
That dog never got over her fear of the basement, and she never set foot downstairs again for as long as she lived. It was sad, because the dad had his office in the basement, and the dog wouldn’t spend any time with him at all. My friend remembers her dad standing at the bottom of the stairs, calling “Lassie, Lassie. Here, Lassie,” in his softest voice. (They named the dog after the Lassie in the TV show.) Lassie would stand at the top of the stairs, staring at the dad, wagging her tail frantically, even whimpering and crying because she wanted to go down to him so badly. But she would not move. You could put a big thick juicy piece of raw steak halfway down the stairs—nothing doing. She wouldn’t budge. And if someone tried to pick Lassie up and carry her down the stairs she’d get violent. This was a collie. This dog was so terrified of the basement she was fighting for her life.
People with severe cases of PTSD don’t get over it, either, but people with milder traumas have a lot of leeway in dealing with their fears. My friend with the collie developed a mild case of PTSD herself after a car crash about six years ago. She was having semiflashbacks while she was driving, and she felt a huge amount of tension and fear whenever she had to drive on the freeway. I say semiflashbacks because she didn’t feel as if she was reliving the accident; it was more that she kept vividly remembering the accident anytime she had to drive anywhere, and sometimes even when she wasn’t anywhere near a car. Her memories were all visual, just like the people in Dr. Lanius’s experiment.
It took her a good two or three years, but today she’s basically over it. Getting into a car doesn’t automatically trigger memories of the accident the way it used to, and most of the time she takes driving for granted the way she did before the accident. An animal can’t do this. No animal goes back to acting nonchalant about a person, place, or situation once he’s been scared half out of his wits. It just doesn’t happen.
FEARLESS GUPPIES
I don’t know where autistic people fall on the trauma spectrum, although I believe animal fear is more adaptive than autistic fear, on the whole. Autistic people have way too much fear, while in most circumstances animals have just enough.
I say “enough fear” because fear has a purpose, and an animal or a person without fear has a disability. The purpose of fear is to keep us alive. It does an excellent job of this, judging by what happens when you’re low-fear. Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams describe a terrific study on fear and survival in their book Why We Get Sick.9 Some researcher put a bunch of guppies in with a piranha in a fish tank. Some of the guppies were highly fearful, some were moderately fearful, and some were practically fearless. The fearless guppies were the ones who would stare straight at the piranha.
The fearless guppies got eaten first. If you’re a guppy and you’re not afraid to swim out in the open and stare straight at a piranha, you’re not going to live long. Next to go were the medium-fear guppies, who didn’t stare straight at the piranha but didn’t do everything in their power to get away, either. They got eaten next.
The fearful guppies lived the longest. They got eaten, too, but not until everyone else was eaten up. Fear kept them alive longer.
It’s pretty obvious how fear would help keep you alive when you’re a guppy swimming with a piranha. But fear is also a survival mechanism when you’re a piranha swimming with another piranha. Researchers found this out doing genetic knockout work with mice. A knockout mouse is a mouse whose genes have been manipulated to eliminate, or knock out, just one of them. You can eliminate both copies of the gene, or just one copy. Once the gene is knocked out the researcher studies the mouse to see what’s different about it, if anything.
The link between fear and survival popped out in the middle of a knockout study on learning. Six months into the study there were some strange things going on in the mouse colony. The researchers would come to the lab first thing in the morning and find dead mice in the cages. Their backs were broken and there was blood everywhere. They had obviously fought to the death, which is very unusual for mice. Mice normally either avoid fights, or end a fight before either mouse dies.10
The researchers discovered that they hadn’t just knocked out some aspect of learning; they’d also knocked out fear. A normal mouse, with a normal amount of fear, does not fight to the death. He fights until he’s beaten, or sees he’s going to lose, and then he yields. Fear keeps him alive. The knockout mice were almost fearless, and they fought to the death.
The researchers discovered some other interesting things about their mice. A normal mouse will fight an intruder on his territory. Lab experiments on this are clear: if you put a strange mouse inside another mouse’s cage, the resident mouse will attack. That’s called defensive aggression, because the resident mouse is fighting to defend his home. A normal mouse who’s forced to become an intruder—a mouse who suddenly gets put inside another mouse’s cage—won’t fight. It will either run away or stand up in a defensive position to protect itself.
Mice with just one copy of the knockout gene were different. (Mice with both copies of the gene knocked out were messed up in so many ways that I’m not going to talk about them here. They had huge problems in lots of realms, which makes it harder to say anything specific about fear.) These mice showed normal defensive aggression if a stranger mouse was put into their cage. They fought to protect their home territory. But they also fought when they were the intruder. They’d get dropped into a strange cage already “owned” by a strange mouse, and instead of trying to run, they’d fight. Not only did they attack the resident mouse, but after an initial skirmish they’d approach the resident mouse again and start a whole new fight. This is something you’d never see in a normal mouse. A normal mouse finding himself on another mouse’s territory would be too frightened to fight.
The experimenters knew the problem was reduced fear because they ran a bunch of other tests showing that these mice were less fearful in all kinds of situations. One example: the knockout mice didn’t freeze up as much as normal mice do when put in a cage where they’d been shocked. The experimenters also ran experiments showing that the mice remembered the fact that they’d been shocked just fine. To test whether or not mice remember the place where they’ve been shocked, experimenters use a shuttle box, which is a cage with a partition in the middle that the mouse can jump over. The mouse only gets shocked on one side of the partition but not the other. All mice quickly learn which side is the bad side, and they stay on the good side. They remember which side is good and which side is bad.
The knockout mice remembered the shocks and they remembered that the shocks hurt. They just didn’t care. And they didn’t care because they didn’t have the right amount of fear. If these mice had been living in the wild they would have had very short lives.
STAYING ALIVE
That’s the point of emotions: survival. Normal emotions are essential to staying alive and well. Emotion is so important that if you had to choose between having an intact emotion system in the brain and having an intact cognitive system, the right choice would be emotion. Emotions are so important that, as Jaak Panksepp says, “there are good reasons to believe that the cognitive apparatus would collapse if our underlying emotional value systems were destroyed.”11
To most people, this doesn’t make sense. We humans tend to think of emotions as dangerous forces that need to be strictly controlled by reason and logic. But that’s not how the brain works. In the brain logic and reason are never separate from emotion. Even nonsense syllables have an emotional charge, either positive or negative. Nothing is neutral. That’s what you have to remember.
I want to stick with this idea for a little bit longer, because it’s important to understanding what fear means to an animal. The reason most people think logic is more important than feeling is that we aren’t usually aware of the connection between the two. A lot of people’s emotional life is unconscious a lot of the time, especially when you’re calmly thinking something through. You feel like you’re just using logic, but you’re actually using logic guided by emotion. You just aren’t aware of the emotion. Not only that, but sometimes when you are aware of your emotions, because you’re passionate about an issue or a person, you make bad decisions and you blame the emotion. And, of course, most of us definitely think other people’s emotional decisions are dumb!
We’re half right about all of this. A lot of obviously emotional decisions probably are dumb a lot of the time. But the problem isn’t the fact that emotion was involved. Everyone uses emotion to make decisions. People with brain damage to their emotional systems have a horrible time making any decision at all, and when they do make a decision it’s usually bad. The problem isn’t the emotion; the problem is that the emotions they’re using are dumb.
I recommend Descartes’ Error to anyone who’s interested in emotions, intuition, and decision making. Dr. Damasio has done a huge amount of work with frontal lobe patients who lost the ability to have what we call a gut feeling. Even though these patients still had completely normal IQs and logical reasoning abilities, they couldn’t function as normal adults. They needed other adults to take care of them, and after Dr. Damasio testified for one of them in court he qualified for permanent disability payments.
The really interesting thing is why these people can’t function. On paper, it seems like they ought to be able to manage their lives just fine. They pass most or even all of the standard neuropsychological tests. Elliot, Dr. Damasio’s patient, had a high IQ and tested well on “perceptual ability, past memory, short-term memory, new learning, language, and the ability to do arithmetic.”12 His attention was good, and so was his working memory.
Working memory, by the way, is the part of your memory that performs work. When you hold a phone number in mind while you dial you’re using working memory. Or, if you’re a researcher or a writer, working memory holds two different ideas in mind while you’re trying to figure out how they’re related. Working memory also searches your brain for any other ideas that might be related to the first two. In other words, working memory is in charge both of finding things in long-term memory and of holding those items in conscious memory so you can use them once they’re found. If you’ve got working memory deficits—which I do—it’s a problem.
Elliot’s working memory was fine. All of his cognitive abilities tested out fine, too; on paper there wasn’t anything wrong with him.
It took Dr. Damasio a long time to figure out what it was Elliot couldn’t do, and what he found relates directly to animals and their emotions. What Elliot couldn’t do was have a proper emotional response to life. Dr. Damasio writes, “I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration with my incessant and repetitious questioning…. [In the rest of his life] he tended not to display anger, and on the rare occasions when he did, the outburst was swift; in no time he would be his usual new self, calm and without grudges.”13
Elliot hadn’t just lost the big emotions like fear and anger, either. He’d lost his visceral emotions, the kind of thing you feel when you look at a photograph of a terrible accident or a wounded animal—or, on the positive side, a happy child or a sunset. He was mostly an emotional blank.
Why was that such a huge problem? Because people and animals use their emotions to predict the future and make decisions about what to do. That’s what Elliot couldn’t do after his brain damage: he couldn’t predict the future, so he couldn’t decide what to do about the future. He’d get stuck in endless deliberations instead. One time when Dr. Damasio asked him what day he wanted to come to the office next week, Elliot pulled out his date book and spent a full half-hour going through all the pros and cons of each one of the two days Dr. Damasio had suggested. He went on and on and on, spelling out all the possible consequences of either choice and never reaching a conclusion. Finally Dr. Damasio just picked one of the days. Without visceral emotion, Elliot couldn’t automatically predict which day would be better and which day would be worse; he also couldn’t tell whether the two days would be equally good or equally bad. He couldn’t decide about the future.
If he did manage to take an action, it was almost always the wrong one. His judgment was shot.
But he sure did great on all those tests. Eventually one of Dr. Damasio’s graduate students developed a test that picked up the difference between Elliot and people whose brains were normal. They called it the Gambling Test. In the test, the subject, who is called the Player, starts out with $2,000 in play money and four decks of cards to draw from. All he knows about the game is that every card he turns over will win him money, but a few of the cards will also require him to pay a “fine” to the experimenters, so he takes a loss on those draws. The goal is to try not to lose any of the loaned money and to win as much extra money as possible.
What the player doesn’t know is that decks A and B give you really high wins but also really high losses. Decks C and D give you lower wins and lower losses. If you could sit down and do the math you’d find out that in the end you come out ahead drawing from Decks C and D. But that’s not allowed, because the Gambling Test is supposed to be like life: it’s uncertain. You don’t know what’s going to happen, so you don’t know, for sure, what to do. You have to rely on intuition; you have to develop a feeling for which decks are the good ones.
That’s what emotions do. Emotions let you develop hunches. They give you a feeling—and it really is a feeling—for what’s going to happen in the future so you can make the right decision about what to do.
Elliot flunked the test. He started out like everyone else, picking cards from Decks A and B because the payoff was so high. But he didn’t change to Decks C and D when he noticed his money dwindling down to nothing. People with normal brains, and even people with other kinds of brain damage (including language disorders!) start to get a bad feeling about Decks A and B pretty quickly. Once they have that bad feeling they switch to Decks C and D. But Elliot never switched. Although he understood perfectly well that he was losing his shirt, he never got a bad feeling about A and B, so he never switched to C and D. He just kept on picking cards from A and B and going deeper into debt.
USING EMOTIONS TO PREDICT THE FUTURE
A healthy animal is the exact opposite of an emotional blank, and he makes sound, emotion-based decisions all the time. He has to; otherwise he’d be dead. The single most important thing emotions do for an animal is to allow him to predict the future. We didn’t always know that, but thanks to research we do now.
Animal behaviorists have learned that emotions work a lot like hunger. It’s easy to see that the whole point of hunger is to keep you alive and functioning. Hunger makes you get up off your comfy seat on the sofa, or up off your comfy seat on a rock inside your cave, and go find something to eat. But what most people don’t know is that hunger isn’t just a motivator of action, it’s also a predictor of the future. Your body doesn’t wait until the last possible moment to get hungry. Instead you get hungry long before you’re in danger of running out of the energy you need to keep on finding and consuming food. Hunger is an early warning system.
Nature is filled with systems just like the hunger system, and that includes our emotional system. Emotions don’t just give you motivation; they give you information—information about the future and what you need to do about it.
The way our bodies work reminds me of a question productivity consultants ask companies about when they deal with problems. Do they deal with a problem when it shows up, or when it blows up?14 The right answer is “when it shows up.” Companies that wait until the last minute to handle a problem end up handling a much bigger problem than they would have if they’d jumped on it as soon as they knew about it.
It’s the same way with nature, only nature goes management consultants one further: Mother Nature tries to keep us out of trouble in the first place. This isn’t speculation. We know that emotions work by letting animals predict the future thanks to research into fear and the sense of smell in rats.15 All mammals have two systems for smell: a close-up system (called the accessory olfactory system, or AOS) and a distant system (the main olfactory system, or MOS). The close-up system is extremely close-up; an animal almost has to be touching an object to smell it using the AOS.
Although it’s not a mammal, the snake is a good example of the AOS. Snakes smell the air by flicking their tongues in and out. When they do that they are actually catching air molecules on their tongues and moving them to the roofs of their mouths, where the AOS is located.16
When it comes to picking up a predator’s scent, the close-up system lets a rat smell a cat that’s sitting no more than a foot or two away. The distant system lets rats smell a cat way off in the distance.
So naturally everyone assumed that rats—and any animal who’s vulnerable to being attacked and eaten—would use their distant smell system to stay out of danger. It just stood to reason that if you’re a rat and you don’t react to a cat until you’re face-to-face with it, it’s too late. You’re lunch.
But it turns out that’s not the way things work at all. The distant system isn’t connected to fear centers in the rat’s brain, and the smell of a predator in the distance does not motivate a rat to flee. The distant smell system doesn’t affect a rat emotionally or behaviorally at all.
It’s the close-up system that’s connected to the fear centers in the rat’s brain, and it’s the close-up system that activates survival behaviors like freezing in place or fleeing. It’s the close-up system that keeps rats alive. We know this from experiments comparing rats whose close-up system has been disconnected from the rest of the brain to rats whose long-distance system has been disconnected. (This is done by snipping the fibers connecting the two inside the brain.) Only rats who have an intact close-up smell system act scared when they smell a predator. The instant they smell cat they freeze and start dropping more pellets of poop, classic signs of fear. The rats whose brains are getting input only from long-distance smell don’t react at all. They feel nothing emotionally.
Researchers were stunned to get this result. It was completely counterintuitive, because why would nature want a rat to wait to get scared until he’s standing face-to-face with a cat?
The answer is nature wouldn’t want that, and that’s not what nature did. What nature did by linking close-up smell to fear was to give the rat the ability to predict the future.
Here’s how it works. In the wild, rats get scared when they wander into a place where a predator has been in the past. There’s no cat there now (or let’s hope not), but there’s plenty of cat smell, and the rat is right on top of it when his close-smell system picks up the scent. Since most predators are territorial, where a cat has been in the past is an excellent indication of where it’s going to be in the future. So the rat’s close-up “scary smell” system lets it predict where any cats in the area are going to be and then get out of the way before they get there. It’s an early warning system. Animal emotions help animals stay out of trouble in the first place, which is a very good idea if you’re a rat. It’s probably a good idea if you’re a dog or a cat, too. Cats might want to stay away from major dog spots, and dogs who’ve lost fights might want to stay away from spots the victor dog is going to be visiting soon.
It seems like Mother Nature thinks an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And emotions are essential to prevention. A healthy fear system keeps animals, and people, alive by allowing them to predict the future.
When you think about emotions as a prediction system, it stands to reason that close-up smell would be wired to fear. But it’s still not obvious why nature would wire up a rat’s brain so that it doesn’t feel fear when it smells a real live cat off in the distance. Shouldn’t a rat who knows there’s a cat in the detectable distance be motivated to put even more distance between itself and death-by-cat?
I don’t think so. Fear is such an overwhelming emotion for an animal that evolution probably selected for brain systems that keep it under control. Propagating a species takes more than just not getting eaten. All creatures need to eat, sleep, mate, have babies, and feed and protect the young until they’re big enough to fend for themselves. To do all that, a rat has to have some time off from fear. If rats froze in place every time they smelled a cat in the distance they could be frozen around the clock, depending on the neighborhood where they live.
My explanation is ad hoc, of course. You can’t know why one thing evolved and another thing didn’t, and it’s a mistake to assume that everything we see in nature serves a purpose. Evolution can be random, and some things are probably just the side effects of other characteristics that did give animals an edge when it came to survival. But I think wiring close-up smell to fear probably did confer an evolutionary advantage. Until someone else comes up with a better idea, it makes sense to me.
The same basic principle (close-up = fear; distant = calm) probably applies to other senses as well. Take vision, for instance. People are always struck by how nonchalant prey animals are when they see a predator who can’t get to them—not just nonchalant but sometimes downright provocative. A friend of mine once watched a squirrel in a tree tease a cat way down on the ground for a full half hour. The squirrel would creep down the trunk, getting closer and closer to the cat, looking it straight in the eye, until finally the cat sprang. Then the squirrel would scamper back up to safety and the cat would have to drop back down to the ground, because the trunk was too long for the cat to make it all the way up to where the branches began. There’s no way for me to know what was in that squirrel’s brain, but to my friend it sure looked like the squirrel was deliberately taunting the cat. He definitely wasn’t frightened, because a frightened squirrel, just like a frightened rat, displays very specific behaviors like freezing in place. This was not a frightened squirrel.
He was definitely using his vision (he was probably smelling the cat, too), because he was staring at the cat intently. So obviously the sight of a predator out of the range of danger does not activate a squirrel’s fear system. I suspect that if you surgically removed his close-up smell system and put him eyeball-to-eyeball with a cat, he’d panic. Distant predators don’t fire up fear; close predators—or close signs of predators, like smell—do.
You see the same thing with dogs. Dogs know when other dogs are on a leash. Another friend of mine lives with a young male dog named Jazzie who’s part Rottweiler. Jazzie is an extremely dominant dog, so he’s always trying to get in fights. My friend’s husband says Jazzie takes offense at any dog who’s not “minding his own business,” which means a dog foolish enough to look Jazzie in the eye. According to Jazzie, a dog who happens to enter his body space is supposed to bow his head and avert his eyes. Maybe a cat can look at a king, as the saying goes, but a dog definitely cannot look at Jazzie. He’s going to get chomped if he does.
Jazzie lives next door to an unneutered golden retriever named Max whom he’s tangled with a couple of times. For a while after that everything was fine because Max acknowledged Jazzie as the leader. Whenever Max got within a certain distance of Jazzie he would avert his eyes and then, if the distance between them got even smaller, drop to the ground. Both dogs seemed to know how close it was okay for the two of them to be without Max having to look away or drop to the ground.
But if Jazzie happened to be on a leash, forget it. Max would drop all his submissive behaviors and carry on like Jazzie was no more threat than a flea. Max would also act outrageous whenever Jazzie was behind the sliding glass doors looking at him. My friend said it was hilarious watching the two of them. Max would look straight at Jazzie—just like that squirrel—then wander nonchalantly around the deck, peeing all over the place.
It’s the same story with deer, who are some of the most timid animals on the planet. Jazzie’s house has an invisible fence and the deer know exactly where the electronic perimeter is. They’ll calmly stand outside the boundary munching grass. Every once in a while they’ll give Jazzie a direct stare, a challenging behavior no prey animal would ever do to a dog close enough to strike. Those deer know Jazzie can’t get to them, so they aren’t afraid. Distant-sense sensory systems do not activate fear.
The total disconnect between distance sensing and fear is really striking in the wild. A herd of antelope won’t show the tiniest concern about a pride of lions sunning themselves not too far away. When you observe these animals you see that prey animals are very aware of whether or not a predator is stalking them. They know what stalking behavior looks like, and if they don’t see stalking behavior they don’t worry.
So we have a lot of evidence that animals are put together in such a fashion that they have a good chance of not getting frightened any more often than they have to. Nature seems to have tried to wire animals and people to have useful emotions, useful meaning emotions that keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Emotions keep us alive by letting us make good predictions about the future, and good predictions let us make good decisions about what comes next.
HOW DO ANIMALS KNOW WHAT’S SCARY?
There’s a fair amount of research showing that certain basic fears are built into animals and people. The visual cliff experiments I described in Chapter 2, showing very young children and animals refusing to crawl or walk over what looks to them like a cliff, are an example of an innate, inborn fear. No one has to teach young humans or animals to fear heights. They already know.
More recently, Jaak Panksepp found that laboratory-reared rats who’ve never seen or smelled a cat stop playing the instant you put a tuft of cat hair in their play space. Since frightened animals don’t play, that’s a good indication that those rats are afraid. “The animals moved furtively,” Dr. Panksepp says in Affective Neuroscience, “cautiously sniffing the fur and other parts of their environment. They seemed to sense that something was seriously amiss.”17
This experience got Dr. Panksepp to thinking about how many research laboratories might be messing up their results due to researchers’ coming to work smelling like their pet cats. The Pet Food Institute says there were 75 million pet cats living in the United States in 2002. That’s a lot of cats. Since a huge amount of what we know about the psychology of learning and behavior comes from lab rats, you have to wonder how much of that knowledge came from terrified rats. This is an extremely important question, because learning done in a state of fear is different from learning done in a state of calm. I’ll get to how it’s different shortly.
Dr. Panksepp didn’t have a pet cat, but he did have a dog, a Norwegian elkhound named Ginny. He realized he had to find out whether his own research was being affected by the fact that he was coming to work every day smelling like elkhound. So he covered his rats’ play space with a massive amount of Ginny’s hair, and—nothing happened. The rats kept right on frolicking and playing. Dr. Panksepp thinks this is evidence that ancient rats weren’t hunted too much by ancient dogs.18
UNIVERSAL FEARS
We know what most of the almost certainly innate fears are. All children under the age of two are afraid of sudden sounds, pain, strange new objects, and losing physical support.19 After age two, children lose these fears. That’s decent evidence that these fears are innate. Every child has them at the same age, then every child loses them at the same age.
Older children and adults also have a set of universal fears that may or may not be innate: sudden sounds, a stranger walking toward you with an angry look on his face, snakes, spiders, dark places, and high places. Animals have whole sets of similar fears. Most mammals don’t like snakes, and all animals are frightened by sudden sounds. Animals don’t like anything sudden at all.
Other animal fears are more specific to each species. Mice and rats, for instance, don’t like well-lit open spaces. If you plop a lab rat down in the middle of an open room in broad daylight he’ll freeze and defecate. That makes sense for a small prey animal like a rat whose best bet for not getting killed is to stay out of reach and out of sight. All those old Tom and Jerry cartoons are ethologically correct: mice like mice holes. Small prey animals are happiest in small, dark places where larger predators can’t get to them.
Big prey animals like cows and horses, on the other hand, are fine with wide-open spaces. They’d have to be or they couldn’t get enough food to eat. If you’re a thousand-pound animal trying to live on grass, you need a lot of grazing space. To stay safe, herd animals like horses and cows create their own “small space” by clustering together in groups. You’ll always find the dominant animals standing in the middle of the herd where it’s safest, too. That way they’ve got a lot of animal shields standing between them and whatever predator comes along.
Predator animals like wolves seem to be perfectly happy out in the open, but even they like to nap and sleep together inside a small den, where other predators can’t get at them. In short, all animals, predator or prey, have natural-seeming fears of the natural dangers their worlds present.
IT’S EASIER TO LEARN SOME FEARS THAN OTHERS
But the story doesn’t end there, because animals (and people) also have a number of fears that fall somewhere between innate and learned. These are fears that are extremely easy to pick up, like snake phobias in people. Snake phobias are common, and no snake has ever bitten most of the people who have them. Some people with snake phobias may never even have seen a snake outside a photograph. And yet they’re terrified by the very thought of a snake.
That wouldn’t necessarily seem like evidence that snake phobias are semi-innate if it weren’t for the fact that people don’t easily develop phobias to all kinds of things that are much more dangerous nowadays, like automobiles or electrical outlets. I’m not even sure a person can develop a car phobia per se. People who’ve been in bad accidents can and do develop post-traumatic stress syndrome, but they don’t feel fear just looking at a photograph of a car, as people with snake phobias do looking at a picture of a snake. They’re terrified of riding in a car, but the fear doesn’t spread any further.
Animals show the same bias toward certain fears and against others. Psychologist Susan Mineka’s experiments with monkeys and snakes at Northwestern University are probably the most important evidence we have of this. She started with the fact that monkeys living in the wild are terrified of snakes, while monkeys raised in labs are not.20 Show a live snake to a bunch of wild-reared monkeys and they explode. They make faces, flap their ears, grip the bars of their cages, and their hair stands on end (piloerection). Wild-reared monkeys refuse to even look at the snakes; that’s how aversive the presence of a snake is to a wild-reared monkey.
But show the same snake to a monkey who grew up in the lab and nothing happens. He’s not worried. So obviously monkeys don’t come into the world already knowing snakes are bad. Somebody has to teach them.
What Dr. Mineka showed is that it’s super-easy to teach a lab monkey to be just as terrified of snakes as any monkey living out in the wild. When Dr. Mineka exposed her fearless monkeys to wild-reared monkeys acting afraid of snakes, the lab monkeys instantly got scared themselves, and they stayed scared. All they had to do was watch one snake-scared monkey, and they were snake-scared for life themselves. It took only a few minutes. Moreover, the lab-reared monkeys learned the same level of fear the demonstrator monkeys showed. If the demonstrator monkey was scared but not panicked, the observer monkey learned to be scared but not panicked, too. If the demonstrator monkey was terrified, the observer monkey learned to be terrified.
And, after learning snake fear through observation, the lab-reared monkey was just as good a fear model for other lab-reared monkeys as the wild-reared monkey had been for him.
Dr. Mineka also showed that it’s impossible to teach a monkey to be afraid of a flower using the same technique. She showed her lab monkeys videotapes of a flower followed by a shot of a monkey acting terrified, making it look like the monkey on the tape was terrified of the flower. That tape had no effect. Watching a video of a monkey acting afraid of a snake scared the lab monkeys to death; watching a video of a monkey acting afraid of a flower didn’t faze them.
Most researchers have concluded that the fear of snakes is semi-innate. Monkeys aren’t born fearing snakes, but they are born ready to fear snakes at the first hint of trouble. Animal behaviorists call snakes a prepared stimulus, meaning that monkeys have been prepared by evolution easily to acquire a fear of snakes.
Dr. Mineka also found she could protect an animal from developing a fear the same way. If she first exposed a lab-reared monkey to another lab-reared monkey not acting afraid of a snake, that gave him “immunity.” After that, if he saw a wild-reared monkey acting scared of the snake, he did not develop snake fear himself. He held on to his first lesson.
LEARNING BY WATCHING
This is called observational learning. When it comes to evolutionary fears, as well as to many other areas of learning, animals and people learn by watching what other animals or people do, not by doing something themselves and learning from the consequences. I have the impression this lesson hasn’t quite been absorbed by most educators. You read that hands-on learning is best, but that may not always be so. Obviously evolution has selected for strong observational learning in animals and in humans. One of the most amazing examples of this is in Frans de Waal’s book The Ape and the Sushi Master. Dr. de Waal says that in Japan, apprentice sushi cooks spend three years just watching the sushi master prepare sushi. When the apprentice finally prepares his first sushi, he does a good job of it.21
Dr. Mineka’s research shows how people and animals can develop phobias without ever having had a bad experience with the thing they’re afraid of. Classical learning theory always assumed people learn phobias through direct experience. That’s logical, but it doesn’t correspond to reality, because lots of phobic people can’t remember any initial bad experience. Probably most people with fear of flying, just to give a common example, have never come close to crashing.
So a lot of therapists had suspected that phobias are contagious, that people can “catch” a phobia by hanging around people who already have it. Dr. Mineka’s research showed that not only is it possible to learn a phobia by being exposed to someone else who has that phobia, it’s incredibly natural and easy to acquire a phobia this way. Fear is contagious.
The fact that animals learn what to be afraid of from watching other animals is another example of evolution giving animals and people an ability to ward off trouble before it happens. If you’re Mother Nature and you decide to set things up so everybody learns what to be afraid of through direct, hands-on personal experience, you’re going to lose a lot of animals. The only monkeys you’d have around to propagate the species would be monkeys who’d had the good luck never to meet up with a snake in the first place, or monkeys who did meet up with a snake and lived to tell the tale. The odds of keeping monkeys on the planet are going to be a lot higher if you set things up so monkeys learn about snakes from other monkeys.
AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS
Of course, it’s not going to be much use learning about snakes in the safety of your monkey community if you don’t remember what you know the next time you run into one. What happens if your monkey elders tell you snakes are bad news, and it slips your mind?
When you think about how much stuff you’ve forgotten in your life (quick! what’s the quadratic equation?) it’s kind of horrifying to think that our survival depends on remembering all the bad stuff we’re supposed to be afraid of.
Evolution solved that problem by making fear learning permanent. All intensely emotional learning is permanent. That’s why you can forget everything you ever learned in trigonometry, but no one born before 1958 is ever going to forget where they were when Kennedy was shot, and no one born before 1996 is ever going to forget where they were on September 11. You couldn’t forget where you were even if you wanted to, and even if you tried to.
The story is a little different with lesser traumas and fears. Animals and people certainly act as if they can forget a milder fear, and in the past behaviorists did quite a bit of research on this. Typically researchers would teach an animal to be afraid of something neutral, such as a light or a tone; then teach the animals to stop being afraid of the light or tone. They did this by pairing the conditioned stimulus, which was the light or the tone, with something aversive, like a shock to the foot or a puff of air to the eye.
Under those conditions, pretty quickly an animal would start reacting fearfully to the light or the tone, at which point the experimenters stopped pairing the light or tone with anything bad. Sure enough, after a while the animals stopped reacting badly to the light or the tone. Behaviorists called this phenomenon extinction, because they had extinguished the response. The animals seemed to have forgotten that lights or tones were scary. Researchers found the same thing in humans.
However, it turns out that extinction doesn’t actually wipe out the fear from your brain. It’s still there. If you teach an animal to fear a tone that precedes an air puff to the eye, and then teach him not to fear the tone because there’s no more air puff, he hasn’t forgotten. He stops blinking reflexively every time he hears the tone, but all you have to do to get him blinking again is to pair the tone with the air puff again just once and the animal is right back where he started. He knows that tone means air puff. He hasn’t forgotten.
Both animals and people can “get over” a learned fear. But today we understand that getting over a fear isn’t the same thing as forgetting a fear. Extinction isn’t forgetting; it’s new learning that contradicts old learning. Both lessons—tone is neutral and tone is bad—stay in emotional memory.
FAST FEAR, SLOW FEAR
When you spend a lot of time with animals it’s easy to see that animal fears are worse than human fears a lot of the time. It’s also easy to see that you, as a human, share certain core fears with animals.
Cows don’t like snakes, and neither do you. You and any cow you meet see eye-to-eye on that one.
But beyond that, it’s hard for people to empathize with an animal’s fears. A lot of times it’s hard even to know what an animal’s fears are. I get a lot of calls from people who can’t figure out what’s getting their animals so upset. I’ll go out to a plant that’s having problems and find the manager standing there in the middle of what looks like a perfectly normal, perfectly safe feedlot to him, and he’s got a couple hundred head of cattle having conniptions. He has no idea why.
To understand animal fears it pays to know something about the brain. One of the most important researchers in the neurology of fear is Joseph LeDoux of New York University. In his book The Emotional Brain, Dr. LeDoux explains that fear happens in the amygdala.22 What’s really interesting for nonscientists is that he’s found there are two kinds of fear in the brain: fast fear and slow fear, which he calls the low road and the high road.
The high road gives you slow fear for a simple reason: its physical path through the brain is longer than the low road. On the high road, a scary stimulus, such as the sight of a snake in your path, comes in through the senses and goes to the thalamus, located deep inside the brain. The thalamus directs it up to the cortex, at the top of the brain, for analysis. That’s why Dr. LeDoux calls slow fear the high road. The information has to travel all the way up to the top of the brain. When it gets there the cortex decides that what you’re looking at is a snake, then sends this information—it’s a snake!—back down to the amygdala, and you feel afraid. The whole process takes twenty-four milliseconds.
The low road takes half the time. Using the fast fear system, you see a snake in your path, the sensory data goes to your thalamus, and from there it goes directly over to your amygdala, which is also located deep inside the brain, in the temporal lobes at the side of your head. The whole process takes twelve milliseconds. Dr. LeDoux calls fast fear the low road because the sensory information doesn’t have to travel up to the top of the brain. The cortex is out of the loop.
Both systems operate at the same time, with the same sensory inputs. This means that the thalamus receives potentially frightening sensory data and sends it two places: both to the cortex and to the amygdala. If you’re looking at a snake, the fast fear system has you jumping out of the way in twelve milliseconds; then, twelve milliseconds later, you get a second jolt of fear from the exact same information finally arriving at the amygdala after having been routed through the cortex for closer analysis.
Dr. LeDoux thinks the reason our brains are set up to work this way is that evolution couldn’t put both speed and accuracy into the same system. The fast road, he says, is quick and dirty. You’re walking down a path, you see something long, thin, and dark in the path, and your amygdala screams, “It’s a snake!” Twelve milliseconds later your cortex has the second opinion: either, “It’s definitely a snake!” or, “It’s just a stick.” That doesn’t sound like very much time, but it makes all the difference in the world to whether you get bitten by that snake or not, assuming it is a snake and not a stick. The reason fast fear can be so fast is that accuracy is sacrificed for speed. Fast fear gives you a rough draft of reality.
It’s the cortex that does the precision rendering of the world, so it’s the cortex that can tell a snake from a stick. But that takes time, and time is exactly what you don’t have when you’re looking at a snake. Dr. LeDoux thinks nature evolved this system because it’s better to be safe than sorry: it’s better to mistake a stick for a snake than to keep walking toward a snake bite while your cortex is still forming an opinion.
The other thing to know is that high road fear is conscious, while low road fear is not. High road fear is conscious because it’s been through the cortex, which makes you consciously aware of what’s scaring you. I’m scared of that snake sitting there in the middle of the road. That’s conscious, high road fear. With low road fear you react unconsciously, or mindlessly. You’re running away before you know what you’re running away from.
WEIRD FEAR
One of the really interesting things about memory is that conscious memory is much more fragile than unconscious memory. The terminology for different kinds of memory gets confusing, partly because different fields use totally different terms for conscious and unconscious memory. Some fields talk about declarative versus procedural; other fields talk about explicit memory versus implicit memory. I’ll mostly stick to conscious and unconscious, but when it makes sense to use other terms, I will.
Conscious memory handles the kinds of things we call “school learning,” facts, figures, dates, names, and so on. If you think about how much of what you learned in school you’ve forgotten you’ll get a good idea of how fragile it is. Unconscious learning is much more stable and long-lasting. The old saying about how you never forget how to ride a bicycle is a perfect example. It’s true: you don’t ever forget how to ride a bicycle once you’ve learned.23 You can have significant brain damage from a stroke, and you’re still likely to remember how to ride a bicycle. It’s very tough to wipe out unconscious memory.
By now you’re probably thinking Freud was right. If so, you’re not far off. A number of Freud’s ideas are turning out to be pretty good descriptions of how the brain works. I’m no expert on Freud, so I should add that I have no idea whether Freud’s idea of repression will be supported by brain research. What is supported is the idea that we have a huge amount of unconscious information stored up in our brains.
I don’t know whether unconscious, or procedural, learning like bicycle riding is always permanent. The easy way to remember what procedural memory is, is to think of things like bicycle riding as procedures. When you learn something like riding a bicycle, or how to button and unbutton your shirt, you’re using unconscious, procedural memory. Your fingers know how to unbutton your shirt; you can do it without thinking about it consciously.
I don’t know whether procedural learning is always permanent, but it looks like fear learning is. Learned fears are the exact opposite of learned facts, dates, and names, which you’re constantly forgetting. You never forget a fear. In fact, fear learning in animals and people is so powerful it can get stronger over time, even when you do nothing further to “practice” your fear through repeat exposure. Say you see a snake in the road just once in your life, and it scares you half to death; you could never see a live snake again yet still get more and more frightened of snakes as time goes on.
According to Dr. LeDoux, the relative weakness of conscious fear memory compared to unconscious fear memories may explain why fears can spread so far beyond their original content. What may happen is that as time passes you lose your conscious memory of the thing that frightened you, but your unconscious memory is as strong as ever.
Dr. LeDoux gives a nice example of a person in a bad car crash where the horn gets stuck on. For a period of time after the crash, the person feels frightened all over again every time he hears a horn. But then, over time, he gradually forgets about the car horn, because the details of the car crash are fading out of his conscious memory. He doesn’t consciously remember he’s afraid of car horns.
But as far as his unconscious emotional memory is concerned, the crash and the stuck horn could have happened yesterday. Now, whenever he hears a honking horn, his body tenses up and he feels scared, but he doesn’t know why. So his conscious mind associates his bodily fear reactions with whatever perfectly innocent things are going on around him, like walking down a busy street, or trying to find the elevators inside a crowded mall parking lot. It could be anything at all. Having forgotten what he was originally scared of, he’s developing all kinds of brand-new, totally irrational fears that aren’t based in anything real.
In Dr. LeDoux’s view, this is one reason why therapists see so many fears without any obvious cause in their patients. What they’re seeing are secondary downstream fears that developed after the conscious content of the original fear was forgotten. The new fears are like stand-ins, or substitutes, for the old one. This may sound strange, but it happens a lot, especially to people with phobias. As Dr. LeDoux says, “phobics can sometimes lose track of what they are afraid of.”24
Another thing that could happen, once the conscious details of the original frightening experience have faded, is that a person can start having conscious feelings of fear that aren’t attached to anything he can pinpoint. They just seem to come out of nowhere. Say he hears a honking horn somewhere in the distance. He doesn’t pay any attention to it and then starts to feel anxious without realizing it’s the horn that caused the emotion. His conscious memory has forgotten all about the horn, but his amygdala hasn’t, and he could end up thinking of himself as an anxious person.
Dr. LeDoux thinks the differences between the fast fear and slow fear systems probably lead to lots of the different anxiety disorders psychiatrists treat. As he points out, the slow fear system is probably the reason a person develops a fear of a harmless car horn in the first place. The stuck horn didn’t cause the car crash; the car crash caused the stuck horn. But the amygdala doesn’t make the distinction, and everything about the scene of the accident can become contaminated with fear. All kinds of irrational fears probably develop because the amygdala reacts so fast based on such crude analyses of a situation.
This process happens to animals all the time. I got a call to work with a horse who was terrified of garage doors. When I talked to the owners I found out that the first time they tried to collect semen from the horse, he’d fallen on his butt. To collect semen you have the horse mount a dummy, and somehow this horse had fallen backward. It was a freak accident, and the people working with him got crazy and hit him with the whip and yelled at him, so now he was traumatized.
The reason he was terrified of garage doors was that he’d been looking at a garage door when he fell. The garage door had nothing to do with the fall, but his amygdala made the crude association: garage door–traumatic fall.
The next time they tried to breed the horse they kept him out in the open away from any buildings and he was fine. But a horse who’s going to go berserk anytime he sees a garage door is a dangerous horse to ride or handle anywhere outside his home corral.
ANIMAL FEARS ARE DIFFERENT
Although the basic fear mechanisms in an animal’s brain are the same as in a person’s brain, the difference in frontal lobe size and complexity means that animal fears and human fears end up being different.
The single most important thing to remember is that animals are afraid of tiny details in their environments. I like to use the term hyper-specific to describe animal fears. It comes from autism research, because autistic people are extremely hyper-specific. It’s one of the main things that separate them from typical people. I’ll be talking more about hyper-specificity in autistic people and in animals when we get to animal genius, so for now all I need to say is that being hyper-specific means you see the differences between things a lot better than you see the similarities. You see the trees better than the forest. A lot of times you might not see the forest at all. Just trees, trees, and more trees. Animals are like that.
My favorite example of a hyper-specific fear is the black hat horse. I met the black hat horse when his owner came to me for a consultation. She said her horse was terrified of people wearing black hats. That was all, just black hats.
Now that is an extremely specific fear. It was so specific I was amazed a normal human being had managed to figure it out. It might seem easy to notice that a horse is bolting every time he sees a black hat, but it’s not. If you think about it logically, there’s almost an infinite amount of data coming into our senses every second of the day. The only reason the world isn’t a total blur is that your nervous system automatically filters out a huge amount of stuff, and automatically focuses on some things and not others. That’s what inattentional blindness is all about, filtering out the stuff you don’t care about.
Normally, a typical human nervous system is not set to focus on black hats or any other extraneous detail. It’s just not. But an animal’s nervous system is set to focus on detail, because his frontal lobes are so much less developed than a typical human’s frontal lobes. That’s why an animal can become terrified of black hats: (a) because he notices them in the first place, and (b) because he has less frontal lobe power available to analyze and suppress a fear of black hats once the fear gets going.
I was impressed that the horse’s owner had managed to figure out that black hats were the problem. She had managed to see through her horse’s eyes, and the ability to do that is rare.
She and I worked with the horse together. We wanted to know two things: what were the exact parameters of his fear, and could we train him out of it? We found out pretty quick that he was really focused on that black hat. We tested him on all the hats we had between us: a red baseball cap, a light blue baseball cap, and a white cowboy hat. The only thing that bothered him was a black cowboy hat, and it had to be black.
He was so scared of the black hat that I didn’t even have to be wearing it to set him off. If I stood perfectly still in front of him just holding a black hat quietly at my waist, he would start to rear. He was looking straight at me, but the only thing he was taking in was the hat. That made me bad. He was sensitive to the position of the hat, too. The closer I held it to my head, the more trouble he had.
So the problem was the black hat, and only the black hat. After that we tried to desensitize the horse. When it comes to fear, there are only two techniques that work with animals at all, and neither works very well: desensitization and counter-phobic training. Desensitization is exactly what it sounds like. You expose a person or an animal to tiny doses of the thing he fears, building up gradually to larger and larger doses. Counter-phobic training means pairing the thing an animal or person fears with something he likes, such as food. You’re trying to build in some good associations to counter the bad associations.
We did a long session of desensitization with the black hat horse, and we made some progress. By the end I was able to have the owner put the black hat on the ground, and I could lead the horse up to it. We even got him to touch it with his nose. But that was as far as we could go.
That is a classic example of the kind of hyper-specific fear animals develop all the time. The horse’s category for bad and scary was black hats on people. Not white hats, not red hats, not blue hats. Just people wearing or holding a black hat, although he wasn’t exactly keen on the sight of a black hat lying on the ground, either.
You see this all the time with animals. I met a ferret once who was afraid of the sound of a nylon ski jacket. Someone wearing one had probably abused him, and what he focused on was the sound of the person’s jacket. So that’s what set him off, the sound of nylon swishing against nylon. Another time I went to a zoo where the keepers told me their chimpanzees were terrified of burlap cloth. They’d been tied up inside burlap bags after they were captured, and if you put a piece of burlap in their cage they’d immediately bury it under the straw, out of sight so they couldn’t see it. Then they all felt a lot better.
BEING HYPER-SPECIFIC
It’s extremely important to understand how hyper-specific animals are, because you won’t socialize your animals properly if you don’t. I’ve watched animals at meatpacking plants go berserk when they saw a man on foot for the first time in their lives. Up to that point the only men they’d ever seen were men riding horseback. These were beautifully handled animals who’d been worked with quietly and gently, but when they saw a man on foot they panicked and almost trampled him. The mental category they’d formed was man-on-horseback, or maybe just man-horse, like a centaur. They didn’t automatically expand their man-on-horseback-is-safe category to include man-on-foot-is-safe.
Another example. Richard Shrake, the famous horse trainer who developed resistance-free training, says it’s important to train a horse to let you mount him either from the left side or the right. You have to do that because to the horse these are two completely different things. A horse that suddenly has to be mounted from the right when he’s always been mounted from the left could buck or bolt. It’s dangerous.
Same thing with dogs. I had an interesting talk recently with a lady who keeps wolf hybrids for pets, something I don’t recommend. She told me that if you’re going to have a wolf hybrid as a pet, you have to socialize it between four to thirteen weeks of age that all men are okay, not just the male owner. Otherwise they’ll think the owner is okay, all other men are the enemy. You have to do the same thing with women, children, toddlers, and babies, and you have to socialize the animal to different members of each category separately. It’s not just the owner’s little toddler who’s okay, all little toddlers are okay. It’s not just the owner’s wife who’s okay, all women are okay. And so on.
Another way to think of this is that animals don’t generalize well. They don’t generalize from male-owner-is-okay to male-owner-and-mailman-are-okay. Normal human beings are almost exactly the opposite: normal human beings tend to err on the side of over-generalizing, not under-generalizing. That’s what a stereotype is, an over-generalization. All women are X or all men are Y. It’s natural for normal humans to think that way, but you have to actively teach an animal to group all women inside the category “women.” (Animals do form categories, which is a kind of generalization. We’ll get to that in the next chapter.)
I find that even people who work with animals professionally don’t tend to pick up on this aspect of animal minds. It’s just too foreign to their own way of processing the universe. Even when a trainer or handler gets pretty good at analyzing what’s scaring an animal it’s still hard for a normal person to get a sense of animal emotions. What’s it like being so vulnerable to tiny details?
Even though I’m fairly hyper-specific myself, I don’t know the answer. But I think it has something to do with fear of the unknown.
Fear of the unknown is universal. Everyone has some fear of the unknown, although of course people also like novelty and variety within limits. Animals do, too. They’re afraid of the unknown, but they’re also drawn to it.
If you think about it, animals are constantly confronting the unknown. For an animal who’s never seen a man off a horse, a man walking on his own two legs is an alien. So I think a good way to try to get inside an animal’s head, to the extent that’s even possible, is to be constantly asking yourself, “How would I feel if what I were looking at right now was something I’d never laid eyes on before in my life?”
A friend of mine came up with an analogy to the cattle who panicked when they saw a man walking on two feet. “If I were sitting in my living room reading a book,” she told me, “and I looked up and saw a stranger walking down the sidewalk and up to my front door on his hands, acting as if there was nothing out of the normal going on, I’d probably be scared half to death.” She said it gave her the creeps just thinking about it.
That would probably scare anybody. When you see something you’ve never seen before, something you never expected to see, you’re going to feel some fear. That’s because we’re wired for survival, so when we confront the unknown our survival brain gets activated and starts screaming at us, “What is it!? What is it!?” And, “Is it dangerous?!”
FEAR AND CURIOSITY
I talked about cows being curiously afraid in Chapter 3.
What’s interesting about animals being curiously afraid is that it’s the most fearful animals who are also the most curious. You’d think it would be the exact opposite. A fearful prey animal like a deer or a cow ought to just get the hell out of there whenever it sees something strange and different that it doesn’t understand.
But that’s not what happens. The more fearful the animal, the more likely he is to investigate. Indians used this principle to hunt antelope. They’d lie down on the ground holding a flag, and when the antelope came up to investigate they’d kill it. I’ve never heard of Indians lying down on the ground holding a flag to catch buffalo, and my bet is that’s because they never did it. Buffalo are big-boned animals, and we know for a fact big-boned animals are less fearful than animals with small bones. I’m guessing, but I don’t think a buffalo is going to be as compelled to investigate a flag flying in the middle of the prairie as an antelope is, because he’s not as fearful as an antelope is. He’s a great big strong buffalo; what does he have to worry about? But a delicate little antelope has a lot to worry about, and that’s why he’s always looking into things.
You see the same difference in horses, too. Arab horses are fine-boned and flighty, while Clydesdales are calm. If you put Arab horses together with a bunch of Clydesdales, and hang a flag on the fence, it’s the Arab horses who’ll walk up to the flag first. The Clydesdales will always be the last. Curiosity and fear go together.
Fear seems to correlate with intelligence, too, although no one can say that for sure. I mention this because any horse trainer will tell you Arab horses are the smartest. If we were to find out that high-strung animals are more intelligent than placid animals, the difference may be due to the fact that nervous animals investigate their environments more, learn more, and get smarter in the process.
THE NEW NEW THING
I think what all of this means is that animals probably spend a lot more time being suddenly exposed to something brand-new they’ve never seen before than humans do. First of all, animals have more limited lives than people do, if only because they don’t read books and watch TV. They haven’t had the huge amount of vicarious experience we have. Most of us have never seen a pyramid in Egypt, but we wouldn’t be shocked if we did, because we’ve seen the pyramids in pictures.
But second, animals’ hyper-specificity also means they’re constantly coming face-to-face with new things they haven’t seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted before. If you’re hyper-specific and you’ve seen a few big dogs in your life, but you’ve never seen a dachshund, then a dachshund doesn’t automatically seem like a dog the first time you do see one. We don’t know how hyper-specific animals are, but we do know they’re a lot more hyper-specific than nonautistic humans are. I think that probably has to mean that animals encounter more new things than people do, if only because people automatically assign most new things to old categories.
That’s why seeing a dachshund for the first time when I was little completely threw me off—because I’m hyper-specific. To me, that dachshund was brand-new, whereas to a nonautistic person it would have been just another dog.
HOW AN ANIMAL’S FEARS GROW
Animal fears spread like crazy.
People’s fears spread, too, as I mentioned, but animal fears spread in a hyper-specific way.
Here’s my best example. Mark’s dog, Red Dog, is deathly afraid of hot air balloons. She starts going crazy when a hot air balloon is just a tiny speck miles away in the sky.
We have a lot of hot air balloons in Colorado, and originally Red Dog got spooked when one of them revved its burner right over her house. Since that one bad experience she’s gotten more and more frightened of the balloons, exactly the way Dr. LeDoux describes. Her fear has gotten stronger, not weaker, and it’s spread out to all other hot air balloons, no matter how far away.
People’s fears can grow that way, too. But now Red Dog is branching out in a way I don’t think people do. Just lately she’s gotten terrified by the sight of those red aerial marker balls they put on power lines so airplanes won’t hit them. She goes nuts when she sees one of those things.
Then the other day all of a sudden she went crazy when she saw the rear end of a gasoline tanker.
I hadn’t given much thought to Red Dog’s choice of objects to be terrified of until I reread Dr. LeDoux’s book. Halfway through I suddenly realized that the things Red Dog is afraid of are just different versions of the same thing: all three of them are round, red objects seen against the blue sky. The tankers are round and painted red on the back, and Red Dog sees them when she’s riding with Mark in his truck. From her angle, she’s probably seeing them surrounded by sky.
When human fears spread from the original scary thing to other objects or situations that should be neutral Dr. LeDoux calls it over-generalizing. The fear generalizes too far. A Vietnam vet who jumps out of his skin when he hears a car backfire is over-generalizing from the sound of gunfire to the sound of cars backfiring.
That’s what Red Dog was doing, but she was over-generalizing in a hyper-specific way.
People can make hyper-specific over-generalizations, too. That’s what the Vietnam vet is doing when he jumps at the sound of a car backfiring. But animals do it all the time. I don’t think any human would go from being scared of red hot air balloons to being scared of the red ends of tanker trucks.
Animals seem to over-generalize within the sensory channel that first frightened them. That’s why Red Dog keeps generalizing out to things she can see. People probably do this, too, but my impression is that people’s over-generalized fears are often more logical and more conceptual than an animal’s. For instance, I’ve heard of people going from fear of flying to fear of elevators. That’s different from a hot air balloon fear spreading to aerial markers. If an elevator crashed with you inside, that would kill you just as surely as a plane crash would, but no aerial marker is going to rev up its burner over your house and startle you half to death. An airplane and an elevator are linked conceptually; a red hot air balloon and a red aerial marker are linked only perceptually.
Some of the difference between animal fears and human fears is probably due to the fact that animals know less about the world than we do, seeing as how we built it and they didn’t. Red Dog doesn’t know the purpose of hot air balloons, aerial marker balls, or liquid nitrogen tankers.
But even if that’s true, you always need to keep in mind that animals are going to generalize their fears out to things that are in the same sensory category, not the same conceptual category. The black hat horse generalized to other black cowboy hats, not to hats in general. (I wish to heck I’d thought to test him with a big black purse, too. I’d love to know whether anything with the general shape of a black cowboy hat would have frightened him.) Animal fears are hyper-specific, and they spread hyper-specifically, too.
KEEPING FEAR OUT OF ANIMALS’ LIVES
With animals, just like with people, there’s a difference between traumatic fears and plain old everyday fears. Traumatic fears in animals are always bad news; they last forever, and they can spread. Even if you do manage to put together a fairly effective counter-phobic behavior program, you’re going to be doing that program for the rest of the animal’s life. It’s a lot of hard work, without a lot of gain.
Everyday fears are different. Unless an animal is anxious by nature, an everyday run-of-the-mill fear won’t wreck his life or yours, either. The problem is that it’s hard to predict which experiences will traumatize an animal and which experiences will just give him something to think about.
Dog owners face this mystery when it comes to deciding whether to install an invisible fence. An invisible fence, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a perimeter created by a radio signal broadcast to a receiver the dog wears on his collar. When the dog gets close enough to the perimeter he hears a warning beep; if he ignores the beep and keeps going he gets a shock.25 You can think of it as a beep-and-shock fence instead of a wire fence. Most of the time invisible fences work great.26 I’d recommend that every dog owner buy one, if I weren’t worried about people holding me responsible when they spend anywhere from a couple hundred to fifteen hundred dollars putting in an invisible fence that turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth for their particular pet.
The reason some dogs don’t do well with an invisible fence relates to pain levels as well as fear levels. A low-fear, low-pain dog like a retriever, either golden or Labrador, can sometimes just run through them. I knew one family whose golden retriever would bound through the perimeter on his way out of the yard but then refuse to come through it on the way back. He didn’t want to get shocked. Apparently he didn’t mind getting shocked when he was making his Great Escape, but getting a shock just to come home again wasn’t worth it.
It was a huge nuisance, because there was one family down the street who was terrified of that dog, even though he’d never done anything bad to them. Naturally that was the one house he’d always make a beeline for whenever he was done with his travels. He’d plop himself down on their doorstep and just lie there waiting for his owners to come get him and take him home. Probably he’d noticed that his owners always seemed to show up the fastest when he landed at the scared family’s house. That was true, of course, because the instant the scared family saw the dog they’d start frantically calling the owners every five seconds—and naturally the owners would race over to retrieve the dog the minute they got the call, because they knew how upset the scared family was. Until the owners arrived, the scared family would be locked up inside their house, too terrified to come out. Naturally the owners lived in fear of having this happen sometime when they weren’t home. What if there was an emergency and the scared family was trapped inside their house because the dog had busted through the invisible fence again?
I heard about another dog, a little Jack Russell terrier, who would get through the fence just because his fellow-dog, another retriever, could go through it. The retriever would sail through unscathed, and the Jack Russell would lower himself to the ground and stare at the place where he knew he’d get the shock. Finally he’d bolt. The lady who told me about him said, “He’d decide to take the hit.” I’m sure if that dog had lived alone, or at least in a house whose other dog wasn’t a retriever, he would have stayed put. But he wasn’t going to let his pal take off without him.
Those are the problems you can have with dogs who are low-fear (or low-pain). They’re unusual, but they do happen. The problems that can crop up with a high-fear dog are more difficult to manage. I’ve never heard of a dog getting out-and-out traumatized by an invisible fence, but I’ve seen some come close. Some dogs will get so scared of the perimeter that they’ll refuse to ever go through it, whether the collar is on or off, and including when you put them on a leash to take them for a walk. You have to carry or drag them through the perimeter.
That’s not so horrible, but I also heard about a two-year-old collie who got so scared of her own yard that she lost her house-training and started pooping inside the house. If her owners would force her to go outside she’d just stand on the deck barking until her owners finally gave up and let her back in. Then she’d poop on the carpet.
These are all unusual cases. Most dogs live happily inside an invisible fence and don’t panic when you walk them through the perimeter on a leash. But even when an invisible fence works perfectly, you still have to keep on top of the situation. Although animal fears, like human fears, are permanent, animals will reality-test a fear that falls short of a phobia.
I know that happens with invisible fences. I talked to a woman who bought an aboveground invisible fence for her two young dogs. It worked like a charm, but remembering to put their collars on every morning was a pain. (She didn’t like the dogs to sleep in the collars at night, because one of them had sensitive skin and the metal prongs were rubbing it raw.) So she figured she’d be vigilant for a couple of months until the dogs took it for granted that they couldn’t leave the yard without getting a shock. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about whether one of the dogs got out of the house without the collar on. She said she based this on some story she read back in college about how B. F. Skinner once trained some sheep to stay inside a fence, then replaced the fence with a symbolic wire strung between posts. Supposedly the sheep never tried to get past the wire, even though they easily could have.
I don’t remember ever seeing that story in Dr. Skinner’s work myself, and I’d be surprised if that’s what he found. In my experience some animals don’t test fences, but others do. That lady turned out to have fence-testing dogs. At first everything seemed to be working out. The dogs never went near the boundaries, whether they were wearing their collars or not. They didn’t act like they associated the shocks with the collar, either, because every time she took their collars off to take them for a walk she’d have to pull them through the perimeter. They were scared of getting a shock whether they had the collars on or off.
So after a while she just stopped worrying about getting the collars on first thing in the morning. Big mistake. One morning she was sitting outside reading the newspaper when she noticed the dogs running a couple of feet up the hill beside her house, then coming back down again. They seemed to be doing this repeatedly, although she wasn’t paying close enough attention to be sure. She thought they were getting awfully close to the shock perimeter, but since she figured they’d been permanently conditioned like Dr. Skinner’s sheep, she didn’t worry about it.
The next thing she knew, both dogs were gone. They stayed away for hours and probably had a nice romp around the pond a little ways from her house. She’s been having problems with them ever since. As long as she has the collars on and the batteries are working, they stay home. But if she slips up—either forgets to check the batteries or slacks off on putting the collars on in the morning—it doesn’t take too long for the dogs to figure out they’re free.
I don’t know how they manage it, but it sounds like they’re doing their own doggie version of reality testing. The owner has observed that every time she forgets the collars for a few days the same sequence unfolds. First the dogs stay well within the invisible fence boundaries, collar or no collar. Then they start expanding the perimeter, going a little bit farther than the collar would let them go, but no farther. Then, not too long after that, they’re gone.
What she couldn’t figure out was, how do the dogs know it’s okay to expand the perimeter? They’re still acting scared when she takes them through the perimeter on a walk, so why do they test it on their own?
I think they are probably picking up signals a human can’t perceive. I’m guessing they get some kind of little vibration or early warning buzz from the receiver before they reach the spot where the warning sound beeps. They get a warning before the warning. Once the dogs stop perceiving the pre-warning sound or sensation, they start testing the boundaries.
The reason I think this is that the dogs never set off the warning beeps. That has to mean that somehow they know it’s safe to start pushing out the boundaries. If they were just sporadically testing from time to time, to see whether the perimeter was still there, they would set off beeps on days when their collars are on, which is most days.
However those two dogs are doing what they’re doing, the Mark Twain saying about the cat on a hot stove is true only as far as it goes. “She will never sit down on a hot lid again—and that is well;” he said, “but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” That’s true only of a cat who got burned badly enough to be traumatized by the experience, or of a cat who didn’t get burned too badly but doesn’t have any good reason to sit on the stove apart from the fact that cats like to be up high. If the cat isn’t flat-out terrified of the stove, just leery, and if there’s a plate full of yummy meat sitting up there, I predict most cats are going to be back up on that stove.
FEAR MONSTERS
Temperament is everything. An animal with too much fear by nature—or too little fear—can be hard to live with and manage. Owners and trainers have to match their approach to temperament. The wrong kind of handling with large prey animals like cows and horses can actually make them dangerous. You can take a perfectly normal horse or cow and turn it into a spin-and-kick animal—an animal who will spin around and kick a human being with both hooves. When that happens you’ve taken a prey animal and turned him into a killer. It’s ridiculous.
You see it happen when owners use rough training to teach a horse or cow to accept a halter and lead rope. They put a real strong halter and a six-foot lead on the animal, tie him up to a pole, and let him fight it out with the post until he’s exhausted and gives up. The owner is trying to teach the animal to walk calmly on a lead, but instead of just putting on the halter and lead and letting the animal wear them around the corral to get used to the feeling, they think they have to break the animal’s resistance.
It’s a horrible training method. But it has different effects depending on an animal’s temperament, especially his level of inborn timidity. Calm animals, like Holstein cattle, will habituate. After rearing and bucking for a while they’ll settle down and get used to the situation. It’s still a stupid way to train them, but they can take it. A more sensitive, fearful animal can become scared, skittish, and unmanageable when you try to train him that way. That animal will never be okay with the halter and lead, for the rest of its life.
But it’s the animals with the medium temperaments, in between calm and fearful, who become dangerous. When you tie them up to the post they get scared and stay scared, but they don’t lose control. They’re the ones who learn to spin and kick. A naturally calm animal like the Holstein doesn’t care enough about being tied up to a post to need to learn to spin and kick, because he doesn’t feel that his survival is threatened. Naturally timid cattle do feel that their survival is at stake, but they get too panicked to do anything about it. It’s the in-between animals who have exactly the right amount of terror they need to learn how to kill a human being. After rough training to the halter and lead they’ve learned that they have two cannons for back hooves.
I call high-fear cattle fear monsters, because they get completely overwhelmed by panic. I’ve seen Saler cattle (Salers are French dairy cattle we use as beef cattle) get so frantic they’ll fall on the ground and start rolling around. A Saler cow who gets her leg caught between the loading dock and the truck can actually rip her own leg off just below the knee in panic. I saw this happen one time. It was horrible. An Arab horse can do the same thing. These animals are fear monsters. They get so terrified they destroy themselves.
A couple of good things about Saler cows, though: they’re excellent foragers, and they’re wonderful mothers. Saler cattle are dairy cows who were developed in the French mountains, and they’ll go anywhere to find grass. They’ll climb up into nooks and crannies a fat old Hereford wouldn’t think of even trying to get to. And they’ll fight off anything that threatens their calf; they’ll fight off a coyote every time. Of course that means they’ll fight you off, too, if you try to do anything to the baby. So you have to be careful.
Holstein cows, on the other hand, are so calm now they’re terrible mothers. They’ve been selectively bred to be calm and to be huge milk producers, and we’ve bred their protective maternal instincts right out of them. If a coyote really wants their calf, the coyote can have him. Nothing gets a Holstein excited. Meanwhile Holstein bulls can be dangerous because they have no fear.
IS IT BAD BEHAVIOR OR IS IT FEAR?
A big problem I see with a lot of trainers and owners is that they don’t know when an animal’s bad behavior is motivated by fear. I knew a dog with fear-based aggression who, when her owner took her out for a walk, would start barking like crazy anytime anyone came near. The dog was barking because she was scared, but the owner didn’t understand. When the dog kept barking and ignoring her owner’s commands to “hush,” the owner would start getting upset herself and would eventually start yelling at the dog. That made things worse, because the dog thought her owner was screaming for protection, so she got even more crazed.
In that case the owner was lucky, because she figured out what was going on before too much damage had been done. Once she realized the dog was being aggressive because she was scared, she started a whole new program. One of the things she did was that anytime a bicycle rode by she’d stop walking and have the dog sit down. She’d stroke her and talk quietly, telling the dog everything was okay. She was able to get a lot calmer behavior out of her dog that way. (Bicycles were especially hard because not only is a bicycle something that’s being ridden by a scary stranger, it’s in motion, and that sets off a dog’s natural drive to chase moving objects.)
I mentioned earlier that I’m not a big fan of punishment as a teaching method no matter what an animal’s temperament, except in the case of prey-drive-motivated chasing of joggers and bicyclists and the like. But punishment is worse for some animals than for others. There are calm animals who can deal with punishment just fine, and there are nervous animals who totally fall apart if they experience a lot of anger from their human owners.
You have to match your handling to the animal. High-fear animals need super-gentle handling. Low-fear animals don’t need harsh handling, but they don’t fall apart if they get it. I saw some Paso Fino horses down in Argentina who could take just about anything their owners dished out. The trainers really abused them. They beat the horses into submission, and they put wires attached to tie-downs around their noses. A tie-down is a short strap on either side of the horse’s face that is attached to the girth of the saddle. Normally the tie-down is loosely fastened to a broad leather strap that goes across the horse’s nose. People use tie-downs to keep a horse from tossing his head, and some trainers think tie-downs keep a horse from rearing. But tie-downs make horses crazy, so there’s no reason to put one on tightly and there’s certainly no reason to attach it to a wire that would cut the horse’s nose.
Every one of those horses had a quarter-inch dent in its nose. If you did that to an Arab horse, he’d be crazy and unrideable for life. The Paso Fino horses are low-fear, and they habituated—but they hated people. The minute I touched their forelocks, they pinned their ears back and bared their teeth. That was as far as it went, because they knew they’d be beaten if they bit me. But there’s no good reason to make a horse hate humans that way.
Some trainers swear rough handling is effective. But what’s interesting about these trainers is that if you check out their horses, they’re all big-boned, low-fear horses who habituate fast to treatment that would crush a high-strung animal. Mark noticed this one time at the racetrack. The rough trainers were all working with big, heavy horses, and they all think Arab horses are crazy. The gentle trainers were working with the fine-boned, nervous animals.
BRINGING UP BABY
A while ago I read an article about the Homeland Security alerts that had a good line in it: “Once you scare people, it’s hard to unscare them.” Since it’s just about impossible to un-scare a seriously scared animal, you should do whatever you can to fright-proof your animals.
That means, first of all, you have to expose any pet or animal you own to other animals and other people he’s likely to come across—and you need to do this when the animal is young. I’ve already talked about how important it is to socialize animals to other animals and other people, in order to prevent them from developing aggression. But it’s also important to expose them to other animals and other people to prevent them from developing hard-to-manage fears.
If you own a riding horse, you should train him to be as comfortable with novelty and change as possible. You can introduce novelty into a grazing animal’s life by doing things like tying a yellow raincoat to the fence one day, or having him close by when you raise the hood of your car. It can be anything. You’re trying to get him to expect the unexpected, or at least not go ballistic when the unexpected happens.
It’s easier to do this when an animal is young and you can just have it trail along after its mom. If the mother isn’t afraid of the new things you’re showing the calf, the calf won’t be, either. (This is what Dr. Mineka found in her research with lab-reared monkeys and snakes.)
The fact that animals can be inoculated against fears by other animals is something your vet probably won’t think to mention. There are two sides to this coin. First, when you get a new pet you have to be careful about the other animals he meets in the beginning. I know a situation right now, a couple with two Pomeranians they got at different times, that’s shaping up to be really depressing because the first dog is teaching the second dog all the wrong lessons.
The first Pomeranian, who was around two years old when they got him, was scared to death of the husband from the minute the wife brought the dog home. That’s not uncommon; a lot of animals are scared of men, I find. But this dog was so neurotic about the husband that they think he may have been abused by the teenage son in its previous home. They’ve worked and worked with that dog, trying to get him to relax around the husband, but two years later he’s still scared. When he has to be alone in the house with the husband he hides out in his crate.
Then a couple of months ago their older dog died suddenly, and they got a second Pomeranian to take her place. This time they made sure the dog didn’t have any emotional problems with men or anyone else before they brought him home.
For the first week or so everything was fine. The new dog wasn’t afraid of the husband, and he adjusted great. Then almost overnight his attitude changed. All of a sudden the new dog is afraid of the husband, too. The husband hasn’t done anything bad to him, but the new dog is scared. So now when the wife’s away both dogs are cowering inside their crates. It’s pretty demoralizing being alone in your house with two dogs who won’t talk to you.
I’m sure the new dog learned his fear from the first dog. The only owner he’d had to this point was a woman, so he probably hadn’t seen many men, and he hadn’t learned that men were okay. Since animals learn whom to be afraid of from other animals, the scared Pomeranian apparently taught the new dog that the husband was someone to fear.
What they should have done was have the new dog and the husband spend some time alone together without the scared dog around to mess things up, preferably in the company of another dog who wasn’t scared of men. They needed to inoculate the new dog against husband fear before he got home and learned it from their other dog.
Using animal role models to calm animal fears is an old trade secret in horse racing. In her book on Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand says Seabiscuit was a “train wreck” when Charles Howard bought him; the horse was burned-out and mean. His first trainer said Seabiscuit could run but wouldn’t, and he chalked it up to laziness. Seabiscuit’s other problem was that he refused to exercise hard enough to get in shape. More laziness. The trainer had dealt with it by whipping Seabiscuit like crazy all through every race, and entering him in more races than horses normally run. He figured Seabiscuit spent so much time resting that he was up to it, and besides, the horse was so intelligent he’d “back off if he became overworked.”27
It didn’t work. Seabiscuit was a medium-type horse by temperament, so being whipped all the time and raced too hard got him just upset enough to make him mean as spit.
His new trainer, Tom Smith, decided right away to pair him up with an animal friend to help “defuse” him. Laura Hillenbrand writes that all kinds of stray animals have lived with racehorses, from German shepherds to chickens to monkeys. Tom Smith picked a nanny goat for Seabiscuit and put her in the horse’s stall. You can get a good idea of what a mistake it is to mistreat a medium-fear horse from reading what happened next: “Shortly after dinnertime, the grooms found Seabiscuit walking in circles, clutching the distraught goat in his teeth and shaking her back and forth. He heaved her over his half door and plopped her down in the barn aisle. The grooms ran to her rescue.”
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.
FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE
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 circumstances 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.
CHOOSING A STURDY ANIMAL
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.