Animals in Translation

It was years ago that I first heard about Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin is an autistic woman. She also holds a PhD in animal science, is a professor at Colorado State University, a designer of humane cattle handling systems widely used in meat-packing plants throughout North America, the author of a number of books, and is a popular and sought-after lecturer and consultant.

But I didn’t know all that when I first heard about Temple Grandin. It was simply the title of her book, Thinking in Pictures, that caught my attention. While I didn’t read the book at the time, that title grabbed me, and continued to fascinate me. I began questioning people I knew, “Do you think in words, or pictures?” My own answer was words, lowly boring words. Most people I asked also answered “words”, although one or two said, “both”. Before that, it had never occurred to me that anyone would think in anything other than words, but right away I saw that pictures must be how animals think.

Well, early this summer I made the happy discovery of a horse book collector disbursing some of their collection on the Internet. Absorbing the writings of the modern and classical masters of riding and horsemanship, looking for written clues and insights to guide me in my never ending quest, is a bit of a compulsion of mine. At this sale I managed to score copies of Klaus Balkenhol’s biography, Success with Sympathetic Hands, as well as Nuno Oliviera’s classic, Reflections on Equestrian Art. Also, and immediately relevant to the subject of this article, I spotted a copy of Temple Grandin’s book: Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. Again the title jumped out at me, and I decided that here was a book that I simply must read.

Animals in Translation seemed like a book that was written just for me, since I’ve always had a practical desire to understand animals: how they think, how they learn, and how I can better communicate with them. And I also have something of a fascination with the inner workings of the brain. As a result, I found this book hard to put down, and once I was done reading it, I turned it over and started again from the beginning (a hallmark of books that I love). Temple Grandin’s writing style is simple and direct. For a scientist, she doesn’t use a ton of big words or jargon, a trait that I value.

The book starts out with a brief story of Grandin’s life growing up with autism, and moves on to her college experience in the 1960’s, studying animals and psychology. In those days the field was all B. F. Skinner and behaviorism, when scientists believed that all you needed to, or indeed should, study was behavior. You weren’t supposed to speculate about what was inside a person’s or an animal’s head, because you couldn’t measure all the stuff inside the “black box” of the brain, like intelligence, emotions, and motives.

Some behavioral scientists back then took this idea to the extreme by teaching that animals didn’t even have emotions or intelligence, only behavior, which was shaped by rewards, punishments, and positive and negative reinforcements from the environment. Shaping behavior in this way is called Operant Conditioning, and is still the way that most animals, including horses, are trained. However, today people recognize that there is much more to animal learning and animal behavior than just environmental shaping, and we recognize that animals definitely do have their own emotions, motivations, and instinctual hard-wired behaviors.

Grandin says, when talking about the amount of effort that has been put into designing humane slaughter systems so that animals don’t suffer,

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.

I was not the least bit surprised when reading this statement, as I predict none of my own readers will be. If you work with animals, especially prey animals like horses, you know how much more significant fear is to them than pain.

Horses can mask pain, even intense pain, like crazy. They can be in the middle of a serious medical episode and yet, when you check on them, they look totally unconcerned, and are even eating like everything is just fine and dandy. Most of us have learned to monitor signs like respiration rate, heart rate, and skin temperature to give ourselves clues to how much pain our horses are actually in, if we suspect that something is not right with them.

Fear, on the other hand, especially intense fear, is almost debilitating to horses. They can’t think of anything else, can’t learn, and basically can’t function in the face of intense fear, except to try to distance themselves from the object of their fear.

Fear and pain is an area where people differ from animals, in that if you asked most people to choose between experiencing intense pain and intense fear, most people would choose fear. Grandin says that is because normal people have a lot more power to control their fear than animals do. This is due to different levels of frontal lobe function. Normal humans have much bigger frontal lobes than animals (while autistic people also have normal human-sized frontal lobes, they have reduced frontal lobe function). Studies show that an active prefrontal cortex is associated with reduced fear. It is also associated with increased pain. So, animals and autistic people have higher fear and lower pain.

While the fact that our human frontal lobes give us more ways to manage our fear didn’t really surprise me (just think of all the ways that we have to distract ourselves from and/or rationalize our fear), it did surprise me that our large frontal lobes would result in a greater experience of pain.

Grandin shares an anecdote from Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes’ Error about a patient who had a debilitatingly painful condition, spending his days crouched in profound suffering, almost immobile from pain. Doctors couldn’t find any way to heal him, or reduce his pain, and they ended up doing a leucotomy (basically a less-invasive lobotomy) on him, a procedure that severed the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain. Two days after the operation the man was sitting in a chair, playing cards, looking completely relaxed. When the doctor asked him how he was doing, the man replied, “Oh, the pains are the same, but I feel fine now, thank you.”

After their operations, leucotomy patients stopped caring about their pain. They kept the pain, but lost their suffering! I think that’s amazing. Our large frontal lobes are said to be one of the things that “makes us human”, and apparently part of that function is to build an experience of suffering around the sensation of pain.

On my yoga DVD the instructor sometimes says, “Nothing has meaning unless you give it meaning. Whatever you’re experiencing on the mat, it is just sensations.” After I read this story I saw what he was getting at. I’ve even tried this approach on myself when I have pain (not from yoga!) I tell myself, “I feel the pain, but it doesn’t bother me.” Strangely, this does help. While we’re talking here about an unconscious function of the frontal lobes, it seems to show that we do have some conscious ability to influence the story our brain is constantly creating for us to make sense of our sensory experiences.

Although I already knew that a horse’s experience of fear certainly seems more profound than a human’s, I now have more of an appreciation of why. And reading this also made me think that, through training, we humans can provide for the horse some of the same functions that our frontal lobes provide for us. That is, a way for him to understand, rationalize, and make better decisions in the face of fear, to better cope in our human-centric world. Recently I’ve been experimenting with operant conditioning using positive reinforcement to do exactly this, and it has been an interesting exercise with rather amazing results which I plan to share in a future article.

This post just touches on one of the many anecdotes, observations, and theories of how animals learn and think that are covered in this useful book. If you are interested in animal learning and how the brain works, I really recommend reading Animals in Translation. The book gives an interesting and thought-expanding look at both the science and practice of animal behaviorism, as well as a fascinating glimpse into Temple Grandin’s life.