The experimenters tested out their theory with another video in which an actor suddenly changes into a whole different person, wearing a completely different set of clothes. Seventy percent of normal people don’t notice that, either. They also don’t notice it in real life. In one study a blond-haired man wearing a yellow shirt handed students a form to fill out, then took the completed form behind a bookcase to file. When he came back out he was a dark-haired man wearing a blue shirt. He wasn’t the same guy in disguise; he was a whole different person. It didn’t matter. Seventy-five percent of the students had no idea they’d just interacted with two different people.
The scariest study, though, was the one NASA did with commercial airplane pilots. The researchers put them in a flight simulator and asked them to do a bunch of routine landings. But on some of the landing approaches the experimenters added the image of a large commercial airplane parked on the runway, something a pilot would never see in real life (at least, let’s hope not). One quarter of the pilots landed right on top of the airplane. They never saw it.
I’ve seen photographs from the study, and what’s interesting is that if you’re not a pilot, the parked plane is obvious. You can’t miss it, and you don’t have to be autistic to see it, either.7 I’d bet the ranch that the only people who could possibly miss that plane would have to be commercial pilots. If you’re a professional, expecting to see what a professional normally would see, there’s a 25 percent chance you’ll miss a huge commercial aircraft parked crossways blocking the landing strip in a flight simulator.
That’s because normal people’s perceptual systems are built to see what they’re used to seeing. If they’re used to seeing gorillas in the middle of basketball games, they see gorillas. If they’re not used to seeing gorillas in the middle of basketball games, they don’t. They have inattentional blindness.
I have no idea how a visual thinker would do on these experiments, but my guess is visual thinkers would see the gorilla a lot more often than verbal thinkers. I’m almost positive there’s no prey animal on earth who would miss that gorilla, that’s for sure, though I think predators would see the gorilla, too. A predator, by the way, is an animal like a dog or a cat who hunts and kills other animals for food; a prey animal is the animal the predator hunts. There’s also another category of animals you don’t hear about as much, which is the scavenger animals (like vultures) who do eat meat but don’t kill the animals they eat. All animals, including human beings, fall into at least one of these categories, and quite a few—including a lot of primates—belong to more than one. Humans are more predators than prey, but we share qualities with both. In terms of the size of our teeth, we’re defenseless, but as soon as we developed tools we became predators.
It’s so hard for normal people to see what scares cattle that I finally developed a checklist of mostly visual details for plant managers to look out for. Things like pieces of metal that wiggle, reflections on water, bright spots, contrasts of color, and air hissing or blowing in their faces. I tell the owners, if you have three “bad” details you have to correct all three. Then your animal will walk up the chute without any trouble and you can throw away your electric prod.
Visual thinkers of any species, animal or human, are detail-oriented. They see everything and they react to everything. We don’t know why this is true, we just know from experience that it is. I’ve had interior designers tell me, “I see everything.” The worst thing that can happen to an interior designer is to work with a sloppy contractor. The designer will see every little flaw in the contractor’s work. Tiny mistakes no one else even notices, like grout that’s slightly uneven, will jump out at visual people. They go crazy. Visual people feel horrible when little details in their visual environments are wrong, the same way animals do.
I think this is probably the hardest part of an animal’s existence for normal people to relate to. Verbal people can’t just turn themselves into visual people because they want to, and vice versa.
I hope this book will help regular people be a little less verbal and a little more visual. I’ve spent thirty years as an animal scientist, and I’ve spent my whole life as an autistic person. I hope what I’ve learned will help people start over again with animals (and maybe with autistic people, too), and begin to think about them in a different way.
I hope what I’ve learned will help people see.
2. How Animals Perceive the World
The problem with normal people is they’re too cerebral. I call it being abstractified.
I have to fight against abstractification constantly when I’m working with the government and the meatpacking industry. A big part of my job now is trying to make sure all food animals are given a humane slaughter, but even though there’s a lot of support for animal welfare it’s getting harder to make good reforms instead of easier. It’s harder because today government regulatory agencies are all run by people who’ve been to college, but who in some cases have never even been inside a meatpacking plant, let alone worked in one. It’s terrible. I keep telling them, “You have got to go out there and visit a plant.”
Things were different in the 1960s when I was visiting my aunt’s ranch in Arizona. That was my first experience with the United States Department of Agriculture. At that time livestock were being attacked by screwworms all over the West, Southwest, and Mexico. Screwworms are the larvae of a fly that lays its eggs in open wounds. The wounds can be from anything—a cut, a tick bite, or even a newborn’s navel. (Screwworms can attack humans, too, and like to lay their eggs inside the nostril.) When the eggs hatch the maggots come out and eat the animal alive. Other maggots eat dead flesh, but screwworm maggots eat live flesh and they are deadly.
Up until the USDA got involved, my aunt had been digging the maggots out of wounds on her horses by hand. She would pick each maggot out with a tweezers, drop it on the ground, and squash and stomp it. Then she’d blob screwworm paste all over the wound to fill it up so no flies could get back in and lay more eggs. The paste looked like black roofing cement. If you didn’t do this, the horse would die. A screwworm infestation was a hideous, horrible thing.
The USDA fieldworkers figured out how to get rid of the screwworms by taking advantage of a quirk in their reproductive system. The screwworm’s developmental sequence goes from egg to maggot to pupa to fly, and the USDA bred a bunch of screwworms and irradiated the males when they reached the pupa stage, making them sterile. Then they put the pupae in little paper boxes, like a Chinese takeout box, and dropped the boxes out of airplanes. The flies would come out of the boxes and mate with lots of females, and the females they’d mated laid eggs that didn’t hatch.
The program was a huge success. It started in 1959, the United States working with Mexico, and the last case of screwworm infestation was recorded in Texas in 1982. Today there are no screwworms anywhere in the United States or Mexico. I remember those years well. You’d find the little boxes all over the ranch, seven or eight of them each summer. The box would say “USDA” and there would be a little story printed on the side explaining what it was and that it wasn’t going to hurt you.
This was the original biotechnology and it worked. The government saved thousands and thousands of animals, maybe millions. They just did it; they didn’t get everyone’s permission.
Today the government could never get a program like that off the ground. Some environmental activist would say, “We have to protect these flies,” and you’d have people who’d never seen a screwworm in their lives advocating to save them from extinction. The whole thing would be about ideology, not reality. The USDA would be required to file environmental impact statements and the environmental impact statements would be challenged in court, and it would never get done.
Even worse, the government might not even get to the point of having advocates block their efforts. To put this type of project together you need a really good field staff that is in charge of things. But today the abstract thinkers are in charge, and abstract thinker
s get locked into abstract debates and arguments that aren’t based in reality. I think this is one of the reasons there is so much partisan fighting inside government. In my experience, people become more radical when they’re thinking abstractly. They bog down in permanent bickering where they’ve lost touch with what’s actually happening in the real world. The only way anything can get done is when there’s an emergency. Then all of a sudden everyone has to move.
So the 1960s and the 1970s were the golden age; that was a time when people who were in charge of regulation, or who were running the plants, had actually done things with their hands.
One thing I’ve noticed about animal welfare regulators who have never worked in the industry is that they always go for some kind of zero-tolerance approach. If the plant violates one or two agency rules, it has to be shut down.
If you don’t know anything about the meatpacking business, that sounds like a good idea. Make sure no animal ever gets hurt, under any circumstances.
But in real life that’s never the way it works out. In real life what happens is that a plant makes one or two mistakes, so the agency shuts it down. Well, shutting down a plant creates a huge uproar, because you’ve closed a whole big huge company that employs a lot of people. Management immediately protests the decision, and lots of pressure gets put on the inspector who reported the violations to clean up his report so the plant can go back to work.
And that’s what happens. The plant goes back to work and doesn’t get inspected so closely anymore. The violations keep on piling up.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I constantly argue that what we really need to do to protect animals is set high standards. People can live up to high standards, but they can’t live up to perfection. When you give a plant a good standard—like 95 percent of all cattle have to be stunned (killed) correctly on the first shot every single day—they always do better than they do under zero-tolerance regulation. A lot of times they beat the standard, too.
But regulators today are too abstract in their thinking to see that. They’re focused on their thoughts about the animals, not on the real animals in the real plants, so more animals end up suffering. It’s not right.
HOW PEOPLE SEE THE WORLD
Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with animals, all normal human beings are too abstractified, even the people who are hands-on. That’s because people aren’t just abstract in their thinking, they’re abstract in their seeing and hearing. Normal human beings are abstractified in their sensory perceptions as well as their thoughts.
That’s why the workers at the facility where the cattle wouldn’t go inside a dark building couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They weren’t seeing the setup as it actually existed; they were seeing the abstract, generalized concept of the setup they had inside their heads. In their minds their facility was identical to every other facility in the industry, and on paper it was identical. But in real life it was different, and they couldn’t see it. I’m not just talking about management. The guys in the yard, who were there working with the animals, trying to get them to walk inside the building, couldn’t see it, either.
That’s the big difference between animals and people, and also between autistic people and nonautistic people. Animals and autistic people don’t see their ideas of things; they see the actual things themselves. We see the details that make up the world, while normal people blur all those details together into their general concept of the world.
A huge amount of my consulting business is getting paid to see all the stuff normal people can’t see. I do this constantly. Not too long ago I got a call to go out to a meatpacking plant where the animals were getting big fat bruises on their loins. The loin is the area in between a cow’s rib cage and its rear leg. It’s the most expensive part of the animal, because that’s where the steak is located. So nobody wants their cattle getting bruised loins. A bruise means bleeding inside the muscle, and the bloody area has to be cut out in the butchering process, which means less meat to sell. Delaying slaughter until the bruise clears up doesn’t help, either, because a healed bruise leaves behind tough meat and gristle. Gristle is scar tissue. Just about any injury, no matter how tiny, can produce gristle, including the needle used in a cow’s vaccinations. (To prevent scarring from vaccination, you have to give the shot just under the skin. The beef industry is working hard trying to get feedlot employees and ranchers to give shots correctly.)
So here was this plant with all its beautiful, well-tended cattle walking around with big bruises on their sides, and nobody could figure out how they were getting them. One minute a cow would be fine; the next minute the same cow would have a great big shiner on her side.
They brought me out, and I walked into the chute to take a look around. That’s the first thing I always do, because you can’t solve an animal mystery unless you put yourself in their place—literally in their place. You have to go where the animal goes, and do what the animal does.
The chute turned out to be the problem. There was a sharp three-inch piece of metal sticking out from the side, and the cattle were hitting it. That little shard of metal was obvious to me, but not one person at the plant had spotted it—and all of them were looking. I think they probably would have seen it pretty quickly if any of the cattle had bellowed when they hit it, but the cattle didn’t yelp. The animals were hitting hard enough to bruise themselves, but not hard enough for it to really hurt.
WHAT DO ANIMALS SEE?
When an animal or an autistic person is seeing the real world instead of his idea of the world that means he’s seeing detail. This is the single most important thing to know about the way animals perceive the world: animals see details people don’t see. They are totally detail-oriented. That’s the key.
It took me almost thirty years to figure this out. During all that time I kept a growing list of small details that could spook an animal without realizing that “seeing in details” was a core difference between animals and people. The first small detail I saw spook a cow was shadows on the ground. Cattle will balk at the sight of a shadow. Then the workers get out the electric prods, because they have no idea what’s scaring the cattle, so they can’t fix it. I first saw cattle get spooked by a shadow thirty years ago, and I’ve been seeing it ever since.
The next detail I noticed was that cattle were afraid to enter dark places. That got me on the track of thinking that differences in contrast were important for animal behavior, which is true, but it didn’t tell me that detail per se was the issue.
I finally realized that animals perceive way more details than people do when McDonald’s hired me in 1999 to help them implement the animal welfare audit I’d originally created three years earlier for the USDA. They had a list of fifty meatpacking plants they purchased beef from, and they had announced that all fifty plants had to pass my audit or get thrown off the list.
McDonald’s was already auditing their suppliers for food safety, so they asked me to train their auditors to monitor animal welfare, too. It was easy to train the auditors, but it wasn’t easy for all the plants to get in compliance, even though they wanted to. Good intentions weren’t enough. We had to help plants figure out what they were doing wrong.
One of the criteria the plants had to meet to pass my audit was that employees couldn’t use the electric prod on more than 25 percent of the animals. Any plant that couldn’t get its prod usage down to 25 percent had to analyze what the problem was and correct it. But sometimes no one at the plant could see why their animals were balking.
Always, when I would go out to the plant to analyze the situation, I would find two things.
First, the problem was always a small detail, usually a detail the humans hadn’t even noticed. The entrance to the chute might be too dark, or there might be a bright reflection on a metal bar that was causing the animals to balk.
Second, to get their prod scores down a plant had to correct all the details that were scaring the cattle. They couldn’t just correct some
of the details or most of the details. They had to correct all of the details.
There was this one hog plant on the list that had four things they had to fix. Three involved lighting and the fourth was that they needed to put up some metal sheeting to prevent the pigs from seeing people moving around up ahead. This is something most people don’t realize: cattle and hogs raised for food are domestic animals, but they aren’t naturally tame unless they’ve been socialized to humans as babies. So they get jittery when they’re walking through a chute or alley and see people moving up ahead of them. All domestic animals, including cats and dogs, have to be socialized to people. The plant had to make all four corrections to get their prod scores down. They couldn’t just fix three and let it go at that.
That turned out to be true at all the plants. No plant had zillions of bad details; about the most any plant had was six. But if they had four bad details they had to correct all four. For the animals every detail was equally bad and equally important. That’s what made me realize that details are the key, and that’s when I started preaching the importance of detail in all my talks and all my articles and books.
Only highly visual people react to details the way animals do. I knew one interior designer who was supervising a renovation of her own bathroom and the contractor cracked one of the marble tiles. She couldn’t stand it. Every time she went in the bathroom she saw that crack. It jumped out at her and she’d get upset all over again. She knew she was different, but that’s what made her good at her job. She saw the visual details most people didn’t.
Nancy Minshew, a research neurologist at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in autism, was coming out with her new work on autistic people’s cognitive processing around the same time, and she confirmed my new insight into animals and detail. Her brain scans showed that autistic people are much more focused on details than on whole objects. Since I’d noticed so many similarities between animals and autistic people in my career, the fact that Nancy Minshew was finding a connection between autism and an orientation to detail gave me another reason to think I was right about animals.1
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