Animals in Translation

by Temple Grandin

  There’s a little more involved with some of the bulls, especially the Brahman bulls. Those are the white cattle with the big humps on their backs and the long ears. Brahman cattle are very affectionate toward people, and they love to be petted. They just eat it up. I love Brahman cattle. If you treat them nice, they’ll treat you nice. They’ll lick you all over your face and body. But if you treat them bad, look out. They’ll kick you or charge you.

  Brahman bulls are so affectionate that when you collect semen from a Brahman bull you have to pet them a long time first. They’ll refuse to give the semen for twenty minutes because they want twenty minutes of throat and butt scratching; that’s the stuff they really care about. Then they’ll give it to you. They’ll delay the sex in order to get some good, serious stroking. With some of them you have to walk away and leave or they won’t give you the semen at all. You have to let them know that if they don’t give the semen they’re not going to get stroked.

  Pigs could be bred naturally, too, but a lot of the time breeders use artificial insemination instead. Breeding pigs commercially is an art. I talked to a man who had one of the most successful records for breeding sows out there and he told me things no one’s ever written in a book as far as I know. Each boar had his own little perversion the man had to do to get the boar turned on so he could collect the semen. Some of them were just things like the boar wanted to have his dandruff scratched while they were collecting him. (Pigs have big flaky dandruff all over their backs.) The other things the man had to do were a lot more intimate. He might have to hold the boar’s penis in exactly the right way that the boar liked, and he had to masturbate some of them in exactly the right way. There was one boar, he told me, who wanted to have his butt hole played with. “I have to stick my finger in his butt, he just really loves that,” he told me. Then he got all red in the face. I’m not going to tell you his name, because I know he’d be embarrassed. But he’s one of the best in the business—and remember, this is a business we’re talking about. The number of sows successfully bred by the boars translates directly into the profits a company can make.

  This same man also told me he had to deal with the female pigs the same way. With a cow you can just take a catheter and insert it into her womb and she’ll have babies. She doesn’t have to be turned on or interested. But you have to get the sow turned on when you breed her so her uterus will pull the semen in. If she isn’t fully aroused she’ll have a smaller litter because fewer eggs will get fertilized.

  So the breeder has to be able to tell exactly when the female pig is ready. One of the signs you look for is that when a pig is sexually receptive her ears will go “blink!” and pop straight up. That’s called popping. Also, when you put pressure on her back, which is what she would feel when the boar mounts her, she’ll stand perfectly still. Breeders call that “stand for the man.” A good breeder knows when his sows are ready to stand for the man, and he usually sits on each sow’s back when he inserts the semen so she feels that pressure on her back. Some breeders put weights on the sow’s back to accomplish the same thing.

  Pig breeders used to ignore all these psychological factors, but now they pay attention. One thing that’s really important: the man who does the breeding cannot be involved with any nasty things, like vaccinations or any kind of veterinary care. (Nasty from the pig’s point of view, I mean.) If he does any of that stuff, the pigs will reject him. He might still be able to breed them, but they’ll have smaller litters. Paul Hemsworth, from Australia, showed that sows who are afraid of people have 6 percent fewer piglets than sows who aren’t afraid of people, and the piglets don’t do as well on weight gain after they’re born.20 The people attending the farrowing also have to be people the pig trusts completely. So the employee handling the breeding has to do only the breeding and nothing else.

  HORSES IN SUPER-MAX PRISONS

  Pig breeders respect the animals’ nature, and they do a good job with their animals. But I have a lot of complaints about horse breeders. They keep the stallions locked up alone in their stalls all day long, where they go crazy with nothing to do and no one to interact with. Horses are social herd animals, and they need to be with other horses. The super-max prisons we keep stallions in distort their sexuality.

  Out on the range, a stallion who wants to mate a mare walks up to her and whinnies. He’s saying, “Would you like to have sex?” and he has to ask very nicely to breed her. If the female doesn’t cooperate he isn’t going to get anywhere.

  But a stallion who’s been locked up in a stall turns into an aggressive sex maniac. The mating procedures owners use are horrible. They tie up the mare so she can’t run away, and then they hobble her feet so she can’t kick the stallion if she doesn’t like him. Then they let the stallion out and he just runs up to her and rapes her. It is disgusting.

  I understand why the breeders don’t want to do things the natural way. They’re afraid the mare will kick the stallion and injure him. But turning stallions into horse rapists is wrong. It’s completely abnormal, and keeping the stallions locked up the way they do is terrible. A racehorse who’s been reared in isolation probably does need his own stall for protection, but that’s because his character has already been warped. Horses don’t need private stalls; they need other horses. The owners may be sparing no expense providing food and shelter, but they’re just not thinking.

  HORMONES OF LOVE

  We know a fair amount about the brain basis of sexuality. Everyone has heard of testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone, and probably most people know that both sexes have all three hormones, though in different amounts. Two other important hormones aren’t as well known: oxytocin in females and arginine vasopressin (AVP), or vasopressin, in males. (Some readers may have heard of AVP from their pediatricians. AVP is also called antidiuretic hormone, or ADH, because it increases water retention. Doctors sometimes prescribe it for children who wet the bed.)

  Oxytocin shoots up right before a mother animal gives birth and helps her be a good mother, and both oxytocin and vasopressin shoot up in male brains as well as female brains during sex. (Oxytocin is more important in the female brain and vasopressin is more important in the male brain.) These are very, very old chemicals. Both of them evolved from vasotocin, which controls sexual behavior in frogs and other amphibians. If you put just a little bit of vasotocin into a frog’s brain the frog will immediately start performing courtship and mating behaviors. There’s only one amino acid difference between vasotocin, oxytocin, and vasopressin, so when it comes to sex, we still have our frog brains working for us.

  Vasopressin and oxytocin aren’t just sex hormones. They’re motherhood, fatherhood, and love hormones, too. Some science writers have called vasopressin the monogamy hormone, because prairie voles, who mate for life, have much higher levels of vasopressin than their cousins the montane voles, who don’t mate for life. (Only 3 percent of all mammals are monogamous.) Mother and father prairie voles build nests together and raise their babies together. Thomas Insel, a neuroscientist who has done a lot of the research on vasopressin and voles, has found that when you put high-vasopressin prairie voles together in a big roomy cage the male and female mates will spend half their time close together. When you put low-vasopressin montane voles inside the same cage, they spend almost all of their time alone and only 5 percent of their time physically close to another vole.21

  Oxytocin is especially important to all these social activities, because oxytocin is essential to social memory: oxytocin is the hormone that lets animals remember each other. An experiment with mutant mice who didn’t have the gene for oxytocin found that the mice didn’t form social memories. They could remember everything else just fine, but they couldn’t remember that they’d already met a mouse who had just been put in their cage, and they’d start sniffing him like he was a total stranger.22 (Animals who already know each other never sniff each other as much after a separation as they do when they first meet. You can see this easily with dogs.) Obviously, if yo
u don’t have social memory you can’t be monogamous, and you’re not going to be a very devoted mom, either, if you have trouble recognizing your babies.

  This finding has led researchers to speculate that some autistic people might have faulty oxytocin production, since a lot of times autistic people don’t seem to remember people they’ve met before, either. However, a lot of that has to do with face recognition, which is extremely poor in autistic people, not face memory. This is another aspect of autism that no one understands, although we do have brain scan data confirming it. There’s also a study showing that normal people use different parts of the brain to recognize an object versus a face, whereas autistic people use the object recognition area of the brain to recognize objects and faces. I have a terrible time recognizing people’s faces myself, but I don’t have any trouble remembering people in other ways, like through their voices. Oxytocin might be involved in autism; I don’t know. But I’m guessing that autistic people’s face recognition problems come from something else.

  Vasopressin also makes prairie voles sexually possessive. They mate guard, which means they stick close to their mate and fight off any other male who approaches. They’re more territorial, and they’re much more aggressive toward other males even when their mates are not present. One study looked at the relationship between vasopressin and intermale aggression, which is a male animal’s tendency to attack another strange male that is put into a cage with him.23 The researchers found that adult male voles who are still virgins are almost never aggressive. But once they’ve mated and had their vasopressin levels rise they “exhibit a long-lasting, permanent increase in aggression.” In the study the researchers injected newborn prairie voles with vasopressin over the first seven days of life, then tested them for aggression. The treated voles were much more aggressive, not just toward other males but even toward females.

  The montane voles, who have low vasopressin, could care less about their mates or about other males. Once they’ve mated a female they disappear. They’re just not very socially motivated. The montane females are loners, too. Oxytocin is the maternal hormone, and montane females have lower levels of it than the prairie females. Montane females abandon their babies soon after they give birth—and the babies aren’t too bothered by this, because they aren’t very social, either.

  Compare that to the way a mama dog acts with her babies. One time Mark’s dog Annie accidentally got locked in the kitchen and she couldn’t get to her puppies, who were in the attached garage. Annie went crazy. First she violently scratched the door, then she attacked the plasterboard on the wall between the kitchen and the garage. She was so frantic that she clawed clear through the wall into the garage. Annie was a relatively small dog, only thirty to thirty-five pounds, but she was so desperate to get to her babies she tore through a wall.

  Dogs probably have fairly high oxytocin levels. They’re highly social animals to begin with, and an animal has to have good oxytocin levels to be highly social. Wolves are often monogamous, and even when they’re not strictly monogamous they practice serial monogamy. The dingo and the Carolina dog are usually monogamous, too.

  On the other hand, domestic dogs don’t look like they’re monogamous at all. A male dog on the loose will mate any receptive female he finds and then go tearing off to find any other receptive females in the area. However, that might be due to the fact that dogs never become full adults emotionally, so they don’t develop an adult wolf’s capacity for monogamy. Also, we don’t really know what domestic dogs’ social life would be like if they didn’t live with people. Very few pet dogs have the option of mating with another dog for life.

  A dog’s oxytocin levels rise when his owner pets him, and petting his dog raises the owner’s oxytocin, too. I’m sure that’s one reason why so many people have dogs in the first place. I don’t think anyone has researched this yet, but I expect we’ll find that dogs make humans into nicer people and better parents. Oxytocin is definitely important in humans. When women have babies their oxytocin levels shoot up right before the birth, and research shows that those high levels spark maternal warmth and care. Oxytocin produces caring “maternal” behavior in men, too. So for parents, owning and petting a dog is probably like getting a “good parent” shot every day. Dogs are probably good for marriages for the same reason.

  One of the interesting things about the research on vasopressin is the way behaviors we humans tend to think are “bad,” like aggression and sexual possessiveness, go together with behaviors we think are good, like taking care of the young and being faithful to your mate. Male prairie voles have higher aggression and higher mate guarding, and they’re also faithful husbands and nice dads. Male montane voles don’t have much aggression or any mate guarding at all, but they’re promiscuous and totally uninterested in their offspring. Take away the aggression and the mate guarding and you lose the devoted mate and the good dad, too. They go together.

  The research on testosterone and paternal behavior isn’t as clear as the research on vasopressin. A lot of researchers have concluded that testosterone lowers paternal behavior, but the most recent research shows that in a monogamous animal, testosterone increases paternal behavior. The body converts testosterone to estrogen, and the estrogen increases nurturing of the young.

  ANIMAL LOVE

  All baby animals make a high-pitched distress call when they’re separated from their mothers. (I don’t know whether montane vole babies have a distress call, but I assume they probably do if only for a short period of time.) Animal babies are totally attached to their mamas, and when they grow up most animals are strongly attached either to a particular friend or to the members of their social group, or both. Animals love other animals.

  Animals make social distinctions between friend and stranger the same way people do, too. I heard a story about a guy who was stealing pigs at an auction a while back. Farmers bring their hogs to auction to sell to buyers from the packing plants. The auctions last for a few days and handle thousands of pigs, so it would be easy to take just one or two pigs a day without anyone noticing, which is what the thief was doing. The only reason they knew someone was stealing was that the trucks were coming up short. A truck holds two hundred animals, and when a farmer delivered a truckload of pigs to the loading dock the stockyard manager would do a head count and find that one pig was missing.

  They discovered who the thief was when somebody noticed a pen where none of the pigs were lying together. Each pig was keeping his distance from the others, and the guy who noticed them realized that the pigs in that pen were acting like strangers. The reason they were acting like strangers was that they were strangers. They’d come from different farms.

  The thief turned out to be an employee who was taking one or two pigs a day out of the thousands at the auction and moving them to a pen in the back where he was keeping them until he could take them home. The pen looked like every other pen, and there would have been no reason for anyone to think the pigs inside had been stolen if the pigs themselves hadn’t known they didn’t belong there. The pigs’ behavior gave him away. They weren’t with their friends, and they acted like they weren’t with their friends.

  People constantly underestimate domestic animals’ need for companionship. A good way to understand just how social these animals are is to ask yourself how horses, cows, pigs, sheep, dogs, and, to a lesser degree, cats, came to be domesticated in the first place. Why did wild horses decide it was okay to have people sitting in a saddle on their backs holding a pair of reins? It’s pretty incredible.

  Most experts believe that the reason these animals became domesticated was that they were highly social. Their innate sociability led them to associate with humans and eventually to accept human ownership and direction. That’s a high degree of sociability, and it’s still there in all of our domestic animals. Even cats are much more social than people realize; sister cats even help each other give birth. All domestic animals need companionship. It is as much a core requirement as f
ood and water.

  Some ranchers are beginning to take this into account. In the past I’ve watched calves being separated from their mamas here at the university when they reached weaning age, which is three to six months. There’s a lot of individual variability in how the calves and the mothers react, and some of them would get horribly upset. I remember one mama who was mooing frantically and trying to jump the fence to get back to her baby. The babies acted really stressed and agitated, too.

  Now people are starting to do low-stress weaning, where the mothers and the babies are separated by a fence but they can still touch noses. That’s all the babies care about by that age. They don’t care about the nursing; they care about being together with their mom. If you didn’t separate the calves, and just let nature take its course, female calves would probably stay with their mothers for good. You see that a lot in the wild, mothers and daughters staying together. You also see males stay with their brothers, and in some species males form friendships with other males.

  A dog’s attachment to his owner is like a baby animal’s attachment to his mother, or a human child’s attachment to his mom or dad. Pet dogs act the exact same way children do in the strange situation test. In the strange situation test the researcher watches how a very young child reacts to a strange new environment when his mother is there with him, and when she’s not. Most children will confidently explore a strange environment as long as their mother is with them, but when she leaves the room they’ll stop exploring and wait anxiously for her to come back. Dogs do exactly the same thing. This has been tested formally in fifty-one dogs and owners. Most dogs stop exploring and act anxious when their owner leaves the room. Then they relax and start exploring again when their owner returns. When humans say dogs are like children, they’re right.

  Researchers do ESB—electrical stimulation of the brain—research on social attachment by recording which areas in the brain cause an animal to make separation distress calls when stimulated by electrodes. Using this technique they’ve been able to map out these circuits and the chemicals that are involved pretty well. Evolutionarily, social distress is linked to three old, primitive systems in the brain: