Animals in Translation

by Temple Grandin

  Predators have to learn from other animals whom to direct their hardwired predatory behavior against. If a puppy grew up in a house with a pet groundhog, the puppy would learn that a groundhog is not prey and would probably never attack it. That’s why puppies need to be raised around toddlers, or at least exposed to them. Toddlers do the same kind of sudden, rapid movement prey animals do, so it’s easy for them to trigger a dog’s predatory killing behavior. Puppies have to be taught that toddlers are not prey.

  It’s not hard to teach a dog what’s prey and what’s not; you just have to make sure you do it. When I was little our family had a golden retriever who was a vicious cat killer. Ronnie was the sweetest dog around little children. I can remember trying to ride on Ronnie’s back when I was about four, and he never even protested. But whenever he saw a cat he became wildly excited and would instantly chase and kill it. Ronnie had been thoroughly exposed to toddlers as a puppy, and he knew toddlers weren’t for killing. But he hadn’t been exposed to cats and had concluded that cats were for killing. He never got confused about the categories, either, because a dog is emotionally wired to learn prey and not prey.

  Having to learn what to eat and what not to eat gives animals and humans the flexibility to adapt. If an animal had to rely on instinct alone to feed himself he would starve if his usual source of food suddenly disappeared or went into decline. He wouldn’t be able to imitate other animals, either.

  IS IT FUN TO KILL A GROUNDHOG?

  The answer is yes.

  First of all, behaviorists call predatory killing the quiet bite because predatory killing is not done in a state of rage. We know from brain research that during a kill the rage circuits in the brain are not activated, and we know from observation that the killer is always quiet. Killing bites are nothing like the kind of loud, screaming fights you’ll see two animals from the same species get into. During territorial fights the rage circuits can be turned on, and a rage-filled attacking animal makes a lot of noise. But when a predator is on the kill, he just bites down hard and then shakes his prey to death.

  Dave’s impression that Max enjoyed killing the groundhog was right. We know this from the ESB studies I mentioned in the last chapter. Animals like having their predatory killing circuits turned on, and will turn them on themselves if you show them how. When you think about what predatory killing is all about, of course it ought to feel good, because predatory killing means dinner. Killing a mouse feels good to a cat the same way finding a luscious ripe banana feels good to a primate.

  According to Jaak Panksepp, ESB studies show that predatory killing comes from “essentially the same brain areas” as the SEEKING circuit, which produces the pleasurable feelings of engaged curiosity, intense interest, and eager anticipation I mentioned in the last chapter.9 When the SEEKING circuit is turned on, animals and people seek the things they need and want, like food and shelter, or a perfect pants suit at a department store or an advanced degree in physics. People and animals love the hunt.

  But angry aggression feels bad. Animals and people do not like having their rage circuits turned on, and will avoid it if they can. Rage is a painful emotion. Inside the brain, predatory killing and angry aggression are not the same thing. Not even close.

  THE HAPPY HUNTER

  Anyone who has ever watched a dog kill an animal will tell you that the dog sure looked happy afterward. But since most people aren’t going to get the chance to watch a dog kill a groundhog, if you really want to get a good look at an animal enjoying the hunt, spend some time with a cat. Cats are the super-predators of domestic animals. They can get especially carried away chasing, batting at, and pouncing on a red laser “mouse.” Laser mice are a variant on the battery-operated laser pointers lecturers use in large lecture halls to point to an overhead screen. If you’ve never seen one, a laser pointer projects a tiny red dot that the lecturer can shine onto the part of the overhead screen they’re referring to. In a laser mouse the dot is shaped like a mouse. The mouse shape is just a marketing tool; any cat who will chase a laser mouse will also chase a laser dot.

  Some cats get so excited chasing the dot that they’ve been known to break their own bones or dislocate joints. One time I was at my friend Rosalie’s apartment in New York and I was amazed at the way her two cats, Lilly and Harley, chased a laser mouse. You could lead Lilly and Harley around the whole apartment at a dead run, jump them up on the counter, back down on the floor, up a bookshelf—you could shoot them wherever you wanted them to go. They were so frenzied I had to be careful not to suddenly reverse the motion, because I could throw Lilly into a back flip, she was so focused on that dot.

  I’ve never seen a domestic cat chase any other toy that way. I’ve also never seen a cat behave that way outdoors, chasing live prey. Lilly and Harley had gone into what behaviorists call hyper-activation of the predatory chasing instinct; they were so mindlessly fixated they could have injured themselves. I think that happens with laser pointers because cats can see the dot but can’t catch it. Even when a cat puts his paws on the dot he can’t feel it or hold it. The laser dot probably becomes a super-stimulus that keeps on stimulating the chase because the cat can’t complete the sequence of chase and catch, so the chase instinct can’t get turned off.

  I was intrigued to find that even when I held the dot still, which I assumed would turn off the chase behavior, they didn’t calm down at all but kept frantically batting and pawing at it on the floor. They didn’t look like they were playing with the dot, the way a cat will play with its prey; they looked like they were still in chase mode. I suspect that the reason Lilly and Harley stayed so fixated over a motionless red dot was that the slight tremor of my hand was making the dot vibrate enough to keep them hooked in. I was holding my hand as still as I could, but the tiny movements of mouse-dot on the floor were enough to keep them going. That’s how hyper-activated they were.

  I’ve been told that some cats don’t chase laser pointers, which is interesting. I wonder whether those cats may know more about hunting and catching live prey than indoor cats like Lilly and Harley do. Lilly and Harley aren’t allowed outside and were never taught to hunt by their mother, whereas a cat with a normal outdoor upbringing learns what to chase and when. Outdoor cats also learn to inhibit their chasing instinct so they can stalk their prey and get close enough to catch it.

  An outdoor cat who’s learned all these things may not be interested in a laser mouse for a couple of different reasons. Number one, a laser dot is not food and they’ve made the connection between chasing and eating; and number two, the cat knows how to suppress his chasing instinct. He isn’t a slave to rapid motion the way Lilly and Harley are. Whatever the explanation, the fact that some cats don’t chase laser pointers, while others chase them so frantically they risk injuring themselves, shows you that what an animal chases is learned, not instinctual.

  The cats’ fixation on the dot reminded me of autistic fixations. It was totally mindless; nothing else in the world existed. Their whole world was a little dot. I was like that when I was a child. I remember dribbling sand through my hands and the rest of the world disappeared. I was hypnotized by the tiny reflections coming off each little grain of sand. I couldn’t stop looking. Sometimes I would stare at falling sand on purpose, just to shut out overwhelming stimuli from my environment.

  I think I was probably tapping into the part of the same prey chase circuit Lilly and Harley had activated. Like the cats, I was attracted to erratic movement, because it was the constant changing movement of the reflections that held my attention. The autistic brain, like all brains, seems to be attracted to rapid erratic movement. The difference is, we get stuck in it. Flags are another moving object that used to fascinate me, and I wonder whether some autistic children’s love of rotating fans falls into this category, too. I didn’t care about fans myself, but the movement of fan blades didn’t look erratic to me. The autistic kids who really love fans are usually lower-functioning, and their visual processing may be more pi
ecemeal. Maybe to some autistic children the little light reflections off of fan blades does look erratic, so they get hooked.

  HOW ANIMALS MANAGE PREDATORY AGGRESSION

  In the wild, tigers and other animals who hunt for food can’t act like Lilly and Harley or they wouldn’t survive. First of all, no wild animal has an unlimited food supply. A predator who chased and killed everything that moved would quickly run out of food.

  Another reason why an animal living in the wild has to show some restraint is that he can’t afford to waste calories on a chase that doesn’t end in a meal. If he killed animals he wasn’t going to eat, he’d then have to kill even more animals to replace the calories he used up chasing down and killing prey for sport.

  Last but not least, mindless chasing like Lilly’s and Harley’s would make an animal less likely to catch prey, not more, because it short-circuits intelligent stalking behavior. Cats stalk their prey to get in the best possible position to pounce and catch it. That’s the whole point. A cat wants to catch the mouse, not chase it in circles forever the way Lilly and Harley were doing. So predators have to be able to inhibit the impulse to give chase until they’re in the best position to catch the animal they’re after.

  What all of this means is that an animal has to be able to inhibit his chase sequence, and he has to learn how and when to do this from other animals.

  We know this is true from the behavior of animals raised in captivity and reintroduced to the wild. The television show Living with Tigers had a terrific episode about two cubs who had been raised by humans and then returned to the wild. At first they chased everything they saw, whether they were hungry or not. One night they killed seven antelopes in an orgy of predatory killing. It was like Lilly and Harley chasing the laser. They just kept chasing and kill-biting every animal that moved, one animal after another. They didn’t eat them; they just killed them. The humans finally began holding them back, trying to teach them just to kill what they needed to eat.

  The humans also had to teach them what to eat. When the young cubs were presented with a dead zebra they instantly performed a killing bite to the neck. I’m not sure why the cubs did that since obviously the zebra wasn’t moving, but it may have been because the zebra was down on the ground. Maybe that was the trigger.

  But after they performed the killing bite they made no attempt to eat the zebra. They didn’t know the zebra was food; they thought food was something that came in the back of a truck. It was the same problem Dave’s dog had with the groundhog. Nobody ever told him that a groundhog is meat. The humans had to teach the cubs that the animals they were chasing were also good for eating, which they did by cutting open the dead bodies and exposing the entrails.

  The film footage of those tiger cubs is a good lesson on what a fixed action pattern looks like, and on exactly how far a fixed action pattern will take an animal in life. The tiger cubs were born knowing how to perform a killing bite, but that was it. The rest they had to learn. I assume that a normal animal learns from his mother and/or his peers to kill only what he intends to eat, though I don’t know this for a fact. We do know, however, that almost no animal routinely kills prey animals on an indiscriminate basis.

  The only wild animal I’ve seen who will sometimes violate this rule is the coyote. Most of the time a coyote eats the animals he kills, but occasionally coyotes will go on a lamb-killing spree, killing twenty and eating only one. I believe it’s possible coyotes have lost some of their economy of behavior by living in close proximity to humans and overabundant food supplies. A coyote that kills twenty lambs and eats only one isn’t going to have to trek a hundred miles to find more lambs next week. Any sheep rancher will have several hundred other lambs that will be just as easy to catch later on, and the coyote knows it. Wild coyotes have probably lost the knowledge that you shouldn’t waste food or energy.

  AFFECTIVE AGGRESSION

  Affective aggression is completely different from predatory aggression. Affective aggression is hot aggression; it’s aggression driven by rage. Compared to predatory aggression, in affective aggression an animal’s emotions are different, his behavior is different, and his body is different.

  A cat whose rage circuits have been electrically stimulated assumes an aggressive posture and hisses, and his hair stands on end (that’s called piloerection, for erection of the hair follicles). His body is aroused. His heart beats faster, and his adrenal system kicks in. Stimulate the same cat’s predatory circuits and his body stays calm. Jaak Pansksepp says you see “methodical stalking and well directed pouncing,”9 with no increase in stress hormones. Humans have tended to mix up these two states, because the outcome is the same: a smaller, weaker animal ends up dead. But predatory aggression and rage aggression couldn’t be more different for the aggressor.

  Animal behaviorists usually classify the different types of rage aggression by the stimulus that triggers the aggression, and different experts have come up with slightly different lists.

  This is mine:

  Assertive aggression. This category includes dominance aggression and territorial aggression.

  Fear-driven aggression. This includes maternal aggression to protect young.

  Pain-based aggression.

  Intermale aggression. Intermale aggression is influenced by testosterone levels.

  Irritable or stress-induced aggression. This includes redirected aggression, such as when a cat gets agitated by the sight of another cat outside but can’t get to it and so attacks another cat or person inside the house instead.

  Mixed aggression. For instance, fear combined with assertive aggression.

  Pathological aggression.

  Assertive Aggression

  Assertive aggression includes both dominance aggression—one animal attacking another to assert or maintain his dominance in the hierarchy—and territorial aggression, which is when an animal attacks to protect his territory from intruders. Assertive aggression is probably connected to the neurotransmitter serotonin in a fairly straightforward way; the lower the serotonin, the more aggressive the animal. Antidepressants like Prozac that increase serotonin levels can reduce dominance aggression in a pet.

  Unfortunately, the connection between serotonin, assertive aggression, and actual social dominance or alpha ranking within the group still has to be sorted out. There is strong evidence from colonies of vervet monkeys that the dominant animal has the highest levels of serotonin and the lowest levels of overall aggression.10 The lowest-ranking animals show the most random, impulsive aggression, while the leaders are calm and collected and get aggressive only when they have to defend the group.

  We know this from Michael Raleigh’s famous study of twelve vervet monkey colonies. He and his team removed the dominant monkey, always a male, from all twelve colonies, then gave a medication that raised serotonin levels to one of the two remaining males in the colony, and a medication that lowered serotonin levels to the other. That gave them twelve subordinate males in twelve different troops who now had higher levels of serotonin than they did before, and twelve subordinate males who now had lower levels.

  Every single one of the subordinate monkeys whose serotonin levels had been raised became the dominant monkey of the pair. Then, when they reversed the medications, raising the serotonin levels of the monkeys who had previously had their levels artificially lowered, those monkeys became dominant.

  The reason this whole area is so confusing is that we’re talking about two completely different fields of research. We don’t know whether the people who study dominance aggression in dogs are talking about the same thing Michael Raleigh was studying in vervet monkeys. So for the time being we have to make do with the standard definition of assertive aggression I’m using here.

  Fear-Driven Aggression

  Fear-driven aggression causes so much violence and destruction in the animal and human worlds that I’ve often asked myself, What is rage for?

  Why do we have rage circuits at all?

  When you lo
ok at animals living in the wild, the answer is simple. Rage is about survival, at the most basic brute level. Rage is the emotion that drives the lion being gored to death by the buffalo to fight back; rage drives a zebra being caught by a lion to make one last-ditch effort to escape. I once saw a videotape of a domestic beef cow kicking the living daylights out of an attacking lion. It was some of the hardest kicking I have ever seen. Rage is the ultimate defense all animals draw upon when their lives are in mortal danger.

  When it comes to human safety in the presence of animals, fear cuts two ways. Fear can inhibit an animal or a person from attacking, and very often does. Among humans, the most vicious murderers are people who have abnormally low fear. Fear protects you when you’re under attack, and keeps you from becoming an attacker yourself.

  But fear can also cause a terrified animal to attack, where a less-fearful animal wouldn’t. A cornered animal can be extremely aggressive; that’s where we get the saying about not getting someone’s “back up against a wall.” An animal with his back up against a wall is in fear for its life and will feel he has no choice but to attack.

  On average, prey species animals like horses and cattle show more fear-based aggression than predatory animals such as dogs. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since prey animals spend a lot more time being scared.

  I categorize maternal aggression differently from some researchers; I put it in the fear department. I think maternal aggression is fear-driven at heart because over the years I’ve observed that the high-strung nervous animals will always fight more vigorously to protect her young than will a laid-back, calm animal like a Holstein dairy cow. Many a rancher has told me that the most hotheaded, nervous cow in the herd is the one who is most protective of her calf.

  Any mother, nervous or calm, will fight to protect her baby. That’s why on farms the human parents always warn their children to stay away from mama animals. But the fact that it’s always the most nervous, fearful mother who shows the most maternal aggression makes me think that maternal aggression is driven by fear, even when the animal is calm by nature. When mother animals think their babies are in danger, they feel fear, and their fear leads them to attack. That’s my conclusion.