I talked to a vet student who has the same problem with a horse she owns, and she uses a slightly different version of the same technique. She doesn’t feed any of the horses until they’re all standing nicely at the trough, with their ears forward. Then she feeds them all at the same time. If anyone has their ears pinned back—any of the horses, not just the problem horse—no food. It’s not hard to get the group of horses to turn their ears forward, because that’s what horses do naturally when they’re paying attention to you. She just waits them out, until all of them are focused on her instead of on each other. She uses Mark’s approach only if her horse tries to chase the others away after the feed has been put out. Then that horse does get fed last. She said her system works really well.
The point is, you have to do a lot of emotional damage to a prey animal to turn it into a killer. As we’ve seen, if you lock a stallion up alone in a stall for his whole life, with no socialization at all, he could become aggressive. He might rear up and strike at people. That’s dangerous, but only because the stallion is so big. He isn’t actively trying to kill the person he’s kicking. There are always exceptions, of course. Just recently I read a report about a stallion in Poland who became aroused by a nearby mare and then attacked and killed his owner, who was trying to calm him down. The report said that the horse bit his owner’s jugular vein and also damaged his spine, so this was obviously a vicious attack. Still, a horse attacking and killing his owner is so unheard of that even though it happened in Poland we read about it here.
Bulls do kill people with some frequency, but when they do they’re almost never trying to kill; they’re challenging the person for dominance. Bulls don’t kill each other when they’re fighting for dominance, but because a bull is so big, and because bulls use head butting to win dominance contests, the human gets crushed against a fence. The bull doesn’t understand how much bigger and stronger he is.
Even though you can handle aggressive behavior in most, though not all, prey animals, it’s always better to keep aggressive behavior from developing in the first place. With prey animals that means good training and socialization, but not dominance training per se. I think in the old days a lot of animal handlers didn’t understand the difference. They thought any kind of training was also dominance training because the trainer was in charge. That’s probably where the idea of breaking a horse’s spirit came from. You shouldn’t break any animal’s spirit, horse or dog, but a nervous prey animal like a horse or a cow doesn’t need to learn obedience as a separate concept the way a dog does. A cow or a horse who’s being trained just needs training, not dominating; a dog needs training, but he also needs dominating. A dog needs an alpha, or else he’ll be the alpha himself. With prey animals even an aggressive, nippy kind of horse usually isn’t much of a problem to manage.
It’s never easy to manage an aggressive dog. The only person equipped to deal with an adult dog who bites is a professional who specializes in aggression, and even then your chances of turning the dog around are not good. Dr. Bonnie Beaver, a veterinary animal behavior specialist at Texas A&M, says that a typical case of dominance over humans gets worse, and Dr. Dodman, who treats dominance aggression, reports that only two out of three of dogs with dominance aggression end up getting a lot better, even with a formal retraining program. The other third still have problems, although most of them are safer to be around than they were. But many dogs do not improve at all. These are dangerous animals.
It’s also easy for most dogs to become biters if they’re allowed to hold alpha status over their owner. We don’t know exactly why it’s so easy to teach a dog not to bite in the first place, but so hard to teach a dog to stop biting once he’s started. Why can’t you turn back the developmental clock and retrain an aggressive dog the way you train a puppy?
Dr. Dodman has done research showing that in some cases the problem is the owner.23 “Emotional” owners aren’t as successful at retraining a dominant aggressive dog as “rational” owners who can stick to a retraining program. Maybe people who were too “kindhearted” to be firm trainers and disciplinarians in the first place can’t suddenly turn themselves into good trainers just because an animal behaviorist has told them that they have to do it. If they had established themselves as the alpha early in their dog’s life, they would not have a biting dog. This is true for all normal dogs. There are some dogs who are genetically bad, dangerous dogs, the same way the rapist roosters were genetically bad, dangerous birds. Such dogs have to be euthanized. But if you own a normal dog, you can prevent aggression by doing enough obedience training to establish yourself as the alpha.
I think the main reason you can’t train a dog back out of aggression as easily as you can train a dog into aggression is that the genie has been let out of the bottle. All dogs have a natural drive to be the alpha. Owners have to teach their dogs to think that it’s impossible for a dog to dominate a human. It’s not just a bad thing, it’s an impossible thing. Once a dog has discovered that he can dominate people there’s no turning back. You can’t un-teach this knowledge; you can only try to teach a biting dog to inhibit his impulse to compete with his owner for dominance.
This is what happens with the big cats. In Out of Africa Isak Dinesen tells a story about a young pet lion named Paddy. Paddy was tame, and was nice to everyone at the ranch where they lived, although he’d never been socialized to children. Then one day someone brought a little girl to visit, and Paddy accidentally knocked her down. He didn’t hurt the little girl, and he didn’t do it on purpose.
But that very night Paddy went out into the pasture and killed a bunch of livestock, and from then on he had to live in a cage. He had learned that he was a lion, not a big house cat. That one moment of experiencing his power over another creature, when he knocked down the little girl, was enough to wake up his real nature.
Triggering a predator animal’s aggressive nature is so dangerous that big cat handlers can use a trained lion or tiger only a few times in TV shows and movies if the scenes involve knocking down a human being. Even when a trained lion or tiger gently bumps against a human being on command it will soon become too dangerous to work with.
The moral for lion tamers is, Don’t let this kitty ever find out that he weighs seven hundred pounds. You can arrest an animal’s emotional development by not giving it a chance to figure out its strength and power, but you can’t make him un-learn his strength and aggression once he knows it.
HANDLING FEAR AGGRESSION
Not all dogs who bite are dominant. Shy biters bite people because they’re afraid, not because they are dominant. German shepherds who bite are usually shy biters. They are nervous animals.
Shy biters are somewhat less dangerous than dominant biters. They are dangerous mainly when the owner is around to give them courage. If a shy biter sees a stranger or a neighbor he’s afraid of when he’s alone, he’ll usually just try to get away. If he can’t get away, he will bite the stranger from behind because that’s less frightening than having to meet the person’s eyes. Shy dogs will avoid eye contact with everyone but their owners at all costs. That’s just as well, since if you’re going to get bitten by a dog it’s better to get bitten on the ankle or the thigh than in the face. All in all, shy dogs are probably not as dangerous as they seem.
A dominant scared dog is different. Dogs who are both dominant and fearful can bite any time and place. They will bite with their owners present, or with their owners long gone. And when they bite, they can go straight for the face. Because they are dominant by nature, running away isn’t an option. They have to attack. I don’t think anyone knows exactly why a shy dominant dog is as potentially dangerous as he is. Is it just because he has two different reasons, fear and dominance, to bite people, which raises the odds that he will? Is it because when you mix fear and dominance together the dog’s emotions are heightened and his ability to control himself is impaired?
I do know one neutered male dog who’s highly dominant and fearful. He’s not
a shy biter, because his owners realized how dominant he was early on and did everything right, so he knows he’s not the alpha.
But he’s a big problem with other dogs. He’ll try to attack any dog he sees on walks with his owners, and he can never be let off a leash in public or taken to a dog park. This is a dog who was well socialized to other dogs as a puppy, and yet was so dominant by nature that he still managed to get into two fights with the neighbor’s dog. He won the first fight but lost the second one, and has been acting more and more terrified of other dogs ever since.
If he were a submissive dog by nature, that might not matter, because he would just avoid looking at the dog who was scaring him. But since he’s dominant by nature, the instant he feels threatened by another dog he attacks—and he feels threatened all the time. Just the sight of another dog minding its own business seems to threaten him. This dog’s behavior reminds me of a well-known study of anxious children versus oppositional children. (Children with oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD, are kids who are so angry and disobedient that their behavior disrupts their school or home life.) Both groups of children interpret ambiguous situations as being more threatening than typical kids do, but where an anxious child copes by avoiding the threat the oppositional child will become aggressive.24 I don’t think a dominant dog is the same thing as an oppositional child, but the fearful dominant dog I know seems both to exaggerate threats and to react aggressively to threats once he’s blown them up out of all proportion in his mind.
Regardless of what makes a shy dominant biter tick, once any dog has begun to bite out of fear, you have an animal who is never going to be completely safe again, because no animal can be completely trained out of fear.
If you’ve never lived with a dog, by now you may be thinking the best idea for anyone who’s especially safety-minded is to just stay away from any animal larger than a small cat.
But that would be the wrong conclusion. The human relationship with domestic animals goes back a long way, and people need animals in their lives. Until recently most experts believed that humans and dogs paired up together 14,000 years ago, but more recent research on dog DNA shows that humans and dogs may have been keeping company for over 100,000 years. Dogs really are man’s best friend.
The reason dogs don’t kill humans more often than they do isn’t that owners are brilliant trainers. A lot of owners don’t know the first thing about obedience training. The reason dogs don’t kill humans is that in 100,000 years of evolution dogs have developed a lot of ability to inhibit aggression against humans, and humans have developed a lot of ability to manage dog aggression, whether they’ve ever read a book on obedience training or not. I think humans have probably evolved some innate ability to read dog language, or at least to learn to read it quickly.
A friend of mine told me an interesting story about this. She adopted a puppy from an animal shelter who quickly began showing signs that he was destined to be a highly dominant dog. When the puppy was only a few months old it started to growl at her seven-year-old son. A couple of weeks later the puppy bared his teeth and growled at a six-foot-four plumber who came to the house to fix the toilet.
The first time the puppy growled at her son my friend was sitting in another room and she called out to her son, “Why did Buddy growl at you?”
Her son, who had never lived with a dog in his life, said matter-of-factly, “Because I was on his chair.”
He was right. Buddy had growled because he was lying comfortably on his favorite chair, which naturally was the biggest, softest chair in the house, seeing as how he was such an alpha kind of guy—and then the boy came in and sat down on it with him! Buddy didn’t like that, and he told the boy he didn’t like it in no uncertain terms.
And the boy understood. He knew exactly why his family’s new dog had growled at him without having to be taught—without even having to think about it. He got the message.
Through all the years dogs have been living with humans they’ve developed a lot of ability to read people, to know what people are thinking and what they’re likely to do. We know this from research comparing dogs to wolves. Even a wolf who has been hand-reared by human beings never acquires the ability to read people’s faces the way any normal dog does. A human-reared wolf mostly doesn’t look at his master’s face, even when he’s in a situation where he could use his master’s help. Dogs always look at their owner’s faces for information, especially if they need help.25
I think that as dogs were learning how to read us, we were learning how to read them. The reason dogs don’t hurt people more often is that dogs and people belong together.
5. Pain and Suffering
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.
Animals in Translation Page 21