People’s fears can grow that way, too. But now Red Dog is branching out in a way I don’t think people do. Just lately she’s gotten terrified by the sight of those red aerial marker balls they put on power lines so airplanes won’t hit them. She goes nuts when she sees one of those things.
Then the other day all of a sudden she went crazy when she saw the rear end of a gasoline tanker.
I hadn’t given much thought to Red Dog’s choice of objects to be terrified of until I reread Dr. LeDoux’s book. Halfway through I suddenly realized that the things Red Dog is afraid of are just different versions of the same thing: all three of them are round, red objects seen against the blue sky. The tankers are round and painted red on the back, and Red Dog sees them when she’s riding with Mark in his truck. From her angle, she’s probably seeing them surrounded by sky.
When human fears spread from the original scary thing to other objects or situations that should be neutral Dr. LeDoux calls it over-generalizing. The fear generalizes too far. A Vietnam vet who jumps out of his skin when he hears a car backfire is over-generalizing from the sound of gunfire to the sound of cars backfiring.
That’s what Red Dog was doing, but she was over-generalizing in a hyper-specific way.
People can make hyper-specific over-generalizations, too. That’s what the Vietnam vet is doing when he jumps at the sound of a car backfiring. But animals do it all the time. I don’t think any human would go from being scared of red hot air balloons to being scared of the red ends of tanker trucks.
Animals seem to over-generalize within the sensory channel that first frightened them. That’s why Red Dog keeps generalizing out to things she can see. People probably do this, too, but my impression is that people’s over-generalized fears are often more logical and more conceptual than an animal’s. For instance, I’ve heard of people going from fear of flying to fear of elevators. That’s different from a hot air balloon fear spreading to aerial markers. If an elevator crashed with you inside, that would kill you just as surely as a plane crash would, but no aerial marker is going to rev up its burner over your house and startle you half to death. An airplane and an elevator are linked conceptually; a red hot air balloon and a red aerial marker are linked only perceptually.
Some of the difference between animal fears and human fears is probably due to the fact that animals know less about the world than we do, seeing as how we built it and they didn’t. Red Dog doesn’t know the purpose of hot air balloons, aerial marker balls, or liquid nitrogen tankers.
But even if that’s true, you always need to keep in mind that animals are going to generalize their fears out to things that are in the same sensory category, not the same conceptual category. The black hat horse generalized to other black cowboy hats, not to hats in general. (I wish to heck I’d thought to test him with a big black purse, too. I’d love to know whether anything with the general shape of a black cowboy hat would have frightened him.) Animal fears are hyper-specific, and they spread hyper-specifically, too.
KEEPING FEAR OUT OF ANIMALS’ LIVES
With animals, just like with people, there’s a difference between traumatic fears and plain old everyday fears. Traumatic fears in animals are always bad news; they last forever, and they can spread. Even if you do manage to put together a fairly effective counter-phobic behavior program, you’re going to be doing that program for the rest of the animal’s life. It’s a lot of hard work, without a lot of gain.
Everyday fears are different. Unless an animal is anxious by nature, an everyday run-of-the-mill fear won’t wreck his life or yours, either. The problem is that it’s hard to predict which experiences will traumatize an animal and which experiences will just give him something to think about.
Dog owners face this mystery when it comes to deciding whether to install an invisible fence. An invisible fence, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a perimeter created by a radio signal broadcast to a receiver the dog wears on his collar. When the dog gets close enough to the perimeter he hears a warning beep; if he ignores the beep and keeps going he gets a shock.25 You can think of it as a beep-and-shock fence instead of a wire fence. Most of the time invisible fences work great.26 I’d recommend that every dog owner buy one, if I weren’t worried about people holding me responsible when they spend anywhere from a couple hundred to fifteen hundred dollars putting in an invisible fence that turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth for their particular pet.
The reason some dogs don’t do well with an invisible fence relates to pain levels as well as fear levels. A low-fear, low-pain dog like a retriever, either golden or Labrador, can sometimes just run through them. I knew one family whose golden retriever would bound through the perimeter on his way out of the yard but then refuse to come through it on the way back. He didn’t want to get shocked. Apparently he didn’t mind getting shocked when he was making his Great Escape, but getting a shock just to come home again wasn’t worth it.
It was a huge nuisance, because there was one family down the street who was terrified of that dog, even though he’d never done anything bad to them. Naturally that was the one house he’d always make a beeline for whenever he was done with his travels. He’d plop himself down on their doorstep and just lie there waiting for his owners to come get him and take him home. Probably he’d noticed that his owners always seemed to show up the fastest when he landed at the scared family’s house. That was true, of course, because the instant the scared family saw the dog they’d start frantically calling the owners every five seconds—and naturally the owners would race over to retrieve the dog the minute they got the call, because they knew how upset the scared family was. Until the owners arrived, the scared family would be locked up inside their house, too terrified to come out. Naturally the owners lived in fear of having this happen sometime when they weren’t home. What if there was an emergency and the scared family was trapped inside their house because the dog had busted through the invisible fence again?
I heard about another dog, a little Jack Russell terrier, who would get through the fence just because his fellow-dog, another retriever, could go through it. The retriever would sail through unscathed, and the Jack Russell would lower himself to the ground and stare at the place where he knew he’d get the shock. Finally he’d bolt. The lady who told me about him said, “He’d decide to take the hit.” I’m sure if that dog had lived alone, or at least in a house whose other dog wasn’t a retriever, he would have stayed put. But he wasn’t going to let his pal take off without him.
Those are the problems you can have with dogs who are low-fear (or low-pain). They’re unusual, but they do happen. The problems that can crop up with a high-fear dog are more difficult to manage. I’ve never heard of a dog getting out-and-out traumatized by an invisible fence, but I’ve seen some come close. Some dogs will get so scared of the perimeter that they’ll refuse to ever go through it, whether the collar is on or off, and including when you put them on a leash to take them for a walk. You have to carry or drag them through the perimeter.
That’s not so horrible, but I also heard about a two-year-old collie who got so scared of her own yard that she lost her house-training and started pooping inside the house. If her owners would force her to go outside she’d just stand on the deck barking until her owners finally gave up and let her back in. Then she’d poop on the carpet.
These are all unusual cases. Most dogs live happily inside an invisible fence and don’t panic when you walk them through the perimeter on a leash. But even when an invisible fence works perfectly, you still have to keep on top of the situation. Although animal fears, like human fears, are permanent, animals will reality-test a fear that falls short of a phobia.
I know that happens with invisible fences. I talked to a woman who bought an aboveground invisible fence for her two young dogs. It worked like a charm, but remembering to put their collars on every morning was a pain. (She didn’t like the dogs to sleep in the collars at night, because one of them had sensitive skin and
the metal prongs were rubbing it raw.) So she figured she’d be vigilant for a couple of months until the dogs took it for granted that they couldn’t leave the yard without getting a shock. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about whether one of the dogs got out of the house without the collar on. She said she based this on some story she read back in college about how B. F. Skinner once trained some sheep to stay inside a fence, then replaced the fence with a symbolic wire strung between posts. Supposedly the sheep never tried to get past the wire, even though they easily could have.
I don’t remember ever seeing that story in Dr. Skinner’s work myself, and I’d be surprised if that’s what he found. In my experience some animals don’t test fences, but others do. That lady turned out to have fence-testing dogs. At first everything seemed to be working out. The dogs never went near the boundaries, whether they were wearing their collars or not. They didn’t act like they associated the shocks with the collar, either, because every time she took their collars off to take them for a walk she’d have to pull them through the perimeter. They were scared of getting a shock whether they had the collars on or off.
So after a while she just stopped worrying about getting the collars on first thing in the morning. Big mistake. One morning she was sitting outside reading the newspaper when she noticed the dogs running a couple of feet up the hill beside her house, then coming back down again. They seemed to be doing this repeatedly, although she wasn’t paying close enough attention to be sure. She thought they were getting awfully close to the shock perimeter, but since she figured they’d been permanently conditioned like Dr. Skinner’s sheep, she didn’t worry about it.
The next thing she knew, both dogs were gone. They stayed away for hours and probably had a nice romp around the pond a little ways from her house. She’s been having problems with them ever since. As long as she has the collars on and the batteries are working, they stay home. But if she slips up—either forgets to check the batteries or slacks off on putting the collars on in the morning—it doesn’t take too long for the dogs to figure out they’re free.
I don’t know how they manage it, but it sounds like they’re doing their own doggie version of reality testing. The owner has observed that every time she forgets the collars for a few days the same sequence unfolds. First the dogs stay well within the invisible fence boundaries, collar or no collar. Then they start expanding the perimeter, going a little bit farther than the collar would let them go, but no farther. Then, not too long after that, they’re gone.
What she couldn’t figure out was, how do the dogs know it’s okay to expand the perimeter? They’re still acting scared when she takes them through the perimeter on a walk, so why do they test it on their own?
I think they are probably picking up signals a human can’t perceive. I’m guessing they get some kind of little vibration or early warning buzz from the receiver before they reach the spot where the warning sound beeps. They get a warning before the warning. Once the dogs stop perceiving the pre-warning sound or sensation, they start testing the boundaries.
The reason I think this is that the dogs never set off the warning beeps. That has to mean that somehow they know it’s safe to start pushing out the boundaries. If they were just sporadically testing from time to time, to see whether the perimeter was still there, they would set off beeps on days when their collars are on, which is most days.
However those two dogs are doing what they’re doing, the Mark Twain saying about the cat on a hot stove is true only as far as it goes. “She will never sit down on a hot lid again—and that is well;” he said, “but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” That’s true only of a cat who got burned badly enough to be traumatized by the experience, or of a cat who didn’t get burned too badly but doesn’t have any good reason to sit on the stove apart from the fact that cats like to be up high. If the cat isn’t flat-out terrified of the stove, just leery, and if there’s a plate full of yummy meat sitting up there, I predict most cats are going to be back up on that stove.
FEAR MONSTERS
Temperament is everything. An animal with too much fear by nature—or too little fear—can be hard to live with and manage. Owners and trainers have to match their approach to temperament. The wrong kind of handling with large prey animals like cows and horses can actually make them dangerous. You can take a perfectly normal horse or cow and turn it into a spin-and-kick animal—an animal who will spin around and kick a human being with both hooves. When that happens you’ve taken a prey animal and turned him into a killer. It’s ridiculous.
You see it happen when owners use rough training to teach a horse or cow to accept a halter and lead rope. They put a real strong halter and a six-foot lead on the animal, tie him up to a pole, and let him fight it out with the post until he’s exhausted and gives up. The owner is trying to teach the animal to walk calmly on a lead, but instead of just putting on the halter and lead and letting the animal wear them around the corral to get used to the feeling, they think they have to break the animal’s resistance.
It’s a horrible training method. But it has different effects depending on an animal’s temperament, especially his level of inborn timidity. Calm animals, like Holstein cattle, will habituate. After rearing and bucking for a while they’ll settle down and get used to the situation. It’s still a stupid way to train them, but they can take it. A more sensitive, fearful animal can become scared, skittish, and unmanageable when you try to train him that way. That animal will never be okay with the halter and lead, for the rest of its life.
But it’s the animals with the medium temperaments, in between calm and fearful, who become dangerous. When you tie them up to the post they get scared and stay scared, but they don’t lose control. They’re the ones who learn to spin and kick. A naturally calm animal like the Holstein doesn’t care enough about being tied up to a post to need to learn to spin and kick, because he doesn’t feel that his survival is threatened. Naturally timid cattle do feel that their survival is at stake, but they get too panicked to do anything about it. It’s the in-between animals who have exactly the right amount of terror they need to learn how to kill a human being. After rough training to the halter and lead they’ve learned that they have two cannons for back hooves.
I call high-fear cattle fear monsters, because they get completely overwhelmed by panic. I’ve seen Saler cattle (Salers are French dairy cattle we use as beef cattle) get so frantic they’ll fall on the ground and start rolling around. A Saler cow who gets her leg caught between the loading dock and the truck can actually rip her own leg off just below the knee in panic. I saw this happen one time. It was horrible. An Arab horse can do the same thing. These animals are fear monsters. They get so terrified they destroy themselves.
A couple of good things about Saler cows, though: they’re excellent foragers, and they’re wonderful mothers. Saler cattle are dairy cows who were developed in the French mountains, and they’ll go anywhere to find grass. They’ll climb up into nooks and crannies a fat old Hereford wouldn’t think of even trying to get to. And they’ll fight off anything that threatens their calf; they’ll fight off a coyote every time. Of course that means they’ll fight you off, too, if you try to do anything to the baby. So you have to be careful.
Holstein cows, on the other hand, are so calm now they’re terrible mothers. They’ve been selectively bred to be calm and to be huge milk producers, and we’ve bred their protective maternal instincts right out of them. If a coyote really wants their calf, the coyote can have him. Nothing gets a Holstein excited. Meanwhile Holstein bulls can be dangerous because they have no fear.
IS IT BAD BEHAVIOR OR IS IT FEAR?
A big problem I see with a lot of trainers and owners is that they don’t know when an animal’s bad behavior is motivated by fear. I knew a dog with fear-based aggression who, when her owner took her out for a walk, would start barking like crazy anytime anyone came near. The dog was barking because she was scared, but the owner didn’t understand.
When the dog kept barking and ignoring her owner’s commands to “hush,” the owner would start getting upset herself and would eventually start yelling at the dog. That made things worse, because the dog thought her owner was screaming for protection, so she got even more crazed.
In that case the owner was lucky, because she figured out what was going on before too much damage had been done. Once she realized the dog was being aggressive because she was scared, she started a whole new program. One of the things she did was that anytime a bicycle rode by she’d stop walking and have the dog sit down. She’d stroke her and talk quietly, telling the dog everything was okay. She was able to get a lot calmer behavior out of her dog that way. (Bicycles were especially hard because not only is a bicycle something that’s being ridden by a scary stranger, it’s in motion, and that sets off a dog’s natural drive to chase moving objects.)
I mentioned earlier that I’m not a big fan of punishment as a teaching method no matter what an animal’s temperament, except in the case of prey-drive-motivated chasing of joggers and bicyclists and the like. But punishment is worse for some animals than for others. There are calm animals who can deal with punishment just fine, and there are nervous animals who totally fall apart if they experience a lot of anger from their human owners.
You have to match your handling to the animal. High-fear animals need super-gentle handling. Low-fear animals don’t need harsh handling, but they don’t fall apart if they get it. I saw some Paso Fino horses down in Argentina who could take just about anything their owners dished out. The trainers really abused them. They beat the horses into submission, and they put wires attached to tie-downs around their noses. A tie-down is a short strap on either side of the horse’s face that is attached to the girth of the saddle. Normally the tie-down is loosely fastened to a broad leather strap that goes across the horse’s nose. People use tie-downs to keep a horse from tossing his head, and some trainers think tie-downs keep a horse from rearing. But tie-downs make horses crazy, so there’s no reason to put one on tightly and there’s certainly no reason to attach it to a wire that would cut the horse’s nose.
Animals in Translation Page 27