Every one of those horses had a quarter-inch dent in its nose. If you did that to an Arab horse, he’d be crazy and unrideable for life. The Paso Fino horses are low-fear, and they habituated—but they hated people. The minute I touched their forelocks, they pinned their ears back and bared their teeth. That was as far as it went, because they knew they’d be beaten if they bit me. But there’s no good reason to make a horse hate humans that way.
Some trainers swear rough handling is effective. But what’s interesting about these trainers is that if you check out their horses, they’re all big-boned, low-fear horses who habituate fast to treatment that would crush a high-strung animal. Mark noticed this one time at the racetrack. The rough trainers were all working with big, heavy horses, and they all think Arab horses are crazy. The gentle trainers were working with the fine-boned, nervous animals.
BRINGING UP BABY
A while ago I read an article about the Homeland Security alerts that had a good line in it: “Once you scare people, it’s hard to unscare them.” Since it’s just about impossible to un-scare a seriously scared animal, you should do whatever you can to fright-proof your animals.
That means, first of all, you have to expose any pet or animal you own to other animals and other people he’s likely to come across—and you need to do this when the animal is young. I’ve already talked about how important it is to socialize animals to other animals and other people, in order to prevent them from developing aggression. But it’s also important to expose them to other animals and other people to prevent them from developing hard-to-manage fears.
If you own a riding horse, you should train him to be as comfortable with novelty and change as possible. You can introduce novelty into a grazing animal’s life by doing things like tying a yellow raincoat to the fence one day, or having him close by when you raise the hood of your car. It can be anything. You’re trying to get him to expect the unexpected, or at least not go ballistic when the unexpected happens.
It’s easier to do this when an animal is young and you can just have it trail along after its mom. If the mother isn’t afraid of the new things you’re showing the calf, the calf won’t be, either. (This is what Dr. Mineka found in her research with lab-reared monkeys and snakes.)
The fact that animals can be inoculated against fears by other animals is something your vet probably won’t think to mention. There are two sides to this coin. First, when you get a new pet you have to be careful about the other animals he meets in the beginning. I know a situation right now, a couple with two Pomeranians they got at different times, that’s shaping up to be really depressing because the first dog is teaching the second dog all the wrong lessons.
The first Pomeranian, who was around two years old when they got him, was scared to death of the husband from the minute the wife brought the dog home. That’s not uncommon; a lot of animals are scared of men, I find. But this dog was so neurotic about the husband that they think he may have been abused by the teenage son in its previous home. They’ve worked and worked with that dog, trying to get him to relax around the husband, but two years later he’s still scared. When he has to be alone in the house with the husband he hides out in his crate.
Then a couple of months ago their older dog died suddenly, and they got a second Pomeranian to take her place. This time they made sure the dog didn’t have any emotional problems with men or anyone else before they brought him home.
For the first week or so everything was fine. The new dog wasn’t afraid of the husband, and he adjusted great. Then almost overnight his attitude changed. All of a sudden the new dog is afraid of the husband, too. The husband hasn’t done anything bad to him, but the new dog is scared. So now when the wife’s away both dogs are cowering inside their crates. It’s pretty demoralizing being alone in your house with two dogs who won’t talk to you.
I’m sure the new dog learned his fear from the first dog. The only owner he’d had to this point was a woman, so he probably hadn’t seen many men, and he hadn’t learned that men were okay. Since animals learn whom to be afraid of from other animals, the scared Pomeranian apparently taught the new dog that the husband was someone to fear.
What they should have done was have the new dog and the husband spend some time alone together without the scared dog around to mess things up, preferably in the company of another dog who wasn’t scared of men. They needed to inoculate the new dog against husband fear before he got home and learned it from their other dog.
Using animal role models to calm animal fears is an old trade secret in horse racing. In her book on Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand says Seabiscuit was a “train wreck” when Charles Howard bought him; the horse was burned-out and mean. His first trainer said Seabiscuit could run but wouldn’t, and he chalked it up to laziness. Seabiscuit’s other problem was that he refused to exercise hard enough to get in shape. More laziness. The trainer had dealt with it by whipping Seabiscuit like crazy all through every race, and entering him in more races than horses normally run. He figured Seabiscuit spent so much time resting that he was up to it, and besides, the horse was so intelligent he’d “back off if he became overworked.”27
It didn’t work. Seabiscuit was a medium-type horse by temperament, so being whipped all the time and raced too hard got him just upset enough to make him mean as spit.
His new trainer, Tom Smith, decided right away to pair him up with an animal friend to help “defuse” him. Laura Hillenbrand writes that all kinds of stray animals have lived with racehorses, from German shepherds to chickens to monkeys. Tom Smith picked a nanny goat for Seabiscuit and put her in the horse’s stall. You can get a good idea of what a mistake it is to mistreat a medium-fear horse from reading what happened next: “Shortly after dinnertime, the grooms found Seabiscuit walking in circles, clutching the distraught goat in his teeth and shaking her back and forth. He heaved her over his half door and plopped her down in the barn aisle. The grooms ran to her rescue.”
The goat was out, so Tom Smith brought in a lead horse called Pumpkin. Pumpkin was a classic low-fear animal; Ms. Hillenbrand says he was the kind of animal horse people called bombproof. Pumpkin had been a cow pony in Montana, and “out on the range [he’d] experienced everything, including a bull goring that had left a gouge in his rump. He was a veteran, meeting every calamity with a cheerful steadiness…. Pumpkin was amiable to every horse he met and became a surrogate parent to the flighty ones. He worked a sedative effect on the whole barn.” Tom Smith used Pumpkin as his general “stable calmer-downer,” and that’s what Pumpkin was for Seabiscuit, too. The two horses stayed together for the rest of their lives. Pretty soon Seabiscuit also had a dog named Pocatell and a spider monkey called JoJo living with him in the barn, too.
That was the beginning of Seabiscuit’s rehabilitation, and it’s a principle anyone can use with a flighty animal. You don’t need any special training, you just need to find the right match—and remember never to put a nanny goat in with a crazed thoroughbred.
FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE
If an animal you own or manage does develop fears that interfere with his life or yours, your next step is almost certainly going to be setting up a desensitization or counter-phobia program. I won’t go into those, because there are good books on how to do them, and because books may not be enough. You may need to hire a trainer.
There is one other approach you may be able to try if the circumstances are right. That is to fight fire with fire by using an animal’s hyper-specific nature to fight a hyper-specific fear. This is a neat trick I learned from a rancher who bought an abused horse nobody could ride. The horse had been abused with a snaffle bit. Snaffle bits have a joint in the middle that sits on the animal’s tongue, so the new owner just put on a different bridle with a single-piece bit, and the horse was fine! (A single-piece bit doesn’t have a joint; it’s all in one piece.) Here was an abused animal, whose fear memories were permanent, and the owner turned him into a perfect riding horse in thirty seconds just by
changing the bit. The horse’s fear category was hyper-specific: “snaffle bits are bad,” not “all bits are bad.” He didn’t make the connection between snaffle bits and the single-piece bit. They were two different things
I wish I’d known that years ago. When I was in college my aunt bought me a horse named Sizzler who was fine if you walked him or trotted, but would buck every third or fourth time you pushed him to a canter. She’d picked him up cheap from a dealer, and that was why. Sizzler was too dangerous for me to ride, and my aunt couldn’t use him on her dude ranch. You can’t have a horse who throws the guests. So we had to sell Sizzler back to the dealer.
If I’d known then what I know now, I would have gotten my English riding saddle from high school, and a different pad, and put those on his back. Sizzler was a Western-trained horse, and he’d always been ridden with a Western saddle. I bet if I’d brought out that English saddle, Sizzler would have been fine. He would have thought the English saddle was a completely different object on his back, and he would have been starting fresh.
The moral of the story is: if an animal in your life has a fear you can solve by completely removing the thing he’s afraid of, you’re in luck.
CHOOSING A STURDY ANIMAL
Fearful animals tend to be high-maintenance, so if you want an animal who’s easy to fit into your life you should select for a calm, non-skittish temperament. That’s not too hard to do, although if you’re picking out a baby animal there are no guarantees, the same way there are no guarantees with human babies.
I’ve already said mutts are your best bet. Purebred dogs are being ruined by breeders, including even the good breeders, because when you over-select for any particular trait you always get problems. And, as you can see in the case of the rapist roosters, over-selection for single traits will eventually lead to neurological problems.
There are still some good breeds, and there are always individual dogs belonging to chancier breeds like Rottweilers and pit bulls who are good sweet dogs. But don’t let people tell you that Rottweiler or pit bull aggression is a “myth.” It’s not. Temperament and appearance are connected. We don’t know much about how they’re connected, unfortunately, but we know they are.
My favorite example of the connection between appearance and temperament is Dmitry Belyaev’s silver fox breeding experiment in Russia. Dr. Belyaev was a geneticist who believed natural selection determined the traits we see in domesticated animals. Dogs got to be the way they are because dog behaviors helped them survive and reproduce.28
To test his hypothesis, he set up a natural selection study using silver foxes. He wanted to see if over several generations he could turn wild foxes into a domestic animal like a dog. So in each generation, he allowed only the most “tamable” animals—the foxes most willing to tolerate contact with humans—to mate.
He started this project in 1959 and when he died in 1985 another group of scientists picked up where he left off. Altogether the foxes have gone through forty years and more than thirty generations of selective breeding for tameness. Today the foxes are very tame, though not as tame as dogs. The researchers say that when these foxes are puppies they compete with each other for human attention, whine, and wag their tails. They’re turning into domestic animals, just as Dr. Belyaev thought they would.
What’s interesting is that their appearances have changed right along with their personalities. One of the first things to change was fur color: they changed from silver to black and white, liked a Border collie. They look quite a lot like Border collies in photos. Their tails also started to curl up, and some of the foxes developed floppy ears. The floppy ears are neat, because Darwin said there wasn’t a single domesticated animal who didn’t have floppy ears in at least one country where it was found. I don’t think that’s true any longer, because I can’t think of any breed of horse in any country that has floppy ears, although every other kind of domesticated animal does have at least one or two breeds with floppy ears. The only wild animal I know of with floppy ears is the elephant.
Looking at photographs of these animals, I think their bones also thickened, which is what I would expect given that fine-boned animals are more high-strung. Belyaev was breeding his foxes to be calm, so he probably started getting slightly bigger animals, with thicker bones.
The tame foxes developed brain differences right along with their physical and behavioral differences. Their heads are smaller, they have lower levels of stress hormones in the blood, and they have higher levels of serotonin, which inhibits aggression, in the brain. Another interesting change: the skulls of the male foxes have been feminized. Their heads are shaped more like a female fox’s head than like a wild male fox’s head.
Eventually some of his foxes developed neurological problems, just like you’d expect. They had epilepsy, and some of them started holding their heads back in a strange position. Some of the moms even ate their own puppies. Pure over-selection programs always bring trouble.
I worry about this happening with golden retrievers and Labradors who are bred to have calm temperaments. Recently they’ve started having some very unusual aggression problems in goldens, and I’ve had at least one owner tell me that goldens have become hyper animals. She’s owned goldens for years, and she always has three or four goldens at the same time, so she’s noticed a difference. That’s just one person’s experience, but what she’s reporting goes along with Belyaev’s experiment. That owner hasn’t seen any changes in aggression, but you would expect to see super-calm dogs eventually develop an uptick in aggression, since fear is a check on aggression and goldens are selectively bred to be low-fear. Aggression is also connected to seizure activity in the brain, and if goldens are starting to develop some seizure-like brain activity (this wouldn’t have to be obvious in big, grand mal seizures) you could have aggression.
When you’re choosing a mutt, try to pick a dog who comes right up to you and can be friendly. A lot of mutts are horribly distracted inside a kennel or pound, so it can be hard to tell what they’ll be like once they’ve adjusted to a new home, but even at the pound a dog with a good temperament doesn’t act terrified.
On the other hand, the Monks of New Skete give different advice. They say that all litters have loners, aggressors, and retreaters. They say you shouldn’t pick the first puppy who comes up to you, because that’s the dominant puppy, and he’s going to be most prone to having behavior problems. I don’t completely agree with that, especially when it comes to mixed breeds. The Monks train German shepherds, so it’s possible their observations are more relevant to dogs like shepherds and Rottweilers who’ve been bred to be guard dogs. If you’re choosing a dog from a breed that’s naturally nervous or shy, I think you definitely want the most outgoing puppy in the litter.
With all puppies, it’s a good idea to give them a quick startle test. Clap your hands suddenly, or stomp your feet, and see what the puppy does. All puppies should flinch when they hear a sudden, loud sound, but you don’t want a dog who’s so terrified that he runs off to the corner of his cage or crate and cowers. Dog trainers use a version of this test to choose puppies who will be good service dogs. They drop a heavy piece of logging chain with four or five links on the floor about four feet away from the puppy. Puppies who get really upset by this aren’t the best candidates to work as a service dog for a person with disabilities.
Bone size tells you a lot, too, so look for strong, sturdy bones. You don’t have to adopt a hundred-pound monster; just try to find a puppy whose bones aren’t tiny and delicate. The same principle applies to horses.
With horses, there’s another physical trait you can use in judging a young horse’s temperament: the location of his hair whorl. The hair whorl is the round patch of “twisty” hair all cows and horses have up at the top of their faces. The more nervous the animal, the higher the patch. Mark and I were the first to discover this, but trainers have said for a long time that horses with high whorls are more intelligent. What Mark and I realized is that the rea
l difference isn’t intelligence, but fear levels. High-fear animals are often smarter, and that’s what the trainers picked up on. That was the other thing Mark noticed when he matched up trainers with the kind of horse they were training. Rough trainers had horses with big bones and low hair whorls.
I’ve already mentioned that although hair color doesn’t matter, you want to adopt or buy an animal whose skin isn’t too light. I would avoid a puppy that has too many albino characteristics, such as blue eyes, a pink nose, and white fur on most of its body.
Most animals in the wild are either all one color or have an overall mottled, speckled color. Only domestic animals have piebald coloring, where large areas of fur are white. (Zebras and skunks are close, but they probably have too much black fur to be considered piebald.) Belyaev’s foxes started out mostly gray and then, as they became domesticated, some of them developed the piebald black-and-white coloring you see in Border collies.
I’ve been keeping track of animals with white patches of fur, and I’ve noticed that animals with a white patch of fur someplace on their bodies seem to be less shy than animals without. Ben Kilham, a man who lived with wild bears in the wilderness, actually named one of the bears he knew White Heart because of the patch of white fur on her chest. White Heart was the friendliest bear, the one he could get closest to, and she was the first to be shot by hunters because she didn’t have the same fear of people that all black bears did.29
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