Animals in Translation Read Online Free Page A
Author: Temple Grandin
Jason who was a big âgarbage dog,â constantly getting into the garbage whenever Mr. Ross wasnât around. Mr. Ross figured Jason knew he was being bad because if there was a mess on the floor the dog would take off running the minute Mr. Ross got home. On days when he hadnât gotten into the garbage he didnât run, so Mr. Ross thought this meant Jason knew that strewing garbage clear across the kitchen was wrong, and ran away because he felt bad.
He found out differently when a more experienced trainer had him try an experiment. He told Mr. Ross to go get into the garbage himself, when Jason wasnât watching, and dump it out all over the floor. Then he was supposed to bring Jason into the kitchen and see what the dog did.
It turned out Jason did what he always did when there wasgarbage on the floorâhe took off running. He wasnât running away because he felt guilty, he was running away because he felt scared. For Jason, garbage on the floor meant trouble. If Mr. Ross had stuck to behaviorist principles and thought about Jasonâs environment instead of about his âpsychology,â he wouldnât have made this mistake. 5
A friend of mine had the same experience with her two dogs, a one-year-old German shepherd and a three-month-old golden retriever. One day the puppy pooped in the living room, and later on when the older dog saw the poop she got so anxious she started to drool. If the older dog had made the poop herself and then stood there drooling, her owner probably would have thought the dog knew sheâd done something bad. But since the other dog had made the poop, her owner realized that the whole category of poop-on-living-room-floor was just plain bad news, period.
Those stories are classic examples of why itâs not a good idea to anthropomorphize an animal, but thatâs not all there is to it. In my student days, even though everyone was against anthropomorphizing animals, I still believed it was important to think about the animalâs point of view. I remember there was a great animal psychologist out of New Zealand named Ron Kilgour (he was an ethologist) who wrote a lot about the problem of anthropomorphizing. One of his early papers told a story about a person who had a pet lion he was shipping on an airplane. Someone thought the lion might like to have a pillow for the trip, the same way people do, so they gave him one, and the lion ate it and died. The point was: donât be anthropomorphic. Itâs dangerous to the animal.
But when I read this story I said to myself, âWell, no, he doesnât want a pillow, he wants something soft to lie on, like leaves and grass.â I wasnât looking at the lion as a person, but as a lion. At least thatâs what I was trying to do.
That kind of thinking was illegal for behaviorists, however, and wasnât really encouraged by the ethologists, either. Both groups were environmentalists when you came right down to it, the big difference being which environment the animal was in while the researchers were studying him.
In the end, I had a pretty good grounding in animal ethologyfrom undergraduate college before I started graduate school at Arizona State University. It was a good thing I did, because Arizona State was a hotbed of behaviorism. Everything was behaviorism. And I did not like some of the very cruel experiments they did to mice, rats, and monkeys. I remember one poor little monkey that had a little Plexiglas thing shoved onto his scrotum that they were shocking him with. I thought that was terrible.
I was not involved in any of the nasty experiments. I donât endorse using animals as subjects in experiments unless youâre going to learn something incredibly important. If youâre using animals to find a cure for cancer, thatâs different, especially since animals need a cure for cancer, too. But thatâs not what they were doing at Arizona. I spent one year in the
He found out differently when a more experienced trainer had him try an experiment. He told Mr. Ross to go get into the garbage himself, when Jason wasnât watching, and dump it out all over the floor. Then he was supposed to bring Jason into the kitchen and see what the dog did.
It turned out Jason did what he always did when there wasgarbage on the floorâhe took off running. He wasnât running away because he felt guilty, he was running away because he felt scared. For Jason, garbage on the floor meant trouble. If Mr. Ross had stuck to behaviorist principles and thought about Jasonâs environment instead of about his âpsychology,â he wouldnât have made this mistake. 5
A friend of mine had the same experience with her two dogs, a one-year-old German shepherd and a three-month-old golden retriever. One day the puppy pooped in the living room, and later on when the older dog saw the poop she got so anxious she started to drool. If the older dog had made the poop herself and then stood there drooling, her owner probably would have thought the dog knew sheâd done something bad. But since the other dog had made the poop, her owner realized that the whole category of poop-on-living-room-floor was just plain bad news, period.
Those stories are classic examples of why itâs not a good idea to anthropomorphize an animal, but thatâs not all there is to it. In my student days, even though everyone was against anthropomorphizing animals, I still believed it was important to think about the animalâs point of view. I remember there was a great animal psychologist out of New Zealand named Ron Kilgour (he was an ethologist) who wrote a lot about the problem of anthropomorphizing. One of his early papers told a story about a person who had a pet lion he was shipping on an airplane. Someone thought the lion might like to have a pillow for the trip, the same way people do, so they gave him one, and the lion ate it and died. The point was: donât be anthropomorphic. Itâs dangerous to the animal.
But when I read this story I said to myself, âWell, no, he doesnât want a pillow, he wants something soft to lie on, like leaves and grass.â I wasnât looking at the lion as a person, but as a lion. At least thatâs what I was trying to do.
That kind of thinking was illegal for behaviorists, however, and wasnât really encouraged by the ethologists, either. Both groups were environmentalists when you came right down to it, the big difference being which environment the animal was in while the researchers were studying him.
In the end, I had a pretty good grounding in animal ethologyfrom undergraduate college before I started graduate school at Arizona State University. It was a good thing I did, because Arizona State was a hotbed of behaviorism. Everything was behaviorism. And I did not like some of the very cruel experiments they did to mice, rats, and monkeys. I remember one poor little monkey that had a little Plexiglas thing shoved onto his scrotum that they were shocking him with. I thought that was terrible.
I was not involved in any of the nasty experiments. I donât endorse using animals as subjects in experiments unless youâre going to learn something incredibly important. If youâre using animals to find a cure for cancer, thatâs different, especially since animals need a cure for cancer, too. But thatâs not what they were doing at Arizona. I spent one year in the
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