Human-Animal Bonds: Insight Into Thinking And Behavior “Animals notice the details that people don’t notice” Mississippi State University College of Veterinary Medicine hosted a Human-Animal Bond Lecture Series October 19-23. The focus was to explore all facets of the human-animal bond and raise awareness that the bond extends beyond pets and companion animals to production animals and wildlife. Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University was the keynote speaker Tuesday evening. She also gave a lecture earlier in the day on her experiences with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Grandin’s keynote address was “How Animals Think and Feel.” Because of her autism, Grandin thinks in pictures, a characteristic that gives her valuable insight into animals’ thinking processes and behavior. Grandin outlined three thinking styles: (1) oral, visualistic. This is also associative thinking, the way a “search engine” works. (2) Pattern thinking, which is more abstract than a visual thinker. (3) Pure word thinker. “I am a total visual thinker,” Grandin said. “Animal thinking is sensory based, whereas human thinking is language based. Their memories are going to be in pictures/sight, smells, sounds, touch and taste. They are very sensitive to tone of voice. There’s a whole world of cognition without having language.” Do animals have cognition and thinking ability? They do! “Cognition is the ability to solve problems under novel conditions. It is not operant conditioning and is not hardwired instinctual behavior,” she explained. In her lecture and her book Animals Make Us Human, she explained the emotional systems of animals. She wrote, “All animals and people have the same core emotional systems.” She identified the seven basic emotions, which neuroscience has mapped the circuits in the brain: seeking, rage, fear, panic, lust, care, and play. Seeking is “the basic impulse to search, investigate, and make sense of the environment.” Seeking is a very pleasurable emotion, which includes wanting, curiosity, looking forward, novelty. “Seeking might be a kind of master emotion,” she wrote. Rage might have evolved from the experience of being captured and held immobile by a predator. “We should assume that some captive animals feel frustrated being locked up inside enclosures, barns, apartments, houses, yards and cages, because being locked up is a form of restraint no matter how nice the environment is.” Grandin addressed the unwanted behavior that humans create in their interactions with animals, and how to change that behavior. When you are trouble-shooting the causes of the unwanted behavior, she emphasized, “Details matter!” Pay attention to such details as: “Where does the behavior occur? To what or whom is it directed? What does the animal’s posture look like? When does the behavior occur? What exactly does the animal do? What is the breed or genetic line of the animal?” A key to understanding animal behavior is to think in details. “Animals notice the details that people don’t notice,” she explained. Pay attention to “distractions, like shadows, flapping tape, chains, etc. She observed that “calm animals are easier to handle,” so notice the details that are upsetting the animal and you will soon find the cause of the unwanted behavior. Rapid movement is a main behavior stimulus for all kinds of animals. It evokes the seeking response in predatory animals, like making dogs want to chase. It evokes the flight response in prey animals like horses and cattle. The main senses through which most animals react are first, vision, and second, auditory. The dog lives in a “smell detail” world, she explained. This sensory-based concept is important: it is the way animals categorize, for example, into things you can chase and things you cannot chase. In humans, language covers up sensory-based thinking. Motivators for behavior are fear (never punish fear), aggression, food reward, social reward, pain motivated, curiosity motivated, reproductive, prey drive, mixed motivation. Two basic types of behavior are learned and instinctual. So, it is important to figure out what motivates specific behaviors. The main thing people need to do with horses it to prevent behavior problems. “Don’t rough them up,” she said. When humans do rough things to horses, they don’t forget and they start to associate specific things with fear. Horses tune into visual or auditory things when something bad happens to them. “The horse is very specific in his/her thinking. You have to figure out what the fear memory is and then you can get rid of it n maybe.” For examples, “if a snaffle bit causes pain, and the horse goes berserk when you use a snaffle, then you can substitute another kind of bit, a plain bit. If a man roughs them up, then tend to associate fear with all men. Or if it happens in a specific type of arena, they develop a fear of that type of arena and then generalize. You can work on desensitizing, but if the fear is of men or men with black hats, you can’t get rid of all those. You can desensitize to a point, but fear has a nasty habit of coming back and you can’t completely get rid of it.” She supports natural horsemanship type training. “Get away from the rough stuff because that only causes problems,” she emphasized. “Get rid of the rough training. Don’t tie a horse to a tree and throw things at them, while they are going berserk and pulling backwards. Rough sacking only creates fear. It especially wrecks Arabs and flighty, high strung horses.” Another example she gave: if the horse bucks when you change gaits, that’s a sign you’ve trained too fast. The saddle feels different at different gaits.” There are three kinds of stress: fear, pain, and physical stress. Fear is the main emotion in animals. When animals voluntarily cooperate in doing something, they have low levels of fear stress. When you force an animal to do something, this creates high levels of fear stress. Also, animals stay calmer if they have companions, especially herd animals. Grandin says that an animal’s first experience with something new should be a good experience. If the initial experience is adverse, this creates a permanent fear response. Animals then associate the bad experience with something they saw or heard when the bad experience happened. Sometimes even something similar to the bad experience can set off an adverse reaction. They develop specific fear memories related to place (visual), to touch, to sound, or to the feel of something. With horses and cattle, vision is their main sensor. With dogs, smell is their main sensor, although they also use sound and visual thinking. Animals are very attuned to tone of voice. Loud, high-pitched sounds hurt animals’ ears. Animals with excitable genetics, i.e., high-strung horses, are the most sensitive. So shouting, yelling, screaming at animals is very stressful to them. Horses “watch” with their ears for potential dangers. Novelty is both a strong stressor and an attractor. Animals have a see-saw type reaction to new things, much like an emotional switch turning on and off. Seeking can evoke curiosity response, but new things can also evoke fear/flight response. “Animals need to be trained to tolerate a certain amount of change in their routine. Animals need to be habituated to flags, strange people, different vehicles, contrasting colors, etc.” The Seeking emotion turns off fear. Extreme panic behavior occurs when animals are suddenly confronted with something new. It is best to avoid putting animals into a hyper-anxiety situation, because fear memories are very hard to get rid of. Dogs are hyper-social animals. People should be the leader of the pack with dogs, but should use only natural animal behavior to assert dominance. Grazing animals should be reared with their own kind because they become imprinted on the mother that raised them. When training animals, consider their short attention span. Do intense training for about 15 minutes, then do something fun n have a play session. Always end your training session on a good note. Keep it short! Don’t drag out long training sessions. They are far less effective than short, 15-minute sessions interspersed with play, relaxation. The key to effective training is to find out what emotional signal is driving the behavior.