Free Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin

to cross the road, a grouping of twenty white lines painted six inches apart will make them stay put, because the contrast scares them. If the cattle are highly motivated, it’s a different story. If you’ve got mama on one side and baby on the other, painted lines won’t work. Or if cattle are starving, they’ll cross the lines to get to better grazing on the other side of the road. But under normal circumstances, painted lines work just fine.
    You need to know something about animals’ color vision to predict what visual stimuli they’ll experience as high-contrast. The breakdown is pretty simple: birds can see four different basic colors (ultraviolet, blue, green, and red), people and some primates see three (blue, green, and red), and most of the rest of the mammals see just two (blue and green). With dichromatic, or two-color, vision the colors animals see best are a yellowish green (the color of a safety vest) and bluish purple (which is close to the purple of a purple iris). That means that yellow is the high-contrast color for almost all animals. Anything yellow will really pop out at them, so you have to be careful about yellow raincoats, boots, and machinery. 4
    T HE R EAL P ROBLEM I S N OVELTY
    Any sharp contrast between light and dark will draw the attention of a dichromatic animal, either distracting or scaring him. If he’s a big animal who you’re trying to move from Point A to Point B, a sharp contrast in light and dark will stop him in his tracks.
    However, not all high contrast will scare an animal, only high-contrast visual stimuli that are novel and unexpected. If dairy cattle are used to seeing bright yellow raincoats slung over gates every daywhen they enter the milking parlor there’d be no problem. It’s the animal who’s seeing a bright yellow raincoat slung over a gate for the first time at a slaughter plant or feedlot who’s going to balk. Novelty is the key.
    The anti-backup gates used in many cattle alleys have the same problem: the cattle have never seen them before, so they don’t want to go through them. Novelty is a huge problem for all animals, all autistic people, all children—and just about all normal grown-ups, too, though normal adults can handle novelty better than animals, autistic people, or kids. Fear of the unknown is universal. If you’ve never seen something before, you can’t make a judgment about it; you don’t know if it’s good or bad, dangerous or safe. And your brain always wants to make that judgment; that’s how the brain works. Researchers have found that even nonsense syllables spark positive and negative emotions; to your brain, there’s no such thing as neutral. So if you can’t tell what something is, you get anxious trying to decide whether it’s good or bad.
    Any novel object or image in a cow’s visual field will get her worried, and if you happen to be trying to move her in the direction of the novel object or image, forget it.
    It’s different when you don’t try to force things. On its own, an animal will always investigate a novel stimulus, even though new things are scary. I learned that back when I was writing stories and taking photographs for Arizona Farmer Ranchman Magazine. I noticed that if you just left a pile of camera equipment alone in the middle of the field, all the cows would come up to it and investigate. But if you walked toward them carrying the same equipment, they’d take off. Motion was a problem, so if I just stood there holding the equipment, the cows would come to me.
    I also noticed that if I got down low to the ground I was a lot less scary to them. At first I was just trying to get the cow’s head framed against the sky, without any grass showing in the frame, so I’d crouch down to get the shot I wanted. But then I noticed that when I crouched down, I could get close-ups of the cattle because they wouldn’t run away.