Free Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin Page A

Those photos were beautiful—big Black Angus heads silhouetted against the blue sky.
    Finally one day I decided to just lie down flat on my back and seewhat happened. They all came up to me and sniffed and licked and sniffed and licked. These were feedlot cattle who weren’t tame.
    When a cow comes up to explore you, it’s always the same. They’ll stretch out their heads toward you and sniff you; that’s always first. Then the tongue will reach out and just barely touch you, and as they get less afraid they’ll start licking you. They’ll lick your hair and chew on it, and they like to lick and chew your boots, too. I usually don’t let them lick me on my face because cattle have extremely rough tongues and I could get a scratched cornea, although I sometimes just close my eyes and let them go ahead. I don’t mind if the tongue goes down my neck. That’s okay. And I let them lick my hands. I think they probably like the taste of the salt on your skin.
    Sometimes I’ll kiss them on the nose.
    I wasn’t the only person to figure out that it’s perfectly safe to lie down in the middle of a bunch of thousand-pound untamed animals. In the 1970s there were a lot of Mexicans coming over the border to work in the feedlots, and when the Border Patrol came around the Mexicans would hide inside the corrals, with the cattle. Five guys would lie down on the ground with a hundred head of Brahman steers surrounding them. Brahmans are the big huge cattle with the hump on their back. They’re nice animals, as long as you treat them well, but they’re scary-looking to anybody who doesn’t know cattle, so the Border Patrol guys wouldn’t dare go in those pens.
    But it never came to that, because the Border Patrol people never saw any of the illegal workers lying underneath all those cattle. The Mexicans had to lie perfectly still, because if they moved the cattle would run and give them away. And, of course, that would have been really dangerous for the five guys lying on the ground. You don’t want a thousand-pound Brahman steer and his ninety-nine friends stepping on you by accident when they’re trying to get away. It sounds dangerous, but I don’t remember a single person ever getting hurt.
    The reason cattle will approach something novel under their own steam is that they’re curious. All animals are curious; it’s built into their wiring. They have to be, because if they weren’t they’d have alot harder time finding what they need and avoiding what they don’t need. Curiosity is the other side of caution. An animal has to have some drive to explore his environment in order to find food, water, mates, and shelter. People say curiosity killed the cat, and that’s probably true; curiosity can get an animal into a lot of trouble. But an animal or a person can be too cautious, too. If you’re too cautious to explore things, you miss out on things you need.
    Being too cautious might make you miss signs of danger, too. Animals and people need to avoid trouble before it happens, and one way to do that is to pick up on signs of danger and act on them now, instead of waiting until you’re face-to-face with a hungry wolf and then trying to get away. Curiosity drives an animal to explore its environment for signs of danger.
    So it makes sense that a cow would voluntarily explore a yellow raincoat hanging on a fence but dig in his heels if you try to force him to walk past one. Since anything new could be dangerous, an animal wants a clear escape route before he’s going to poke his nose into something he’s never seen before. When he’s being forced through a one-way alley, there’s no escape. So he refuses to move.
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    You can use the exact same checklist with horses, too, partly because they’re prey animals like cattle and partly because their lives and environments are pretty similar. Since I spend most of my