Free Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin Page B

time with cattle I don’t have a good checklist of details that scare dogs or cats, but I can tell you that the same principle applies even though they’re predators and don’t have as many natural enemies to worry about. All animals, predator or prey, have a built-in sense of caution that is triggered by new things.
    With dogs, it’s a little hard to predict which new things might scare them, since dogs live with people and get exposed to so many new things all the time. A dog who’s not naturally timid can seem like he doesn’t mind high-contrast novel stimuli the way a cow does.
    But I don’t think that’s true. One of the good times to see the effects of novel visual stimuli on a dog is Halloween. My experience is that dogs do not like Halloween costumes! A friend of mine was sitting in her upstairs office one day, getting some work done, with thefamily Lab lying next to her, when her son walked up the stairs wearing his Scream costume. You probably know the one I mean: the costume is dark black, and the mask is bright white with a big red tongue hanging out of its mouth. You can’t get much higher contrast than that, unless you made the tongue yellow. The Lab jumped to her feet and started barking her head off.
    My friend was totally surprised, because she had recognized her son from his footsteps, which sounded the same way they always did. He wasn’t wearing a costume on his feet. But the minute the dog saw the mask she went nuts.
    This is another example of the cardinal rule of my checklist: just one of these distracters, out of eighteen, will throw an animal off. To the Lab, it didn’t matter that my friend’s son still sounded and smelled the same. He didn’t look the same, so he wasn’t the same, and that was that. Apparently animals use an additive system rather than an averaging system when they’re figuring out what something is and whether they should be afraid of it.
    That same Lab also went crazy when the neighbors put a Halloween scarecrow up in the front yard. My friend was taking her dog for a walk when they spotted the scarecrow, and the Lab started barking ferociously at the thing. Her hackles were up, too. That same house managed to throw my friend’s other dog into a panic with a piece of lawn sculpture they put in the backyard. The sculpture was a foot-high all-black iron frog, and when the other dog caught sight of it he had the same reaction his pack mate did to the scarecrow. He went nuts. Frantic barking, hackles up, straining at the leash.
    Dog and cat owners won’t have any problem recognizing the next category of common distracters: things that are moving. For any animal you can name, sudden movement is riveting, especially sudden rapid movement. Rapid movement stimulates the nervous system. It makes prey animals run away, and it makes predator animals give chase. It always grabs your attention. That’s why used car lots put flags or twirly plastic thingies up all around their lots. You can’t not look at a bunch of brightly colored, rapidly moving objects. Jiggling parts on feedlot equipment trigger a cow’s inborn impulse to flee, and all of a sudden you’ve got a whole herd of cows turning into the feedlot version of a forty-car pileup. It’s a disaster.
    S OUND
    Last but not least, you have your sound distracters. Any novel, high-pitched sounds will cause cattle to balk, because they activate the part of an animal’s brain that responds to distress calls. An intermittent high-pitched sound is that much worse. Intermittent sounds will drive anyone crazy; they’re much more upsetting than a constant, loud din, whether it’s high-pitched or not. You can’t relax, because you’re waiting for the next sound. And you can’t turn this response off, either, because intermittent sounds activate your orienting response. People aren’t so aware of this response in themselves, but if you