Animals make us human Creating the best life for animals

Review by Choice Review

Grandin (Colorado State Univ.) along with writer Johnson define a core set of emotions-notably, seeking, rage, fear, and panic--governing animal behavior, especially in terms of their relationships with humans. Grandin's assumptions derive from theoretical considerations, controlled studies, anecdotal reports, and personal observations. Her basic rules for improving animal welfare include minimizing rage, fear, and panic while encouraging seeking behavior and play. She describes domestic animal behavior in the context of their wild counterparts, suggesting that dogs and cats, for example, may be largely paedomorphic in nature, having an arrested emotional and, perhaps, physical development. Such animals never mature psychologically and, therefore, never develop the important behavioral control mechanisms (e.g., many hard-wired submissive behaviors) characteristic of their wild ancestors. The book emphasizes the importance of fear and seeking as primary emotions underlying behavioral problems in horses; low-stress handling of cattle and pigs; and the correct use of positive/negative reinforcement. Grandin explores many sadistic atrocities affecting virtually all phases of the poultry industry. She also considers the value of fieldwork in understanding and managing wildlife and addresses important issues related to the welfare of zoo animals. This intriguing, well-written book will appeal to animal owners, stockpeople, ethologists, and anyone interested in humane animal treatment. Summing Up: Recommended. All collections. D. A. Brass independent scholar

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Grandin (Animals in Translation), famed for her decades-long commitment to treating livestock as humanely as possible on its way to slaughter, considers how humans and animals can best interact. Working from the premise that "an animal is a conscious being that has feelings," the autistic author assesses dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, poultry, wildlife and zoo animals based on a "core emotion system" she believes animals and humans share, including a need to seek; a sense of rage, fear, and panic; feelings of lust; an urge to nurture; and an ability to play. Among observations at odds with conventional wisdom: dogs need human parents, not alpha pack leaders, and cats respond to training. Discussions of why horses are skittish and why pigs are arguably the most intelligent of beasts--raccoons run them a close second--illuminate the intersection of people and more domesticated animals; chapters on cows and chickens focus more generally on animal welfare, particularly the horrific conditions in which they are usually raised and slaughtered. Packed with fascinating insights, unexpected observations and a wealth of how-to tips, Grandin's peppy work ably challenges assumptions about what makes animals happy. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

The coauthors of best-selling Animals in Translation have teamed up again to investigate four basic driving forces behind behaviors in dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, poultry, wildlife, and zoo animals. They discuss how humans must understand these drives in order to provide a "good mental life" for their animals. It's best to read the book cover to cover in order to understand the continuity that takes place between the chapters and the comparisons of behaviors exhibited by each species. The text provides thought-provoking scenarios and references several animal studies, but, unfortunately, there is a definite sense of uncompromising bias in favor of the authors' ideas, mitigating any sort of objective study or research that differs from their own conclusions. Those who work with animals will balk at some of the discussions as it's possible to find examples in which what the authors write isn't necessarily the case. For example, the authors note that horses, unlike dogs, can get too excited and worked up over food treats to stay focused on their training. But as many pet owners can testify, dogs can get overly distracted over a food treat. Still, readers will be able to glean new perspectives about animal welfare. Grandin (animal science, Colorado State Univ.) is a renowned autistic author of several books on autism and animal behavior, and writer Johnson specializes in neuropsychiatry and the brain. Recommended for libraries with animal behavior and animal welfare collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/08.]--Kyrille Goldbeck, Virginia Polytechnic & State Inst. Libs., Blacksburg (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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WHAT DOES AN ANIMAL NEED to have a good life? I don't mean a good life physically. We know a lot about what kind of food, water, exercise, and veterinary care animals need to grow well and be healthy. I mean a good mental life. What does an animal need to be happy? The animal welfare movement has been thinking about animals' mental welfare at least since the 1960s. That's when the British government commissioned the Brambell Report on intensive animal production. Intensive animal production means very big farms raising large numbers of animals for slaughter or egg production in very small spaces compared to traditional farms. The Brambell committee listed the five freedoms animals should have. The first three freedoms are about physical welfare, and the last two are about mental welfare: • freedom from hunger and thirst • freedom from discomfort • freedom from pain, injury, or disease • freedom to express normal behavior • freedom from fear and distress 1 What Do Animals Need? Freedom is a confusing guide for people trying to give animals a good life. Even freedom from fear, which sounds straightforward, isn't simple or obvious. For example, zookeepers and farmers usually assume that as long as a prey species animal doesn't have any predators around, it can't be afraid. But that's not the way fear works inside the brain. If you felt fear only when you are face-to-face with the animal that's going to kill you and eat you, that would be too late. Prey species animals feel afraid when they're out in the open and exposed to potential predators. For example, a hen has to have a place to hide when she lays her eggs. It doesn't matter that she's laying her eggs on a commercial farm inside a barn that no fox will ever get into. The hen has evolved to hide when she lays her eggs. Hiding is what gives her freedom from fear, not living in a barn that keeps the foxes out. I'll talk more about this in my chapter on chickens. The freedom to express normal behavior is even more complicated and hard to apply in the real world. In many cases, it's impossible to give a domestic or captive animal the freedom to express a normal behavior. For a dog, normal behavior is to roam many miles a day, which is illegal in most towns. Even if it's not illegal, it's dangerous. So you have to figure out substitute behaviors that keep your dog happy and stimulated. In other cases, we don't know how to create the right living conditions because we don't know enough about what the normal behavior of a particular animal is. Cheetahs are a good example. Zookeepers tried to breed cheetahs for years with almost no success. That's a common problem in zoos. Breeding is one of the most basic and normal behaviors there is. There wouldn't be any animals or people without it. But a lot of animals living in captivity don't mate successfully because there's something wrong with their living conditions that stops them from acting naturally. The cheetah-breeding problem was finally solved in 1994, when a study of cheetahs on the Serengeti Plains came out and everyone realized male and female cheetahs didn't live together in the wild the way they did in zoos. When zoos separated the female cheetahs from the males, they turned out to be easy to breed in captivity. Animal distress is even more mysterious. What is distress in an animal? Is it anger? Is it loneliness? Is it boredom? Is boredom a feeling? And how can you tell if an animal is lonely or bored? Although a lot of good work has been done on mental welfare for animals, it's hard for pet owners, farmers, ranchers, and zookeepers to use it because they don't have clear guidelines. Right now, when a zoo wants to improve welfare, what usually happens is that the staff tries everything they can think of that they have the money and the personnel to implement. Mostly they focus on the animal's behavior and try to get it acting as naturally as possible. I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal, or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions right, we will have fewer problem behaviors. That might sound like a radical statement, but some of the research in neuroscience has been showing that emotions drive behavior, and my own thirty-five years of experience working with animals have shown me that this is true. Emotions come first. You have to go back to the brain to understand animal welfare. Of course, usually -- though not always -- the more freedom you give an animal to act naturally, the better, because normal behaviors evolved to satisfy the core emotions. When a hen hides to lay her eggs, the hiding behavior turns off fear. But if you can't give an animal the freedom to act naturally, then you should think about how to satisfy the emotion that motivates the behavior by giving the animal other things to do. Focus on the emotion, not the behavior. So far, research in animal behavior agrees with the neuroscience research on emotions. A really good study on whether animals have purely behavioral needs was done with gerbils. Gerbils love to dig and tunnel, and a lot of them develop a corner-digging stereotypy when they're around thirty days old. A stereotypy is an abnormal repetitive behavior (ARB for short), such as a lion or tiger pacing back and forth in its cage for hours on end. Pets and farm animals can develop stereotypies, too. Stereotypies are defined as abnormal behaviors that are repetitive, invariant (lions always pace the exact same path in their cages), and seemingly pointless. An adult gerbil spends up to 30 percent of its "active time" doing stereotypic digging in the corner of its cage. That would never happen in nature, and many researchers have hypothesized that the reason captive gerbils develop stereotypic digging is that they have a biological need to dig that they can't express inside a cage. On the other hand, in nature gerbils don't dig just to be digging. They dig to create underground tunnels and nests. Once they've hollowed out their underground home, they stop digging. Maybe what the gerbil needs is the result of the digging, not the behavior itself. A Swiss psychologist named Christoph Wiedenmayer set up an experiment to find out. He put one set of baby gerbils in a cage with dry sand they could dig in, and another set in a cage with a predug burrow system but nothing soft to dig in. The gerbils in the sand-filled box developed digging stereotypies right away, whereas none of the gerbils in the cage with the burrows did. That shows that the motivation for a gerbil's digging stereotypy is a need to hide inside a sheltered space, not a need to dig. The gerbil needs the emotion of feeling safe, not the action of digging. Animals don't have purely behavioral needs, and if an animal expresses a normal behavior in an abnormal environment, its welfare may be poor. A gerbil that spends 30 percent of its time digging without being able to make a tunnel does not have good welfare. The Blue-Ribbon Emotions All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. Most pet owners probably already believe this, but I find that a lot of executives, plant managers, and even some veterinarians and researchers still don't believe that animals have emotions. The first thing I tell them is that the same psychiatric medications, such as Prozac, that work for humans also work for animals. Unless you are an expert, when you dissect a pig's brain it's difficult to tell the difference between the lower-down parts of the animal's brain and the lower-down parts of a human brain. Human beings have a much bigger neocortex, but the core emotions aren't located in the neocortex. They're in the lower-down part of the brain. When people are suffering mentally, they want to feel better -- they want to stop having bad emotions and start having good emotions. That's the right goal with animals, too. Dr. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University who wrote the book Affective Neuroscience and is one of the most important researchers in the field, calls the core emotion systems the "blue-ribbon emotions," because they "generate well-organized behavior sequences that can be evoked by localized electrical stimulation of the brain." This means that when you stimulate the brain systems for one of the core emotions, you always get the same behaviors from the animal. If you stimulate the anger system, the animal snarls and bites. If you stimulate the fear system, the animal freezes or runs away. Excerpted from Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals by Catherine Johnson, Temple Grandin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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