Animals in Translation (20 page)

That's a clear case of an animal having two warring emotions at the same time, and it stands out because you see this so rarely. In real life, animals seem to feel emotions one at a time, with one important exception: the emotions of fear and curiosity. ESB research shows that curiosity and fear come from different circuits in the brain, and you can turn each one on separately through electrical stimulation without automatically turning on the other. But I have observed that prey animals often feel both emotions at the same time. I don't know whether predator animals also experience both fear and curiosity at the same time, but I expect they probably do.

I've already mentioned that cows will investigate scary new objects or people in their environment. If you stand still in their pasture they'll start to walk up to you because they're curious. But if you make even a tiny movement with your hand they'll jump right back, because they're also afraid. Then as soon as you stop moving, they'll resume the approach. When they get about four feet away they'll stretch their heads out as far as they can so they don't have to get any closer than they absolutely have to, and then their tongues will come out another eight inches so they can give you a good licking and sniffing. They're still scared, though, because any little rapid movement, like your hair or your jacket blowing in the wind, will frighten them off again.

This goes on for fifteen or twenty minutes tops, and then they get bored with you. I tell photographers, “You've got fifteen minutes to get your pictures.” After that the cattle won't come up to you again, and they won't let you come up to them. They'll just move away if you try.

The way they act is so striking that I've had more than one person who didn't know anything about cattle go out to a pasture with me and say, “She acts like she's curiously afraid.” That is a perfect
description of how cows react to novel stimuli: curiously afraid. It's the only example of animals being ambivalent that I'm used to seeing as a matter of course.

B
REEDING
E
MOTIONS

Apart from the ESB studies, another piece of important evidence that the core emotions each have their own separate circuits is the fact that you can use selective breeding to change one without changing the other. We know this from a quail study done in France by Jean-Michel Faure. Dr. Faure looked at two different genetically inherited emotions: fear and
social reinstatement,
which means the tendency for an animal to want to get up close to his buddies.
³⁰

They tested this by putting a group of quail in a cage at one end of a treadmill, and then putting one lone quail on the treadmill going in the opposite direction from the cage. The quail had to run against the moving treadmill belt to get back to the cage. They measured how hard the quail tried to get back to his friends.

They also measured each quail's fear level and then correlated fear with social reinstatement. Their first set of findings was what they predicted: high fear and high social reinstatement go together. The more fearful the bird, the harder he tried to get back to his group. You see that in all kinds of animals, including predator animals who don't need to stick together to be safe. Marmalade cats are high-fear for cats and they're also high-social. No one knows why, but it's true. They're super-affectionate; they'll eat up petting, much more so than other cats. But if you make a rapid movement a marmalade cat is the first to run away.

The next part of the experiment is really important. They used selective breeding to see if they could separate fear and social reinstatement—
and they could do it easily.
It was not hard at all to breed a high-fear quail who didn't care about getting to his buddies, or a high-social quail who wasn't afraid of anything. Even though in real life the two emotions go together, in the brain they're separate.

We have some evidence for this in people, too. Various studies have shown that positive and negative emotions are probably created by different chemical systems in the brain. That's not surprising, but
what
is
surprising is the fact that positive and negative emotions aren't inversely related. If you use a medication like Paxil or Prozac to lower negative emotions in a normal person, you don't automatically raise his positive emotions. They're separate systems.
³¹
(This probably explains why people with bipolar disorder can have
mixed states,
when the person is excited and maybe even euphoric at the same time that he's highly irritable.)

Intentionally or unintentionally, humans often separate animal emotions that normally go together through selective breeding programs. For instance, take the idea of breeding an animal for low fear. That might sound like a good idea, because high fear levels can make an animal nervous, high-strung, and hard to manage. But fear is an important emotion, and a person or an animal with abnormally low fear levels can be dangerous. He's dangerous, because in nature fear rides herd on aggression. A dog with normal fear levels might want to get in a fight with a rival, but he's also scared of getting hurt and that slows him down. The dog who's fearless doesn't think twice.

You see that in humans, too. A fearful boy is a lot less likely to start fights than a fearless one. It's not that the fearful boy doesn't get mad; he does. Anger and fear are separate emotions, and a high-fear person or animal can feel as much anger as a low-fear person or animal. The difference is that fear keeps an angry person from going too far. There's some interesting research on this in men and women, too. Males get in more physical fights than females, but females have just as much anger, and in some studies show more indirect aggression, like gossiping about a person they don't like or excluding them from the group, than males. So far psychological research has found that the reason women have as much anger as men but don't get in as many physical fights is that they also have higher levels of fear in angry situations. Fear is a constraint on physical aggression.

People take a big risk when they try to breed less fearful dogs. They could end up with some very dangerous animals. On the other hand, so far we're getting away with it with Labrador retrievers. Labs are low-fear
and
low-aggression, which is something you don't see in nature. I'm sure this is because breeders have been selecting
for lower levels of
both
emotions. At least, I hope that's what they're selecting for. But with Labs, too, breeders are starting to see some of the problems that kick in from the traits that we don't realize are genetically connected.

One of the problems comes from the fact that we're breeding for calm/calm/calm, and we're starting to get a Lab who's so calm he's abnormal. If you do something aggressive like grab him by both jowls he doesn't react. People are also breeding the startle out of Labs, so if a car backfires he won't jump and run off with the blind person he's supposed to be leading. That makes Labradors good with children, who can be rough and unpredictable.

Labs have low pain, too, although that may be a trait they've always had, since as working dogs in Newfoundland they had to jump into icy water to get fish out of fishing nets. You can still see that behavior in Labs today. A young Labrador puppy will jump in a little kids' wading pool and start pawing the water like crazy, like he's trying to catch the fish in there.

The problem with making a dog so calm is that you breed all the motivation out of them. I talked to a lady at a guide dog school, and she said some of the Labs are worthless because they don't pay attention. People are getting worried they're creating a dog they won't be able to train. Even worse, they're starting to see epilepsy in some of the dogs. You can end up with epilepsy no matter what brain trait you're over-selecting for. That's what happened to Springer spaniels, who now have
Springer rage.
They kept breeding them to look super-alert, and they ended up with a form of epilepsy that creates sudden, out-of-the-blue episodes of aggression.
³²

Genetically speaking, Labs are strange dogs: low-fear, low-aggression, and high-social. That's not a normal combination. And anytime you use selective breeding to create an animal who's really different from what nature created, you can end up with some nasty surprises. I think people should be much more careful and
aware
when they're overseeing animal breeding.

I don't want to leave the impression that I'm against Labrador retrievers, though. They're one of the best purebred dogs we have; they're good family dogs and good working dogs, too. I just want to make sure we keep them that way.

A
NIMAL
F
RIENDS AND
A
NIMAL
W
ELFARE

People who own and manage animals need to think about animal feelings, because animals have the same core emotions we do. Just keeping animals healthy and well fed isn't enough; we need to give animals enough social contact with other animals—and with humans in the case of cats and dogs—to live an emotionally normal life.

Animal mothers, and some animal fathers, love their babies; animal babies love their mothers (some love their fathers, too); and almost all animals have some form of friendship. Even seemingly unsocial animals like giraffes are turning out to have friendships now that people are studying their social structures more closely. A researcher named Meredith Bashaw at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta started researching giraffe friendship after two female giraffes got extremely upset when the male giraffe they'd lived with for nine years in the Atlanta Zoo was taken away. Neither female had ever mated with him, and from what the humans could see, the three giraffes hardly interacted much at all. So no one was expecting the females to react badly when the male was moved. But both females were horribly upset and started repetitively licking the fence, which is a sign of stress.

The reason no one knew giraffes had friends was that the field studies of giraffes from the 1970s had concluded that individual giraffes did not form close attachments to other giraffes. Ms. Bashaw says, “Giraffes just seemed to move about the plains of Africa like random molecules in your coffee cup.” But after the female giraffes got so upset in Atlanta, Ms. Bashaw went to the San Diego Zoo where the giraffes are free to move around a ninety-acre park and she could watch whether some giraffes stuck closer together than others.

She found that giraffes have buddies just like every other social animal we know. A giraffe will spend 15 percent of its time grazing with its friend, and only 5 percent of its time grazing close to any other giraffe. Another animal expert who has studied giraffe friendships since the 1970s, Julian Fennessy at the University of Sydney, says that among Angolan giraffes, who live in the Namib Desert, particular females spend a half to a third of their time with their female friends.
³³

In any social grazing group you find some mother-daughter pairs, but you also find animals keeping company with other animals they aren't related to. Dr. Fennessy has also studied a group made up mostly of males, and the males have friendships, too. Animal researchers find animal friendships in most or all mammals. I don't know if montane voles form friendships (they may not), but at this point we believe that all or nearly all mammals—and possibly most or all birds—form friendships.

For people, solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments you can put them through, and it's no different for animals. Animals need friends and companions, and humans need to make sure they have them.

D
og owners are usually horrified the first time they see their beloved pet kill a helpless little furry animal. I remember the day my good friend Tina saw her golden retriever Abbey kill a squirrel on the quad of the University of Illinois. Even though Tina was studying for a Ph.D. in animal behavior, she was still shocked when she saw her gentle dog finish off a squirrel like an expert assassin.

It's even more shocking when you see Lassie kill for what looks like the pure fun of it. My friend Dave, who always takes his seventy-pound half-shepherd–half-hound mix out for runs with him, was stunned when Max shot out after a groundhog one day, seized the animal by the neck, and then shook it violently until it was dead. The dog totally ignored my friend, who was racing after him shouting, “Drop it!”

Max knew perfectly well how to obey the command “Drop it” when he had a shoe in his mouth. But there was no way Max was dropping a live groundhog.

The most upsetting thing was that Max didn't have the slightest interest in actually
eating
his kill. He brought the dead groundhog over to Dave, dropped it at his feet, and beamed up at his master, obviously expecting Dave to be mightily impressed. In a way, Dave was. This was the dog he trusted to play gently with his two-year-old son, and he'd just watched Max turn into a vicious predator who couldn't be called off once the kill was underway.

After that, Dave said he started to wonder why people and dogs get along together at all. We have 60 million pet dogs in this country, all of them predators wired to kill—why aren't there
daily
newspaper reports of hideous fatal dog attacks on humans, instead of the actual number, which averages out to about fifteen a year, based on the years 1997 and 1998.
¹
That's one dog out of every four million. It's tiny. If
there were a disease that struck only one in every four million people, only seventy people in our whole country would have it. (Dogs kill people a lot less often than people kill people, that's for sure.)

I had another friend who told me the same story. Her kids were young when she adopted what she thought was a shepherd-Lab mixed-breed dog from a shelter. By the time he was fully grown it was obvious from his markings and behavior that the dog had more Rottweiler in him than anything else; he was a
very
dominant animal. While he was still a puppy he preferred to spend evenings alone in his crate, instead of getting up on the bed with the family to watch TV. That's typical of dominant dogs; they like their “space.” A dominant dog doesn't interact when
you
want him to; he interacts when
he
wants to. He'll let you know when he's interested.

Even worse, people she and her dog met on the street were saying he looked like he had some pit bull in him, too. My friend didn't think she'd accidentally adopted a pit bull descendant, but she
was
a little upset that her grown dog looked and acted so much like a Rottweiler. A study published in September 2000 found that Rottweilers and pit-bull-type dogs are responsible for the vast majority of fatal dog bites, with Rottweilers being number one.
²
Some of that is due to the fact that Rottweilers have gotten so popular there are a lot more of them around. But that's not all of it. In 1997 and 1998 pit bulls and Rottweilers put together were responsible for 67 percent of all fatal dog bites, and there's no way Rottweilers and pit bulls together make up 67 percent of the total dog population in this country. Not even close. (For a number of reasons, including owners' rights to equal protection under the law, the authors of the study did not recommend laws banning either pit bulls or Rottweilers.)

Seeing how dominant her dog was, my friend started to wonder about the whole dog-human relationship. She'd grown up with dogs herself, but now that she was a parent she realized just how much trust we place in these animals. People trust dogs with their lives; people trust dogs with
their children's
lives. It's pretty incredible when you think about it. I don't think my friend needed to worry as much as she did, though. Rottweiler mixes probably aren't any more dangerous than any other type of dog, except for the handful of purebreds known for low aggression, like Labs. I say “probably”
because there
is
some raw data available on the numbers of mixed-breed Rottweilers who have attacked and killed humans, but it's impossible to interpret because we don't know how many mixed-breed Rottweilers are in the dog population. Just eyeballing the numbers, it looks to me like Rottweiler mixes aren't any more dangerous than any other mutt. But I can't say for sure.

My friend figured she needed to teach the puppy to be more sociable, so she would pick him up out of his crate and put him on the bed with her and the kids. The puppy would stay put, but his way of playing was incredibly aggressive. My friend said his jaws would be snapping open and shut like a little alligator's. Even though she'd lived with dogs her entire life, she would watch this puppy snapping and snarling away and think to herself, “Why do I have this
animal
up here on the bed with my kids?”

Well, probably she shouldn't have had the puppy up on the bed, seeing as how the first thing any dog trainer will tell you is that a very dominant dog needs to be kept down
low.
A dominant dog should never be at eye level with a human! However, today the puppy is a sweet and good-natured adult dog whom neighbors and guests all like to visit. He's still dominant, and the family still has to remind him of the proper hierarchy (humans on top, dog on the bottom), but he is a cheerful and devoted member of the family.

How does this happen?

A
GGRESSION IN THE
B
RAIN

To understand animal behavior you have to start from the brain and work outward. For years animal behaviorists didn't have this option, and researchers struggled to come up with definitive classifications of animal behavior. Animal aggression was especially difficult to categorize, if only because there's so much of it. Naturally, different researchers would come up with different lists of core aggressive behaviors. Some lists were longer; some shorter. One behaviorist might make a distinction between
intermale aggression
(the tendency of two males to fight when one male is dropped into the cage of another) and
territorial aggression
(which often means one male fighting another male who has invaded his territory, although females
can engage in territorial aggression, too). Another researcher might decide that intermale aggression and territorial aggression were really the same thing.

Studying the brain doesn't solve all of these problems, because different behaviors can come out of the same brain circuits. But now that the brain circuits for aggression have been fully mapped out, the nature of animal and human aggression is a lot more clear.
³

We know now that there are two core kinds of aggression:
predatory aggression
and
emotional
or
affective aggression.
Predatory aggression is chasing down and killing prey to eat; emotional aggression is everything else.

I'll start with predatory aggression.

T
HE
K
ILLING
B
ITE

Predatory aggression isn't just something predator animals do. Prey animals also have the neural circuits for predatory aggression in their brains, though these circuits don't get activated very often.

Research with rats, who are prey animals, shows that you can elicit a biting attack in some rats by stimulating the same part of the brain you would stimulate to elicit a biting attack in a predator animal like a cat.
⁴
Even though a rat rarely hunts prey in the wild, he has the innate, built-in capacity to do it. Jaak Panksepp, the author of
Affective Neuroscience,
says researchers haven't been able to turn on a biting attack in all the rats he's studied, just in the ones who have a naturally strong inclination to “approach and vigorously investigate potential prey objects such as mice.”
⁵
Still, these are perfectly normal rats, so the fact that you can produce a biting attack in especially aggressive rats means that the neural circuits are there for all rats; they just don't use them. The predatory chase drive is almost certainly present in all animals as a
potential
behavior.

The actual moment of the kill, called the
killing bite,
is a hardwired behavioral sequence that never changes. Each individual member of a species is born knowing how to perform the killing bite, and each individual member of a species performs the killing bite the same way. A Labrador retriever killing a groundhog will look exactly like a German shepherd killing a groundhog. In the laboratory you
can turn on the killing bite by implanting electrodes into the predatory circuits in the brain and stimulating them with electricity. The animal doesn't have to be hungry, and no prey has to be in sight.

All predators have a hardwired killing bite, but the bite can differ from species to species. Dogs and cats bite down and then shake their prey to death; large cats such as lions, who kill large prey animals like antelope, often bite the animal's neck and then hold on until it dies of suffocation. They do that because an antelope is too big to shake to death. Usually when a predator kills his prey you don't see any blood. The dead animal looks perfectly intact.

Scientists call hardwired behavior sequences like the killing bite fixed action patterns because the sequence of behaviors is always the same. Fixed action patterns are turned on by
sign stimuli
or
releasers.
For
all
predators, rapid movement is a releaser that turns on predatory chasing and biting. Over the years I've read various reports where a person has been injured or killed by a tame lion or tiger. In almost all of these accidents, the cause was rapid movement. The person who was bitten fell down, suddenly bent over, or dropped a tool, and the sudden movement triggered the predatory fixed action pattern. I'm sure that's where the line “Don't make any sudden moves” comes from in police shows. Humans have the same built-in primitive reaction to movement, and in a tense situation a sudden movement can trigger a person holding a weapon to use it.

While the fixed action pattern is always the same, emotions can differ from one animal to another within the same species. If Dave had two dogs instead of just one, he might find that one of his dogs was more motivated to hunt down and kill a groundhog than the other. The briefest glimpse of a groundhog might trigger the chase and kill in one dog; the other dog might ignore the groundhog unless the animal was repeatedly shoved in his face. Both dogs would perform the actual kill exactly the same, but their motivation to get to that point could differ.

S
CHOOL FOR
H
UNTERS

Predatory killing raises the question of how much animal behavior is learned and how much is instinctual. The answer is that it depends
on the species. Animals with large, complex brains like a chimpanzee rely on learning much more than simple-brained animals like lizards. Dogs, cats, horses, and cows are somewhere in the middle. Their brains aren't as complex as a person's or a chimpanzee's, but are a lot more complex than a lizard's or a chicken's. So dogs and cats are more dependent on learning than chickens are, but they probably use more hardwired behavior than a chimp.

The next thing to know is that there is a difference between the fixed action pattern itself and the emotions that motivate and drive the fixed action pattern. The
emotion
of chasing down prey and the
behavior
of killing the prey are controlled by different circuits in the brain.
⁶

Seeing the word “emotions” in this context might be surprising. Animal experts used to talk about
instincts,
which are the fixed action patterns, and
drives,
which we defined as built-in urges that made animals and humans seek the core necessities of life like food and sex. Instincts and drives described animal and human behavior well from the outside, but the concept of a drive didn't hold up well once researchers started mapping the brain. It was too broad and abstract, and when researchers looked for single, unified brain circuits underlying specific drives, they didn't find them.
⁷

Instead of finding one unified circuit for a
hunger drive,
for example, they found two different circuits, one for the physical aspects of hunger, the other for the emotional. The physical aspects of hunger, called
bodily need states,
are things like low blood sugar, which signal that an animal needs something to eat. There's a separate circuit in the brain that handles bodily need states. But a bodily need state on its own isn't enough, which should be obvious to anyone who's ever known a person with anorexia. People and animals also need the emotion of SEEKING, which I talked about in the last chapter, to motivate them to go out and hunt or gather the food their body needs.

Researchers don't know exactly how a bodily need like hunger hooks up to the emotions of hunting; that's one of the questions people are studying now. But they do believe that virtually
everything
people and animals do is driven by some kind of feeling. We know how important feeling is from ESB studies of animal brains,
and also from close study of human patients who have had brain damage. Antonio Damasio, whose book
Descartes' Error
has been extremely influential, has studied people whose emotions have become disconnected from their reasoning and decision-making processes. These patients can't even decide what restaurant to go to for dinner, even though they're hungry and need to eat. Emotion and hunger are separate circuits in the brain, and both need to be working.
⁸