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Thinking In Pictures
This is the heart of the book so I will quote more than I have in the past.
p142 One third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in facilities I have designed. Throughout my career I have worked on systems to improve the treatment of livestock. The principle behind my designs is to use the animals' natural behavior patterns to encourage them to move willingly through the system. If an animal balks and refuses to walk through an alley, one needs to find out why it is scared and refuses to move. Unfortunately, people often try to correct these problems with force instead of by understanding the animal’s behavior." [I'd say this is the key to all good design, not just livestock design. ] My connection with these animals goes back to the time I first realized that the squeeze machine could help calm my anxiety. I have been seeing the world from their point of view ever since.
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I’m skipping the interesting stuff about designing for cattle.
P143 When I put myself in a cow’s place, I really have to be that cow and not a person in a cow costume. I use my visual thinking skills to simulate what an animal would see and hear in a given situation. I place myself inside its body and imagine what it experiences... I have to follow the cattle’s rules of behavior. I also have to imagine what experiencing the world through the cow’s sensory system is like. Cattle have a very wide, panoramic visual field, because they are a prey species, ever wary and watchful for signs of danger. Similarly, some people with autism are like fearful animals in a world full of dangerous predators. They live in a constant state of fear, worrying about a change in routine or becoming upset if objects in their environment are moved. This fear of change may be an activation of ancient antipredator systems that are blocked or masked in most people.
Looking at this the other way, have we adapted to being quasi-predators in ways that sometimes fail... as with the apparent difficulty many people have with experiencing modern war?
P144 Fear is a universal emotion in the animal kingdom, because it provides an intense motivation to avoid predators. Fear is also a dominant emotion in autism. Therese Joliffe wrote that trying to keep everything the same helped her avoid some of the terrible fear. Tony W. wrote that he lived in a world of daydreaming and fear and was afraid of everything. Before I started taking antidepressants, minor changes in my daily routine caused a fear reaction. There were times when I was dominated by fear of trivial changes, such as switching to daylight savings time. This intense fear is probably due to a neurological defect that sensitizes the nervous system to stimuli that are minor to normal people.
...Cattle and sheep have supersensitive hearing, and acute sense of smell, and eyes on the side of their heads so they can scan the landscape while grazing. They are much more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than people and can hear sounds that are outside the range of human hearing.
High-pitched sounds tend to be more disturbing to them than low-pitched sounds... an outdoor telephone caused a calf’s heart rate to jump suddenly by fifty to seventy beats per minute. It’s unlikely that anyone but me would have noticed that the sounds that upset cattle are the same kinds of sounds that are unbearable to many autistic children with overly sensitive hearing...
P145 Even today, a person whistling in the middle of the night will cause my heart to race. High-pitched sounds are the worst... In tame animals... high-pitched sounds have a mild activating effect, but in wild animals and autistic children they set off a massive fear reaction.
...cattle and other livestock can see color, but their visual system is most attuned to detecting novel movement. Cattle vision is like having wide-angle camera lenses mounted on the sides of your head. The animals... can see all around themselves, except for a small blind spot behind their rear ends...
...Coats and hats left on fences will often cause... [cattle] to balk and refuse to walk by. When a steer is calm in its familiar home feedlot pen, the same hat or coat left on a fence may evoke first fear and then curiosity. The steer will turn and look at the coat and then cautiously approach it. If the coat does not move, he will eventually lick it. A coat that is flapping in the wind is most likely to make animals fearful, and they will keep their distance. In the wild, sudden movement is a sign of danger; it may be a lion in a bush or an animal fleeing from a predator.
It is curious that calves tend to be much more curious and bold than mature cows. I believe this is true of sheep as well. Perhaps this fear response is to some degree taught by the herd. I can’t help noticing that she hasn’t mentioned goats, which don’t seem to be much afraid of anything.
The reaction of cattle to something that appears out of place may be similar to the reaction of autistic children to small discrepancies in their environment. Autistic children don’t like anything that looks out of place -- a thread hanging on a piece of furniture, a wrinkled rug, books that are crooked on the bookshelf. Sometimes they will straighten out the books and other times they will be afraid... Autistic children will also notice minor discrepancies that normal people ignore. Could this be an old antipredator instinct that has surfaced?
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P148 Preliminary evidence indicates that the more nervous and excitable cows are the ones that are the most reluctant to change a previously learned safe route. Resistance to change may be partially motivated by attempts to reduce anxiety. In my own experience, minor changes in my high school class schedule or switching from daylight savings time to standard time caused severe anxiety. My nervous system and the nervous systems of some other people with autism are in a state of hyperarousal for no good reason...
One of the most stressful events for semiwild cattle is having people deeply invade their flight zone when they are unable to move away. A person leaning over the top of an alley is very threatening to beef cattle that are not completely tame. Cattle will balk and refuse to walk through an alley if they can see people up ahead. This is one of the reasons that I designed curved single-file alleys with solid sides. They help keep cattle calmer. The solid sides prevent the animals from being frightened by people and other moving objects outside the alley. A curved alley also works better than a straight one because the cattle are unable to see people up ahead, and each animal thinks he is going back where he came from.
That last sentence can be interpretted in a way that also applies to humans and their belief in an afterlife.
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There’s more here about her design work but I think you get the idea.
Jump to Next: Thinking In Pictures - IX.
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