Thinking In Pictures Part 5

Modulating emotions is difficult for me. One time on a plane I laughed so hard at a movie that many people started staring at me. When I cry at a sad movie, I cry more than most people. My emotion is either turned on or all turned off. I have the four simple emotions of happy, sad, fearful, or angry. I never have mixtures of these emotions, but I can rapidly switch emotions.

After I was kicked out of a large girls' school for throwing a book at a girl who teased me, I learned to change anger to crying. I was unable to change the intensity of the emotion but I could switch to a different emotion. At my boarding school, horseback riding was taken away after I got into several fist fights due to teasing. Since I wanted to ride the horses, I immediately switched to crying. Switching to crying enabled me to not lose a job due to either hitting or throwing things. At the Swift Plant, I often retreated to the cattle yards to cry. Today any kind of violent behavior would not be tolerated in the workplace.

Subtle Emotional Cues I was in my early '50s when I first learned about small eye signals. I did not understand why eye contact with so important. There was a whole secret world of eye movements that were unknown to me until I read Simon Baron-Cohen's book Mind Blindness Mind Blindness. Tone of voice was the only subtle signal I picked up. Obviously I recognized strong emotion in other people when they expressed anger by yelling, sadness by crying, or happiness by laughing.

Mother has written about the difficulties with her marriage in her book A Thorn in My Pocket A Thorn in My Pocket. When I was a child, I did not pick up on the emotional turmoil between my mother and father. I failed to recognize the signs of conflict because they were subtle. They seldom yelled at each other and they never hit each other or threw things.

What Does Research Show?

Hundreds of scientific papers have been written on abnormalities in face perception in autism. The bottom line is that in autistic people the amygdala (emotion center) is abnormal and people with autism use different brain circuits when they recognize faces. I still have embarra.s.sing moments when I do not recognize the face of a person I met five minutes ago. I am able to recognize people I have been around for a long time. If a face has a really unique feature like a giant nose, I can remember that. The number of studies on face recognition and eye signals greatly outnumber papers on how people with autism think or perceive sensory input. Normal people are more interested in studying emotions rather than studying sensory problems or how savant skills work. I wish the scientists would spend more time on sensory problems. Severe problems with sensory oversensitivity wrecks the lives of many people on the spectrum. The most miserable individuals are the ones with such severe sensory problems that they cannot tolerate a restaurant or office. Socializing is impossible if your ears hurt from normal noise in movie theaters, sporting events, or busy streets.

8.

A COW'S E EYE V VIEW.

Connecting with Animals 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. 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.

People ask me all the time whether the cattle know they are going to be slaughtered. What I have observed over the years and at many meat plants is that the things that frighten cattle usually have nothing to do with death. It is the little things that make them balk and refuse to move, such as seeing a small piece of chain hanging down from an alley fence. For instance, a lead animal will stop to look at a moving chain and move his head back and forth in rhythm with its swing. He isn't concerned about being slaughtered; he's afraid of a small piece of chain that jiggles and looks out of place.

Most people do not observe these simple things because they get the cattle too excited by poking and prodding them when they refuse to move through an alley or out of a pen. When cattle are excited, it is impossible to determine what is bothering them. They go into antipredator mode and push themselves together in a boiling ball of circling, agitated animals, with their heads toward the center of the group. The smallest distraction can stop a group of cattle moving through an alley. I remember one time when a meat plant became totally chaotic because a plastic juice bottle had fallen into the entrance where the cattle lined up to walk into the plant. They absolutely refused to walk over the white plastic bottle. Anything that causes visual contrast will attract the animals' attention. They fear a drain gate across a concrete floor or a sparkling reflection from a puddle. Sometimes moving an overhead lamp to eliminate a reflection on a floor or wall will make it easier to move cattle and hogs. Poor lighting can cause many problems. Cattle and hogs will not walk into a dark place, so installing a lamp to illuminate the entrance to an alley will entice them to enter. Animals, like people, want to see where they are going.

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. It is the ultimate virtual reality system, but I also draw on the empa-thetic feelings of gentleness and kindness I have developed so that my simulation is more than a robotic computer model. Add to the equation all of my scientific knowledge of cattle behavior patterns and instincts. 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 other people.

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 that 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.

In order to survive, members of a prey species such as cattle or sheep have to be ever vigilant and flee when they spot a predator. Cattle and sheep have supersensitive hearing, an acute sense of smell, and eyes on the sides 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. Tom Camp, a USDA researcher in Texas, found that a loud bell on 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. A sudden hissing similar to that caused by the air brakes on a semi truck will trigger a strong startle reaction in both calves and cattle. When calves hear this sound, they instantly lay their ears against their heads and back up to get away from the source of the noise. Like cattle, a person with autism has hypervigilant senses.

Even today, a person whistling in the middle of the night will cause my heart to race. High-pitched sounds are the worst. High, rapidly repeated sounds are stimulating to the nervous system. P. B. McConnell and his colleague J. R. Baylis, in Germany, found that dog trainers use high-pitched intermittent sounds to stimulate a dog to do something like fetch, while low sounds are used to make it stop, such as saying "Whoa" to a horse. In tame animals the high-pitched sounds have a mild activating effect, but in wild animals and autistic children they set off a ma.s.sive fear reaction.

Contrary to popular belief, 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 have 360 degree vision and can see all around themselves, except for a small blind spot behind their rear ends. However, the price they pay for wide-angle vision is a very narrow field where they can perceive depth. To do that, cattle have to stop and put their heads down. Predatory species, such as lions, dogs, cats, and tigers, have their eyes on the front of their heads, which enables them to perceive depth and accurately judge distances when they leap and bring down their prey. Eyes on the front of the head provide superior binocular vision, whereas eyes on the sides of the head provide the ability to scan the environment and be constantly vigilant.

In the old American West, novelty sometimes triggered stampedes during the great cattle drives. A hat blowing in the wind or a horse bucking would set off the instinct to flee. It is possible to desensitize cattle to novelty, however. For example, calves in the Philippines are grazed along the highways from birth. They learn that all the sights and sounds of the highway will not hurt them. These tame, halter-broken animals are not perturbed by anything.

Most cattle on American ranches are exposed to far less novelty. Coats and hats left on fences will often cause them 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 more 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.

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. Their fear reaction may be similar to a cow's reaction to a coffee cup in an alley or a hat on a fence. Autistic children will also notice minor discrepancies that normal people ignore. Could this be an old antipredator instinct that has surfaced? In the wild, a broken branch on a tree or disturbed earth is a possible sign of predator activity in the vicinity. The animal that survives and avoids the lions is the one that has developed the finest abilities in detecting warning signs of changes.

Cattle, deer, and antelope will turn and face a source of potential danger that is not immediately threatening. Cows on a pasture will turn and face an approaching person, and antelope on the African plains will turn toward and sometimes follow a lion. After all, the lion they can see is less of a threat than a lion they cannot see. The animals will follow the lion but remain at a safe distance, which enables instant flight. This is known as the animal's flight zone.

People working with cattle reared on the open range can use the principles of the flight zone to move groups of animals efficiently and quickly. The size of the flight zone will vary depending on how tame the cattle are. Tame dairy cattle may have no flight zone, and they will approach people for petting. Beef cattle raised on western ranches are not completely tame, and they will move away if people go too close to them. The flight zone can vary from five feet to over one hundred feet. Excited cattle will have a larger flight distance than calm cattle. H. Hedigar stated in his book The Psychology and Behavior of Animals in Zoos and Circuses The Psychology and Behavior of Animals in Zoos and Circusesthat taming is the artificial removal of the flight distance between animals and people.

It is fairly easy to move groups of cattle in a quiet and orderly manner if people work on the edge of the herd's collective flight zone. Deep invasion of the flight zone, however, may cause cattle to panic. If they are cornered in a pen, they may attempt to jump a fence to increase the distance between themselves and a threatening person.

Therapists have observed that autistic children often lash out when they stand close to other children while waiting in a line. They become tense when other children invade their personal s.p.a.ce. Having another child accidentally brush up against them can cause them to withdraw with fear like a frightened animal. A light unexpected touch triggers flight, and a firm touch, similar to the pressure of a tightly bunched herd of cattle, is calming.

A great deal of my success in working with animals comes from the simple fact that I see all kinds of connections between their behavior and certain autistic behaviors. Another example is the fact that both cattle and people with autism can become very set in their habits. A change in a daily routine can cause an autistic person to have a tantrum. Such changes used to make me very anxious. Ranchers have discovered that cattle placed on a new pasture must be encouraged to graze the entire area when they are first put there. I observed a lazy group of bulls that refused to walk less than a quarter of a mile to a good pasture. Why do cattle do this? It may have something to do with instincts to avoid predators. When cattle learn that a certain area is safe, they become reluctant to move to a new area, which may contain danger.

An experiment that Ken Odde and I conducted at Colorado State University indicated the great strength of a bovine's reluctance to change a previously learned safe route. Cattle were given a choice between an alley that led to a squeeze chute and an alley that they could just walk through. The animals quickly learned to avoid the side where they would be restrained in the squeeze chute. When the alleys were switched, most of the cattle refused to switch sides to avoid restraint. Being held in a squeeze chute is slightly uncomfortable, but not so aversive that the animals were willing to change from the previously learned safe route. When something really painful or disagreeable happens, though, most animals will quickly change to avoid it. Mary Tanner, a student at Colorado State University, found that most cows at a dairy were willing to enter both sides of a milking parlor, but a few were very rigid and always entered on the same side.

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 cla.s.s 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. Before I took antidepressant drugs, my nervous system was constantly ready to flee predators. Insignificant little stresses caused the same reaction as being attacked by a lion. These problems were created by abnormalities in my nervous system. Now that the medication has calmed my nerves, I can take small changes in routine in stride.

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 also 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.

Understanding these kinds of sensitivities made it possible for me to figure out ways to calm flighty antelope at the zoo when other people were convinced that it was impossible to train them to cooperate during veterinary procedures. These procedures were often very stressful, because the animals had to be either shot with a tranquilizer dart or grabbed by people. Antelope can be trained to accept new procedures and novel sights and sounds if those things are introduced gradually and quietly, while the animals are fed treats. I worked with students Megan Phillips, Wendy Grafham, and Mat Rooney to train nyala and bongo antelope to enter a plywood box willingly and stand still during veterinary procedures such as blood testing and injections. The solid sides on the box provided the animals with a sense of safety and security. While they munched on treats, the veterinarian worked on them. During training, we had to take care to avoid triggering a ma.s.sive fright reaction in these prey-species animals. They had to be carefully desensitized to the sound and movement of the doors on the box, and to people reaching into the box and touching them.

The crafty animals quickly learned to enter the box to get the treats and then kick the moment a blood test was attempted. To stop this, we withheld the treat until the animal stood still and cooperated. Trainers have to discriminate between kicking because of fear and kicking simply to avoid doing something the animal doesn't want to do. Withholding a feed reward will stop learned kicking, but it will have no effect on kicking or thras.h.i.+ng due to fear.

People who work with nonverbal, low-functioning people with autism must similarly be able to determine whether a tantrum or other bad behavior is caused by fear or pain or is a learned avoidance response. Sometimes it's because of pain from sounds that hurt their ears or fear of an unexpected change in routine. Like the cattle and the antelope, autistics are afraid of the unexpected. But sometimes they throw tantrums simply to get attention or to avoid doing a certain activity or school lesson. In one study, aggression and outbursts were greatly reduced in very severely handicapped autistic adults by giving them an object to hold fifteen minutes before they were scheduled to have lunch or ride on the bus. A spoon was used before lunch, and a toy bus was used before riding on the bus. Touch was the only sense that was not confused by sensory jumbling, and holding the object let these people get mentally ready for the next event in their daily routine. There were times when I threw a big tantrum just to watch the grownups react. Observant teachers can tell the difference between a ma.s.sive fear reaction and the calculated use of bad behavior to avoid tasks the person does not want to do.

People Problems Mistreatment by people is the number-one cause of animals becoming frightened. The best equipment in the world is worthless unless management controls the behavior of plant employees. When I first started designing equipment, I naively believed that if I could design the perfect system, it would control employee behavior. This is not possible, but I have designed equipment that requires very little skill to operate, provided employees are gentle. Good engineering is important, and well-designed facilities provide the tools that make low-stress, quiet handling at slaughter possible, but employees must operate the system correctly. Rough, callous people will cause distress to animals even if they use the best equipment.

Management att.i.tude is the most important variable that determines how animals are treated. I wouldn't be surprised if this were true of any organization. Livestock handling has greatly improved during the past ten years, and managers are becoming more sensitive about animal welfare, but there still needs to be improvement. It is very painful for me to watch somebody abuse an animal, especially when it happens in one of my systems. Some people buy new equipment and think that it is a subst.i.tute for good management. Over the years I have seen animal handling improve with a change in management, and I have seen it get rough and nasty when a good manager left. A good manager serves as a conscience for the employees. He has to be involved enough to care but not so involved that he becomes numb and desensitized. One cannot rely on the foreman to enforce good behavior. This person often becomes immune to animal suffering on the slaughter floor. The manager who enforces good animal handling is usually most effective if he is at the plant-manager level. Someone in a distant headquarters office is often too detached from the reality of the slaughter floor to be concerned.

Plants that have high standards of animal welfare enforce strict codes of conduct. One manager built his office so that he could see the stockyards and the cattle ramp that led into the plant. If he saw employees. .h.i.tting or whipping the cattle, he called the foreman. Employees who handle thousands of animals often become careless and hard. The people who actually kill the animals should be rotated, and complete automation of the actual killing procedure is good for employee well-being. Automation of killing is especially important in very high-speed plants, with rates of over 150 cattle per hour. A person becomes a zombie when he has to shoot thousands of cattle every day. At slower speeds one can take pride in doing the job humanely and treat each animal with respect, but at high speeds it's all one can do to keep up with the relentless movement of the line.

Management also has to be willing to take the time and make the effort to improve handling methods. Employees have to be trained to understand cattle behavior and use the natural instincts of the animals to a.s.sist movement. Trained employees learn to time groups of animals so that they will follow the leader. Each group must be driven up to the single-file alley just as the last animal from the previous group is walking into it. If the next group is driven up too quickly, the cattle or hogs will turn around, because there is no place to go. I love nothing more than to watch a plant I've designed run smoothly and efficiently, knowing that the animals are being treated with decency.

I'm always surprised at the number of people who think that the "jungle" still exists at the Chicago stockyards. The Chicago stockyards have been gone for more than thirty years. When I discuss my job with fellow travelers on airplanes, many ask if a sledgehammer is still used. That was banned by the Humane Slaughter Act in 1958 in all meat plants that sold to the U.S. government. In 1978 the act was strengthened to cover all federally inspected plants that sell meat in interstate commerce. The Humane Slaughter Act requires that cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats must be instantaneously rendered insensible to pain prior to slaughter. The act does not cover poultry or ritual slaughter by any religious faith. The law requires that animals are rendered insensible to pain by either captive bolt stunning, electrical stunning, or CO2 gas. Captive bolt kills the animal instantly by driving a steel bolt into the brain. It has the same effect as a gun. Electrical stunning causes instantaneous unconsciousness by pa.s.sing a high-amperage electrical current through the brain. It works the same way as electroconvulsive shock treatment in people. If the procedure is done correctly the animal becomes instantly unconscious.

People often ask me if animals are afraid of blood. Again it's the small distractions that scare the animals more than blood. Blood or urine from relatively calm cattle appears to have no effect, but blood from cattle that have become very frightened may contain a "smell of fear" substance. If the cattle remain relatively calm they will voluntarily walk into a chute with blood on it. But if an animal becomes severely stressed for over five minutes the next animal will often refuse to enter.

Design of Restraint Equipment Many people who design systems to restrain animals don't think about what the device will feel like to the animal. Some engineers are strangely unaware that a sharp edge will dig and hurt. They build devices that mash the animal or dig into it. Restraint equipment used to hold cattle or hogs for either veterinary work or slaughter often squeezes the animal too hard or holds it in an uncomfortable position. One of the reasons I am good at designing this equipment is that I can visualize what the device will feel like. I can put myself into a twelve-hundred-pound steer's body and feel the equipment. What would it be like with a gentle person operating it? What would it be like with a rough person operating it? When I see somebody squeeze an animal too hard in a squeeze chute, it makes me hurt all over.

One of my crusades in the meat industry has been to eliminate shackling and hoisting as a method of restraint in kosher slaughter plants. The main animal welfare problem with kosher slaughter is the dreadful methods of restraint used in some plants. The variable of the restraint method must be separated from the variable of the actual shehita kosher cut, which is performed on a fully conscious animal. In kosher slaughter, a special, razor-sharp, long straight knife is used. When the cut is made correctly according to the rules outlined in the Talmud, the animal does not appear to feel it. The Talmud states that there cannot be any hesitation during the cut and the incision must not close back over the knife. The knife must have a perfect blade and be free of nicks, because a nick would cause pain.

I will never forget having nightmares after visiting the now defunct Spencer Foods plant in Spencer, Iowa, fifteen years ago. Employees wearing football helmets attached a nose tong to the nose of a writhing beast suspended by a chain wrapped around one back leg. Each terrified animal was forced with an electric prod to run into a small stall which had a slick floor on a forty-five-degree angle. This caused the animal to slip and fall so that workers could attach the chain to its rear leg. As I watched this nightmare, I thought, "This should not be happening in a civilized society." In my diary I wrote, "If h.e.l.l exists, I am in it." I vowed that I would replace the plant from h.e.l.l with a kinder and gentler system.

Ten years ago I was hired by the Council for Livestock Protection in New York to develop a humane upright restraint system for kosher calves. The council was a consortium of major animal advocacy groups such as the Humane Society of the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,the Fund for Animals, the Ma.s.sachusetts SPCA, the American Humane a.s.sociation, and others. It was formed in the early seventies to replace shackling and hoisting with more humane methods of restraint. At this time, upright restraining equipment existed for kosher slaughter of large cattle, but no equipment was available for calves or sheep. When the Humane Slaughter Act was pa.s.sed in 1958, kosher slaughter was exempted, because no humane alternatives to shackling and hoisting of fully conscious animals existed.

Walter Giger, Don Kinsman, and Ralph Prince, at the University of Connecticut, had demonstrated that a calf can be restrained in a comfortable manner when it straddles a moving conveyor. The animal rides the conveyor like a person riding a horse, supported under the belly and chest. Solid sides on each side of the conveyor prevent it from tilting off. The Connecticut researchers had a good idea, but I had to invent many new components to construct a system that would work in a commercial slaughter plant. To make the new system work, I had to eliminate all pressure points which caused discomfort to the animals. For example, uncomfortable pressure on the leg joints caused calves to struggle and fight the restrainer. Elimination of the pressure points resulted in calm, quiet calves.

One of the advantages of a conveyor restraint system for both conventional slaughter, where cattle are stunned, and ritual slaughter is that the cattle move through it in a continuous line. Each animal has its head on the rear of the animal in front of it. Having observed cattle, I realized that they remain calmer when they can touch each other. Since the cattle were in continuous contact with each other, they remained calmer at the slaughter plant than at the squeeze chute at the Colorado State University Experiment Station. I've also observed that cattle are accustomed to walking in single file. An overview of a cow pasture shows the small, twelve-inch-wide cowpaths. Walking in single file is part of the nature of cattle. This is why a system that handles cattle moving through in single file works well.

Many people do not believe me when I tell them that cattle slaughter can be really calm, peaceful, and humane. In some plants, the cattle remain absolutely calm and the employees are very conscientious. At one large plant, 240 cattle per hour quietly walked up the ramp and voluntarily entered the double-rail conveyor restrainer. It was as if they were going in to get milked. Each fat steer walked into the restrainer entrance and settled down on the conveyor like a little old lady getting on the bus. Most animals entered the restrainer when they were patted on the rear end. Since the cattle move through the system in a continuous line, they are never alone and separated from their buddies. At this plant, the system had been beautifully installed and was brightly illuminated. When slaughter is conducted properly, the cattle experience less stress and discomfort than they experience during handling procedures in the veterinary chute.

Being autistic has helped me to understand how they feel, because I know what it is like to feel my heart race when a car horn honks in the middle of the night. I have hyperacute senses and fear responses that may be more like those of a prey-species animal than of most humans. People often fail to observe animals. Recently I visited a slaughter plant where the cattle were terrified of air that hissed from a pneumatically powered gate. Every time the gate opened or closed, the cattle recoiled and backed down the chute. They reacted as if they had seen a rattlesnake. It was obvious to me that the hissing air scared them but other people failed to see it. Purchase of a few air silencers solved the problem. With the hissing gone, the animals were no longer afraid of the gate. All it took was a cow's eye view.

Update: Troubleshooting Challenging Behavior The best place to look for an update on my work with animals is in my book, Animals in Translation Animals in Translation. I do have a few words on troubleshooting challenging behavior. In both the field of animal behavior and in autism education, the number one mistake is misunderstanding the motivation of behavior. In animal behavior, fear and aggression are often mixed up. Punis.h.i.+ng behavior caused by fear often makes it worse. Some people with autism experience ma.s.sive fear when they experience sensory overload. Yelling at the person is the wrong thing to do when the individual's sensory system is already in a state of overload. The person's fear is going to get worse.

When working with nonverbal people with autism you have to be a good detective to figure out the cause behind a challenging behavior like throwing things or biting people. The first thing that must be ruled out is a hidden medical problem that the person cannot tell you about. If an individual who used to be calm and cooperative suddenly turns violent, pain may be the cause. Heartburn or acid reflux is a common problem in adults with autism. Try some simple remedies such as elevating the head of the bed six inches, not laying down after eating, and medicine for heartburn. Constipation is another common problem. Other painful conditions that can cause behavior problems are dental problems, ear infections, or sinus infections. One quiet little boy had pushed a bean up his nose and he disrupted his cla.s.s until the bean was removed.

Sensory issues are another trigger of problem behaviors. Suspect sensory sensitivity if the behavior problem occurs right after the individual is moved to a new environment. The fear of getting one's ears blasted by the smoke alarm can trigger a tantrum. If a smoke alarm has previously gone off in the room, the individual may be afraid to go back into that room. The sight of a mobile phone may cause panic because it can ring at any time. Changing the ring tone may help. Fluorescent lights or some other stimuli that the person cannot tolerate are other possibilities.

Troubleshooting Guide for Challenging Behavior in Nonverbal Individuals Step 1. Look for a painful, hidden medical problem.

Step 2. Look for a sensory reason.

Step 3. If 1 and 2 can be ruled out, look for the behavioral reasons for the challenging behavior.

There are three major behavioral motivators.

1. 1. The person is attempting to communicate.

2. 2. He/she is trying to get attention.

3. 3. The person wants to escape from a task that he/she dislikes.

There are many good books available to help remedy problems with challenging behavior such as the Treasure Chest of Behavioral Strategies Treasure Chest of Behavioral Strategies. Once you have figured out the motivation, you can develop a behavioral program. If communication is a problem, then the individual may need a communication system such as "Picture Exchange" or a picture board. If a desire for attention is the cause, then ignoring the behavior sometimes works. If the individual is attempting to escape from a task, you must make sure that a sensory sensitivity issue is not the true cause. If there is no sensory issue, then try quietly to direct the person back to the task or change the task to make it more appealing.

Other interventions that can be used are working with an occupational therapist to calm the nervous system and special diets and supplements. Some teenagers and adult individuals will need medication. Doctors must not make the mistake of giving more and more medication every time there is a crisis. A program of vigorous exercise also helps to calm the nervous system. A combination of medical, behavioral, and nutritional/biomedical approaches is usually best.

Fear a.s.sociations A person with autism may panic when he/she sees some common, ordinary thing. Maybe a blue coat evokes fear because the fire alarm went off at the exact moment the blue coat was being put on. The coat then becomes a.s.sociated with the fire alarm. Sensory-based fear a.s.sociations are common in animals. I saw a horse that was afraid of black cowboy hats. White cowboy hats and ball caps caused no reactions. The horse feared black hats because he was looking at a black hat when he was abused. Another animal became afraid of the sound of a nylon jacket because it was a.s.sociated with abuse. These fear memories are stored as pictures, sounds, smells, or touches. Since nonverbal people with autism are sensitive to smells, it is likely that a smell could become a.s.sociated with an aversive stimulus such as sensory overload at a supermarket. The smell of a new detergent brought into the home could possibly become a.s.sociated with a "meltdown" in the detergent aisle of a local supermarket.

The problem with severe fear memories is that they can never be erased from the person's memory. A person or animal can learn to overcome a fear. The brain does this by sending a signal down to the amygdale (emotion center) to close the "computer file" of the memory. The file can be closed but it cannot be deleted. In animals, fear memories have a nasty habit of popping back even after the animal has learned to get over its fear. This is especially a problem in high-strung, nervous animals. Sensitive nervous animals that get frightened easily such as Arabian horses can become so traumatized by severe abuse that they may never completely learn to get over their fears. Animals with calmer genetics have an easier time learning to close the file on a fear memory. Making fear memories permanent helps animals to survive in the wild. The ones that forget where they met a lion will not survive.

9.

Artists and Accountants An Understanding of Animal Thought MANY PEOPLE have been fascinated by the terrific feats of memorization of savants. According to Bernard Rimland, of the Autism Research Inst.i.tute in San Diego, approximately 9 or 10 percent of people with autism have savant skills. Some are like calendar calculators who can tell you the day of the year for any date; others can perfectly play a piece of music they have heard only once. Another type can memorize every street in a city or every book in a library. There are also savants who can rapidly identify all the prime numbers in a list of numbers, even though they are incapable of doing basic arithmetic calculations. Hans Welling, a researcher in Portugal, speculates that mathematically weak savants may have a method for visually a.n.a.lyzing the symmetry of numbers, which would enable them to distinguish prime from nonprime numbers.

Savants are usually very impaired in learning other skills, such as socializing. One mother told me about her teenage savant son, who could do extraordinary computer programming but simply could not learn the meaning of money. Savants memorize huge amounts of information but have difficulty manipulating the material in meaningful ways. Their memory skills far exceed those of normal people, but their cognitive deficits are great. Some are incapable of making simple generalizations that cattle and other animals make easily.

It is no mystery how the autistic savant depicted in the movie Rain Man Rain Man beat the casinos in Las Vegas and counted cards in the game of twenty-one. It was simply intense visualization and concentration. The only reason I can 't count cards is that I can no longer concentrate intensely enough. My visualization skill has not changed, but I can no longer hold a single image steady for a long enough period of time. When I visualize equipment, I edit the images like a feature movie. I may visualize the system from a vantage point on the ground, but in the next instant I see it from another perspective. I am no longer able to hold a continuous video in my imagination. I would speculate that the true card-counting savant mind works like a video camera that is fixed to a tripod and continuously records the same scene. The vantage point of the savant 's mind camera remains fixed for relatively long intervals. When the savant 's concentration is locked onto one thing, it is difficult for him to s.h.i.+ft attention. If a VCR could be plugged into his brain and his visual memories could be played on a TV, his memory would likely resemble a very long home movie taken from a single, stationary vantage point. This intense ability to hold an image constant may also contribute to the rigid and inflexible behavior of most savants. beat the casinos in Las Vegas and counted cards in the game of twenty-one. It was simply intense visualization and concentration. The only reason I can 't count cards is that I can no longer concentrate intensely enough. My visualization skill has not changed, but I can no longer hold a single image steady for a long enough period of time. When I visualize equipment, I edit the images like a feature movie. I may visualize the system from a vantage point on the ground, but in the next instant I see it from another perspective. I am no longer able to hold a continuous video in my imagination. I would speculate that the true card-counting savant mind works like a video camera that is fixed to a tripod and continuously records the same scene. The vantage point of the savant 's mind camera remains fixed for relatively long intervals. When the savant 's concentration is locked onto one thing, it is difficult for him to s.h.i.+ft attention. If a VCR could be plugged into his brain and his visual memories could be played on a TV, his memory would likely resemble a very long home movie taken from a single, stationary vantage point. This intense ability to hold an image constant may also contribute to the rigid and inflexible behavior of most savants.

What interests me most about autistic savants of the extreme type is that they do not satisfy one of Marian Stamp Dawkins 's chief criteria for thinking. Dawkins, a researcher at the University of Oxford, is one of the few specialists who studies thinking in animals. She makes a clear distinction between instinctual behavior and true thinking. Similar to the main operating programs of a computer, instincts are behavior patterns that are programmed in the animal. Some instincts are hard-wired like computer hardware, and others can be modified by experience. An example of instinctual behavior is a calf following its mother. Animals are also capable of learning behavior that is not governed by instincts. For example, cows can quickly learn to line up for milking at 4:00 P.M.But cows lining up at milking time or running after a feed truck are simply responding to straightforward stimulus conditioning. Animals are also capable of learning simple rules of thumb. An animal can remember that he gets food when a green light turns on or he must jump a barrier to avoid a shock when a red light turns on. But to determine whether or not the animal is really thinking requires testing under novel conditions where he cannot use a simple rule of thumb. Numerous studies reviewed by Dawkins clearly indicate that animals can think and are capable of using previously learned information to solve problems presented under novel conditions. Animals have the ability to generalize, even though they do not use language.

Dawkins 's work begs the deeper question of whether a child with autism who is unable to generalize can think. For example, a person with cla.s.sic Kanner autism can be taught not to run out into the busy street in front of his house because it is dangerous. Unfortunately, he often fails to generalize this knowledge to a street at somebody else 's house. In another scenario, the autistic person may learn the procedure for buying a candy bar at Safeway but have difficulty figuring out how to buy a candy bar at Wal-green 's. Such people are not able to comprehend any deviations from the pictures in their memory.

According to Dawkins 's criteria, then, savant autistics are not capable of true thought. Autistic people like myself are able to satisfy her criteria for thinking, but I would be denied the ability to think by scientists who maintain that language is essential for thinking.

When a well-respected animal scientist told me that animals do not think, I replied that if this were true, then I would have to conclude that I was unable to think. He could not imagine thinking in pictures, nor a.s.sign it the validity of real thought. Mine is a world of thinking that many language-based thinkers do not comprehend. I have observed that the people who are most likely to deny animals thought are often highly verbal thinkers who have poor visualization skills. They excel at verbal or sequential thinking activities but are unable to read blueprints.

It is very likely that animals think in pictures and memories of smell, light, and sound patterns. In fact, my visual thinking patterns probably resemble animal thinking more closely than those of verbal thinkers. It seems silly to me to debate whether or not animals can think. To me it has always been obvious that they do. I have always pictured in my mind how the animal responds to the visual images in his head. Since I have pictures in my imagination, I a.s.sume that animals have similar pictures. Differences between language-based thought and picture-based thought may explain why artists and accountants fail to understand each other. They are like apples and oranges.

Studies by Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and many other researchers have shown very clearly that primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas can think, though few scientists would also concede that farm animals have thinking abilities. Yet anyone who has spent any time working with cattle knows that they are able to recognize familiar objects when they see them in a new location. My experience suggests that these animals think in discrete visual images. They are able to make an a.s.sociation between a visual image stored in their memory and what they are seeing in the present. During an experiment on the farm at Colorado State University, for example, cattle were handled in a squeeze chute for blood testing once a month for five months. Most cattle willingly reentered the squeeze chute during each blood test after the first one, but a few refused to enter. These animals were very discriminating as to which part of the squeeze chute they disliked, often refusing to put their heads in the stanchion though voluntarily entering the body-squeezing part.

Apparently when the person operating the lever closed the stanchion too quickly, the animal got banged on the head. Animals that had been accidentally struck were more likely to balk at the head stanchion. Most of them marched right up to the squeeze chute and willingly walked into the body squeeze section, but they stopped short of the stanchion because they feared getting banged on the head. Some animals poked their head toward the stanchion and then quickly jerked it back before the operator could close the stanchion around their neck. They acted like sissy swimmers who put a toe in the cold water and then jerk it out.

Over the five-month period the animals grew too large for the manually operated chute, so they were taken to a hydraulically operated squeeze chute for the fifth and final blood test. The hydraulic chute was painted a different color and looked somewhat different from the manually powered squeeze chute. Likewise, the alleys and corrals leading up to the hydraulic chute were totally different. When the cattle approached the hydraulic squeeze chute, many of them balked and refused to put their heads into the stanchion. They recognized the squeeze chute in spite of the different design and new location. They had generalized their knowledge of squeeze chutes and stanchions to a new place.

Cattle I have worked with have had the ability to apply previously learned skills to new situations, which also indicates a capacity for thought. Cattle with large horns, such as Texas long-horns, have good spatial sense and will turn their heads to walk up a thirty-inch-wide truck loading ramp. But young cattle that have had no prior experience with narrow chutes and ramps will hit their horns on the entrance and be unable to enter. Turning the head to pa.s.s through a narrow place is not governed by instinct. Experienced animals learn to turn their heads. After they have learned, they will turn their heads before they enter a chute they have never seen before. When an experienced animal approaches the chute entrance, he turns his head and enters effortlessly.

Some very elegant research with birds has shown that even our feathered friends can think. Herb Terrace, the famous chimpanzee trainer, trained pigeons to peck at a series of lighted b.u.t.tons in a specific order to obtain food. The task was designed to make it impossible for the pigeon to use a simple rule of thumb such as "red light equals food. " All of the experiments were conducted in an enclosed box and controlled by a computer to insure that the pigeons did not receive cues from the trainer. (Whenever animal thinking is being evaluated, the "Clever Hans effect " must be taken into account. Hans was a famous horse that had been trained to count by tapping his hoof. Many people were very impressed and thought the horse really could count. Hans did not know how to count, but he was a very perceptive horse who picked up subtle cues from his trainer.) Terrace designed a whole series of trials to show that the pigeons could apply previously learned knowledge about the b.u.t.ton order to new b.u.t.ton-pus.h.i.+ng problems.

Irene Pepperberg has slowly and laboriously taught an African gray parrot named Alex to use language beyond mere repet.i.tion by having him watch two people talking to each other. One person would hold up an object such as a cork and ask, "What is this? " If the second person gave the correct name for the cork, she would be praised by the first person and given the cork. However, if the second person gave the wrong name for the object, she was told "no " very firmly After Alex watched many of these conversations, he started to use words in appropriate ways. Each small step was mastered before he went on to the next step.

For a reward, the parrot would be given the object. He had to learn that the correct word could get him things he wanted. People teaching language to severely autistic children use similar methods. The Lovaas language-teaching method requires seeing the object, hearing the word, and pairing the word with both the object and reward. After a child learns the objects, he is given pictures of objects. For some children severely afflicted with autism, relating to such pictures is difficult.

More evidence to support the idea of animal thought can be found in Benjamin Beck 's extensive review of the published scientific literature. While it is well known that monkeys and chimpanzees can use tools, Beck found many reports of tool use in birds and nonprimate mammals. Tool use is another sign that animals can really think. Elephants will push uprooted trees onto electric fences to break them, and one elephant even used a bamboo stake to sc.r.a.pe off a leech. Eskimo lore is full of accounts of polar bears throwing chunks of ice at seals. I have watched seagulls carry sh.e.l.lfish up over the roof of a steel boathouse and then drop them to break them open. The gulls also dropped clams on the road and waited for cars to run over them, exposing the tasty morsels. Beck 's review of the literature indicated that birds can learn tool use by observation. When one bluejay in a captive colony had learned to use reaching tools, five other jays also learned. A Galapagos finch that does not usually use sticks for probing learned to use them after observing another species of bird using this tool.

At the University of Illinois farm where I worked as a graduate student, the pigs in one pen learned to unscrew the bolts that held the fence to the wall. As fast as I could screw the bolts back in, their little tongues were uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g them. All five pigs in that pen learned to unscrew bolts. My aunt had a horse that learned to put its head through a gate to lift it off the hinges; and at every large cattle feedlot, there are always one or two cattle who rival the techniques of the great escape artists among us. One time I witnessed a twelve-hundred-pound crossbred Brahman steer jump six six-foot gates. He just levitated over them. A horse has to run to jump a gate, but this big Brahman rose up like a leaping whale and effortlessly cleared the top of the gates. The vast majority of cattle are content to stay in the pens and don 't try to get out, but a bull that has learned how to break barbed-wire fences is impossible to keep in, because he has learned that he will not get cut if he presses against the posts. Fences only work because cattle do not know that they can break them.

Dolphins at the University of Hawaii are being taught to understand symbolic sign language. Initial training is conducted by a person who makes hand signals that represent a simple sequence of commands. After the dolphin learns how to do a series of these tasks with a person, the next step is to have it look at a videotape of the person. This helps to prevent the Clever Hans effect. The simple command sentences are rearranged into hundreds of different combinations so the dolphins cannot memorize a set routine. Dolphins can easily transfer instructions from a real person to a videotape of the person. A third step further prevents possible cuing from the trainer. The trainer is now dressed in black and videotaped against a black curtain. The only thing the dolphin can see is the trainer 's white gloves making the signs against a black backdrop. The dolphins are able to understand the videotaped hand signals, too. At this point, the images are more abstract, and the dolphins are taking the first steps toward understanding symbolic representation of words.

My experience as a visual thinker with autism makes it clear to me that thought does not have to be verbal or sequential to be real. I considered my thoughts to be real long before I learned that there was a difference between visual and verbal thinkers. I am not saying that animals and normal humans and autistics think alike. But I do believe that recognizing different capacities and kinds of thought and expression can lead to greater connectedness and understanding. Science is just beginning to prove what little old ladies in tennis shoes have always known: little Fifi really does think.

Bird Savants The ability of birds to migrate is based on capabilities that resemble savant skills. It is possible that savant skills are part of an older memory-imaging system that is masked by higher thinking skills. Professor Floriano Papi, in Italy, has written an important book, t.i.tled Animal Homing Animal Homing, on the abilities of animals and birds to migrate and home. Since the ancient Romans, carrier pigeons have been used to carry messages. How does a pigeon find its way home after it has been taken far away in a cage?

Birds navigate by using a combination of an innate sense that enables them to detect the earth 's magnetic field and memories they have acquired. In some birds, the innate magnetic detection system is coupled with genetic programming that forms the basis of an instinct to migrate. This will get the bird headed in the right general direction, but information from memory is also essential for accurate homing and migration. If a young bird migrates with its flockmates, it simply learns visual landmarks and other information, such as constellations and orientation of the sun. Some birds, such as the European teal, can distinguish and memorize the constellations. Papi reports that some birds can make visual calibrations of constellations, correcting for the earth 's rotation during different times of the year, which doesn 't seem all that different from the intense savantlike visual memory.

Clara Parks, whose autistic daughter has great artistic talents, noted that when her daughter painted a picture of their house, the constellations she included were very accurate. Mrs. Parks has commented that her daughter 's eye is like a camera. Possibly, her visual skill and birds' navigational skills have similarities. This explains migration, but it fails to explain how a carrier pigeon can find its way home over a landscape it has never seen before. The pigeons rely on visual landmarks when they fly over familiar territory, but when they fly over unknown territory, they rely on smell. When a pigeon is transported from its home loft to the release point, it remembers smells along the way, and it uses these smell cues to get back home. Pigeons deprived of their sense of smell will become lost. Those with their sense of smell intact will also get lost if they are transported in a container that blocks smell. It appears that visual landmarks are the preferred method of homing, but a bird will switch gears and use olfactory cues when it finds itself over strange territory where familiar visual landmarks are absent. It may be using "smell pictures. "

A fairly high percentage of people with autism have a very acute sense of smell and become overwhelmed by strong odors. I am embarra.s.sed to admit it, but when I was a young child, I liked to sniff people like a dog. The scents of different people were interesting. Some animals have highly developed senses which are more acute than ours. Bloodhounds can track a fugitive for miles by smell, and predatory birds have greater visual acuity than humans. Many animals have very sensitive hearing and can hear high-frequency noises that are out of the range of human hearing. Many people with autism share these hyperacute senses. They are unable to concentrate in the cla.s.sroom because they can hear talking in three other rooms. I have often observed that the senses of some people with autism resemble the acute senses of animals.

Emotions in Farm Animals The manager of a very large swine farm once asked me in all seriousness, "Do pigs have emotions? " To him, pigs were simply pork-producing ent.i.ties. We have seen that their ability to think and learn exceeds conditioned stimulus response, but do they experience true emotions? Are the feelings of a sow defending her piglets or an antelope running in fear from a lion similar to feelings in people under similar circ.u.mstances? Even a chicken can be highly motivated; Ian Duncan, at the University of Guelph, found that a hen would push open a very heavy door to reach a nest box, though she was not motivated to push open a lightweight door to reach a rooster. Is this behavior driven by emotion?

Early in my career I befriended two pet steers at the Kelly feedlot in Maricopa, Arizona, while I was doing a photography a.s.signment for a company that made meat packaging equipment. The advertising agency wanted a photo of a great majestic Angus steer against the blue Arizona sky. To get the picture I had to lie down on the ground and wait for the cattle to come up to me. Cattle are less afraid of people when they reduce their size by kneeling or lying down. These two black steers let me touch them, and by the end of the afternoon they would allow me to pet them. At first they seemed to be afraid, but then they started to like it. They stretched out their necks to get stroked under the chin.

About two weeks later I returned to the feedlot, and I wanted to see if the steers would remember me. I stopped my truck in front of the pen, and the black steers immediately ran over to the fence and stuck their heads out to be petted. They wanted to be petted even though I did not offer them food. They simply wanted to be stroked.

There are many other examples of both farm animals and wild animals seeking pleasurable contact with people. Sows that have become pets will turn their bellies toward people so the people will scratch them. At one farm, a pet sow would squeal and become agitated if people walked by and failed to stop and rub her belly. When they stopped and rubbed, she would lie down, stretch out, and appear to be in bliss. Rhinos in a game park in Texas also solicited petting. When people walked up to their enclosure, one fellow would push his body up against the fence so that visitors could rub a soft spot where his rear leg joined his body. After he was petted and fed a few oranges, he would run along the fence and jump up and down like a calf on a spring day. To me, he appeared to be happy.

To the scientist who wants objective data, these anecdotes do not prove that animals have emotions. But scientists have proved that laboratory rats are capable of recognizing a familiar person and seeking him out. Psychologist Hank Davis found that lab rats will bond with a person who has petted, handled, and fed them. When a rat is placed on a table between a familiar caretaker and a stranger, it will investigate both of them and choose the familiar person most of the time. In most mammals and birds, the young will become very upset when they are separated from their mother. When calves are weaned, both the cows and the calves bellow for about twenty-four hours. Some calves bellow until they are hoa.r.s.e.

Cattle will also bellow for departed penmates. This is most likely to occur with Holsteins, which are very calm cattle. Their social behavior is easy to observe because the presence of an observer is not likely to disturb them. I have seen Holstein steers bellowing to penmates that were departing in a truck. The cattle that were left behind watched as their fat penmates walked up the ramp to get on the truck that would take them to Burgerland. Two steers stared at the truck as it turned out of the parking lot. One stretched out his neck and bellowed at the truck, and his penmate on the truck bellowed back. The nice feedlot manager was worried that his cattle knew they were going to die. They had no way of knowing this; they just didn 't like being separated from their buddies. Research by Joe Stookey and his colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan confirms that cattle do not like being alone; the cattle in their study would stand more quietly during weighing on a scale if they could see another animal in front of them.

Studies of animal responses to stress and fear may provide more reliable evidence that human and animal emotions are similar. Hundreds of studies of rats, cats, cattle, pigs, monkeys, and many other animals have shown that when animals encounter something that scares them, the levels of cortisol (stress hormone) in their blood rise. Adrenalin is pumped throughout the body, and both heart rate and breathing greatly increase to prepare the animal for fight or flight from danger. Research has shown that fear is a universal emotion in mammals and birds. Of course, people have these same physiological responses. A person mugged on a city street and an animal chased by a predator have the same increases in adrenalin, heart rate, and breathing rate. In both animals and people, fear causes fight or flight.

Fear can have very bad effects on the productivity of farm animals. The Australian scientist Paul Hemsworth found that when sows were afraid of people, they had fewer piglets. Fear was measured by determining how quickly a sow would approach a strange person. Each pig was tested by placing it in a small arena with a stranger. Pigs that had been mishandled by workers took longer than other pigs to walk up and touch the strange person. They also had lower weight gains.

Further studies indicated that tender loving care improved both reproductive performance and weight gain. Many large Australian swine farms started a training program to improve employees' att.i.tudes toward pigs. As the workers learned more about pig behavior and became more interested in why pigs act the way they do, productivity increased. Farms where the att.i.tude of the employees improved showed an increase of 6 percent more piglets born per sow. Employees who had a good att.i.tude toward pigs engaged in more positive behaviors, such as petting, and fewer aversive behaviors, such as slapping. Hemsworth also found that pigs that had been slapped regularly had learned to stay away from people and still had sufficient anxiety to cause a chronic elevation of stress hormone and decreased weight gain. They clearly felt threatened when people were around.

Other animals also have the ability to antic.i.p.ate an unpleasant experience. In one study, dairy cows that had been shocked in a restraining chute had a much higher heart rate when they approached the same restraining chute six months later than cows that had been restrained