4X8 Dog Kennel

temple grandin: yep. i'm gonna just work itin. it's great to be here. we're gonna talk about handling stress. alright, we got somestress right there. i tell you, the horse has got fear stress. the man probably haspain stress. i don't know about the steer but that picture's not photoshopped. thatis absolutely for real. okay, pain, fear. one of the problems we got with sheep, andi understand you got a lot of people here

4X8 Dog Kennel, interested in sheep. sheep is the ultimateprey species, and when you're watching, they don't show you that they're hurting. theycover it up. cattle cover it up too, but not as much as sheep do. now, you take the lambaway from mama, you hear ba ba ba ba ba, but that's separation distress. and on panksepp'sneuroscience, separation distress is a different

emotion than just fear and pain. sheep coverit up. cattle cover it up too. and so you want to find out the behavior related withpain in sheep and cattle. you better have video cameras. remote video cameras. i hadan interesting experience with cattle. i was out at a feed yard, and they were doing someband castrating of heavy bulls, and i was hiding inside the scale house, but i couldsee where the cattle came out. they didn't know i was in that scale house, and one ofthese animals laid down and moaned, rolled on the ground, moaning. i come out of thatscale house, he jumped up like everything was normal. okay, that's the most very importantthing with the ruminants. they cover up the fact they're hurting. i've gone into placeswhere they were doing very invasive stuff

to sheep, and they go, oh, they're absolutelyfine. they're not in pain. i said, you'd better put video cameras on them at night and findout what they're doing, because i don't think that's gonna be true. alright, here's somenew fear handling, and i am a very, very big proponent of training animals to cooperatewith procedures, whatever it is. and a basic principle is, the more flighty the animalis, and we worked at the denver zoo, we were training antelopes. we had to go through avery long habituation period, to train them to tolerate stuff like a sliding door opening.that took ten days, where domestic cattle, i'd probably train that in about three days.'cause the thing is, if i scare them early in the training, they'll be afraid of things.i just talked to somebody just last night,

they had a nine month old puppy, loved togo out on the boat, but he fell in the water, and for the rest of the dog's life, he's terrifiedof water. it's really important that animals first experiences with new things need tobe at least neutral experiences. another basic principle, very basic, calm animals are easierto handle. so let's say you did have a big rat, and the animal's all crazy. put it backin its pen, let it calm down for half an hour. just let it calm down for half an hour. verysimple thing that you can do. okay, calm animals, nice soft brown eyes. now the first thingthat starts to happen is you scare the poop out of them. now, i could say something elsebut you scare the poop out of them. alright, in our cattle, our horses, all our grazinganimals, okay. sheep usually don't have a

tail, but the cattle and the horses, theyswish their tail. eye white, you got eye white showing, you got a really scared animal. earspinned back, it kind of starts with the poop first, that's the first thing that you'llsee when they're getting scared. and mr. bison, he puts his tail up, well there's a dog therewith what patricia mcconnell calls whale eye, and animals tend to associate something badwith something they were seeing or hearing the moment it happened. maybe it's white labcoats, maybe something as simple as getting rid of the lab coat solved the problem. watchyour body language. see how the horse and zebra have an ear on each other? these animalshave very mobile ears. they watch with their ears. what i want to do is to get you a wholelot more observant, be observant. i also want

to get you away from language. in many ofmy books, like animals in translation, i have talked about, you know, how autism helpedme understand animals, because i'm a visual thinker. now, some people have sort of distortedthat, making me say that animals are autistic. no, there's two different things in animalbehavior. there's the cognitive component. how does it think and store its memories?that's gonna be sensory based, like an elephant that was terrified of diesel powered equipment,but everything that ran with the gasoline engine was fine. that's very specific, that'scognitive. i'm gonna show you some other examples. emotions, that's something totally different.well, if you look at jaak panksepp's research, emotional drivers in most mammals are thesame. you know, so where it's similar to autism

is on the cognitive side. the cognitive side,not the emotional side. you know, when you look at things like bird migration, that'skind of a savant like skill. he's very upset there, you know, and if you don't use nosetongs, you know, if you gotta handle cattle, please don't use nose tongs. they hurt. yougotta hold the head, use a halter, don't force it. alright, let's show you some good reasonswhy you shouldn't be forcing animals. this is not a nice experiment. it was done withpigs, and basically the aggressive handling, they ran them around the barn and they shockedthem a bunch of times with electric prods, and the gentle handling moved them quietly.look at the differences there in those lactates. 25 versus 4. some people might think that25 was a normal reading, that's not a normal

reading. glucose, 215 versus 80. you know,huge, huge, big differences, and when i first started working with nancy irlbeck on trainingantelopes at the denver zoo, all of the cortisol measures were like 20 and 30. well, we managedto get like eight and nine single digits. you see, people thought those real high valueswere normal cortisols. they were stressed out cortisols, and a lot of people didn'twant to admit it. yes, they have emotions. this part of the animal is definitely notautistic. i was reading some stuff the other day where some people were kind of misrepresentingsome of my stuff. it's the cognition that's more like autism. cognition, thinking, thinking,memory storage. prozac works on dogs, and the neurotransmitters are the same. well,this is jaak panksepp's core emotions, i'm

not gonna be going through everything on this,but one of the important things is fear and separation distress are two separate things.you see, that shape is pain, scared, he doesn't show it. but you take the lamb away from mama,that ba ba ba ba ba, they're going crazy. or you get a lone sheep, maybe in your laboff from the other sheep, it's going ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba. that's separationanxiety. i don't like panksepp's word, panic. i hate that word, panic, because that getsmixed up with fear. i'd rather say fear and then separation distress. the other thinginteresting when talking about emotions, is for years this research has shown they haveemotions, but it was all hidden in the neuroscience literature. veterinarians and animal scientistsavoided these words. it's only been in the

last few years they started using them, theseexperiments are old. seeking, that's what makes an animal go out and explore things.you know, you got some labs that want to just chase the ball all the time, other dogs careless about it. then of course you've got sex, so we call that lust, so net nanny doesn'tcensor our web searches. you've got the oxytocin system, mother, young, caring and you've gotplay. you know, what's some of the nasty things animals can have? they can have fear stress,separation anxiety, pain, and then you can get physical stressors. you're hot, you'recold, tired, whatever. alright, animals will self-medicate the pain. people say to me,oh, well i can't feel any pain. these to me are the gold standard experiments. you providetwo feeders or two water bowls, artificially

mess up the joint, the chicken or the rat,and i don't know what they injected into it, but something very nasty, and they'll drinkthis horrible, bitter tasting stuff and as they heal, they'll move away from that. so,they're not getting addicted to it, and this to me tells me yeah, they definitely do feelpain, and this is work that needs to be done in fish. it hasn't been done yet. okay, animalslike dogs for example need social. the most important thing you can do for dogs that arein a kennel is every day take them out for 45 minutes, to have a good play time withpeople, other dogs. christa coppola, one of my ph.d. students did this really simple experimentover at the greeley animal shelter, and every other dog, okay, controls just got stuck inthe kennel, and the experimentals got to have

a fun time training and playing with christa,and the next day this is salivary cortisols, they were lower. but you gotta keep doingit. we've gotten our paper and physiology and behavior on this. dogs need this socialstuff. this is why we've got so much problems with dogs home alone, just chewing up thehouse and everything, and the genetic differences in the strength of things like how fearfulan animal is. genetic differences and strength of how the seeking behavior. let's look atour labradors. they're like two different breeds of dog. one's a ball crazy, skinnylab chasing the ball. the other's a heavyset, lazy lab that's just great for a service dog.that's the differences in seeking, you can genetically select for these traits. in fact,i just revised my book genetics and the behavior

of domestic animals. we just came out witha new revision, genetics and the behavior of domestic animals, temple grandin, and actually,some of the chapters are available online if you just search with my name, sciencedirect,if you've got a elsevier subscription at your institution, you can probably get into someof those chapters on genetics and the behavior of domestic animals second edition. and it�sa book on, some people have like, taken the title and there are some journal articlesout there that are not mine and this is a book it�s not a journal article. okay, um,you know the things like pressure wraps, so they actually help calm dogs down and i justworked with a dog behaviorist and we�ve found that um, on, yeah this did have somecalming effect and it reduced the time the

dog just spent staring at the door. alright,emotions are real. you stimulate, you know, the amygdala, you get the reactions, you�reprobably all aware of these old experiments. um, get through this, yeah, they really dohave emotions. this is, look at how old this research is. one of the problems that we�vegot in science is people are in their silos. this has all been over in the neuroscienceliterature and it�s, and it�s even two years ago, i was working on some guidelinesfor veterinarians and i ha, i was not allowed to use the fear word. i had to take the fearword out and call it agitation and excitement. alright, this is the basic principle, thisslide shows. and the basic principle is, is when you force animals to do stuff, and justthe other day i read about some awful video

jamming a primate into a chair, uh-uh. whenanimals voluntarily cooperate, i don�t care what animal you got, then you don�t getall this fear stress. i�ve had wildlife biologists say, oh well we held this otterdown for just 15 seconds, it can�t be that stressed. well let�s say i go up to my carthis afternoon and somebody knocks me over and steals my purse. that might take 15 secondsbut i�d be really stressed over that. you see that�s fear stress. and this interactswith genetics. the more flighty the genetics is, when you force it, you get more fear stress.okay up there at the top there, you got the cortisol levels really roughed up beef cattle,then you got beef cattle quiet handling. dairy cows are trained, and look at our trainedantelope down there. the untrainable animal.

worked with nancy irlbeck, we got him trained.go in a box, get blood samples, get um, vaccinated, and it took ten days to train him just totolerate a door opening. 10 days of habituation. we hadn�t gotten to the operant conditioningyet. well the first day, we moved the door this much, the sliding door, and it goes cchhhh.and it orients. that�s all we did that day. because when it orients, that�s when thebrain makes a decision. do i keep watching or do i throw a giant fit and go splat againstthe wall. okay, the second day i moved the door this much. chhhhh. and it orients. that�sall it do. took 10 days to train it to that door. once it was trained i could just jerkthat door open. but in a very flighty animal, if you do it too fast, you may never get ittrained, and they are antelopes. our nyalas

and our bongos, we got papers in zoo biologyon this. and um, this was considered to be something impossible. i was looked at likei was a fruitcake when we did this back in the mid 90�s. now everybody does it. andthe thing that�s really nice is look at those cortisol levels. single digit cortisols.and we left them in there for 20 minutes, i wanted to make sure it had plenty of timeto get up. 20 minutes we left them in there. and you know what happened when i submittedthe paper to one of the journals? the title was low stress blood sampling of bongos. somebodywrote that the title was judgmental. and we had to send it to a different journal. theydidn�t like the fact that what they were calling normal values was like, 20 and 30stressed off the wall. okay, acclimating animals

to handling. i mean this is something in thelast few years, cattle people are doing this on ranches. um, pigs are easier to handle.let me tell you, pigs don�t like new kind of flooring. if you�ve got piglets and they�vebeen raised on a plastic floor, and then you try to drive them out of the pen onto a concretefloor, they won�t go. one of the best ways to prevent that problem is give those pigletsa chance to explore the new floor. let them explore it for half an hour. then they willgo. you see, this, you just force them into a novel situation, they get scared. the farmershave learned that if they acclimate their animals to people walking through them, they�llbe calmer. another thing about pigs. they differentiate between a person in their pen,and a person in the alley. and you can have

a situation where when you walk into the alley,they�re real gentle and calm and you go in the pen and they�re freaking out andthey�re climbing up the walls. but think about it. see this gets back to visual thinking.man in the alley, or lady in the alley, is different than lady or man in the pen. youwanna get those young piglets, when you get some young piglets, get them used to peoplewalking through them, because animal thinking, since it�s sensory-based, is extremely specific.animal memories are extremely specific. for example with the cattle, if they got habituatedwith the rancher coming out in his pickup truck and feeding them range cubes, that didn�ttransfer to the handling facility. then they�re brought up to the handling facility and dida little forcing and freak out over that.

if you habituate a horse to a blue or whiteumbrella, that doesn�t instantly transfer to other novel objects. think about it. it�sa different picture. this is a really important thing and in the um, in a lab on, i uh talkedto one, they had a bunch of beagles in this lab, and something bad had happened and theanimal associated with the badness with just seeing a syringe. well, then they just startedhiding the syringe so the dogs didn�t see it and then they were fine. it wasn�t theneedle stick that they were getting upset about, it was seeing the syringe, becausethe animal tends to associate something it was looking at or hearing right at the momentsomething bad happens. so you get a fear memory that�s either a sound or a picture. andsometimes they�ll make odd associations.

like dogs will get afraid of the place theywere hit by a car. we wouldn�t do that. and one difference between our brain and thedog is we�ve got a lot more association cortex. animal thinking specific, becauseit�s sensory-based, not word-based. this is the thing that is more like autism. theemotions, we�ll imply the animal is like, you know, is emotionally autistic, no. absolutelynot. i am strictly here talking about cognition, not emotions. now the thing is, is then theanimal gets one of these specific fear memories, yeah you get a big emotion there of fear.so if you can figure out what�s setting an animal off, sometimes it�s somethingas simple as, maybe white lab coats are bad. or somebody else has got um, the ruminantsdo not see red, they see blue, yellow, and

green just fine, um, you know striped sweaterthere, somebody�s wearing a scrub suit that�s uh, you know maybe blue scrub suits are bad.well then you change the color of the scrub suit, they might be just fine about it. nowthis is a picture a young man sent to me to show how he thinks in movies in his head,and i think in pictures. and i think this helped me figure out some of this stuff onthese fear memories. an animal�s first experience with you, a vehicle, or a place, needs toleast be a neutral first experience because if the first experience is terrible, theydon�t forget it. lemme tell you about miller�s rats. in a radial arm maze. this is an oldexperiment and i have a paper called assessment of stress during handling and transport, it�sa free download. assessment of stress during

handling and transport, you can look it uponline, and what miller did is that he had a radial arm maze and he puts a rat in themiddle of the maze, in the hub, and it goes down this alleyway, and it finds some chocolatechips. well it�s gonna keep going down that alleyway. then it goes in the second alleywayand it gets blasted with an electric shock the first time it goes in. he�ll never goin that arm again. then the third arm, he goes down there and gets some chocolate chips,and then he�s learned that that�s the chocolate chip alley, then he goes in andgets a tiny tingle shock, and then he goes oh those chips are good, so he goes on in.and then they gradually increase the shock and he�ll go in for a blasted out shock.but if that big fat shocks the first time

in the arm, he�s never gonna go in thereagain. it�s a really important principle. so maybe get some new animals in, let�sfeed them. get some, you know, new sheep in, let�s feed them, let�s make sure theyhave non-slip flooring. i can�t emphasize enough the importance enough of nonslip flooring.animals freak out and panic when they start to slip. this horse was terrified of blackcowboy hats because during a procedure, they threw alcohol in his face and the guy whodid that was wearing a black hat. white hats are fine. another thing that shows us howspecific this is, is when the hat was on the ground, i could actually get the horse totouch it. but then as i took this hat and i brought it closer to my head, then it gotmore and more scary. now some people may say

to me this is just all anecdotal, but oneof the problems is, is to actually prove some of these things, now the, the horse experimentdid prove it somewhat, you have to like, be scaring animals in a really nasty way. it�snot something i want to do. now then i�ve known several dogs where men with beards arebad. and another real common one, very common one with dogs is guys are bad. because a guyis more likely to, you know, abuse the dog. you know, maybe ladies with long hair arebad. they tend to associate some obvious trait. animals make categories like when i�m onthe leash i protect my owner, off the leash i play. they make these kind of, you know,specific categories. a common one with cattle is, a man on the horse is safe, so maybe theyonly have a flight zone of, you know, like

that, six feet. but when the man gets on theground, the cattle run away. think about it. i wanna get you really getting away from language.man on the horse is a different picture than a man on the ground. now there is a, i wannajust explain how this can kinda generalize in a visually specific way, um, i knew thislittle red dog and she was terrified of hot air balloons. you know one would come overthe house, revved up the burner, scare her, and then she started getting afraid of otherthings around town. like streetlights and a gasoline tanker. and i got to thinking wellmaybe it�s just round stuff she doesn�t like. and then i got to thinking very specific,well stoplights are round, the globe lights at the pizza parlor are round, why isn�tred dog afraid of that? and then i started

comparing in my mind, the very specific picturesand it turned out it was, it was round against the sky because when she got scared of thegas tanker, uh, red was in the car looking out the front window, and as the gas tankerwent up over the top of the hill, it was round, the back end, round against the sky. trafficlights are round against black rectangle, street lights are round against the sky, pizzaparlor, round against a brick wall. okay, you see how i�m like, very specifically,very visually specific, but she generalized in a visually specific way. another thingi can�t emphasize enough is nonslip flooring on the exam table, you know i don�t, ifyou go online and you look up cute pictures of dogs at the veterinarian and they�reall braced like this. you know, give them

a nonslip surface. rapid movement, okay, sheep,cattle, all those animals, they get scared of rapid movement, unless you have specificallyhabituated them to it. rapid movement makes the predator chase, it makes the prey runaway. now this is a camera that�s used in the movies that moves very slowly like this.you can put that right down around the head of farm animals, they don�t even noticeit. alright, look for distractions in the environment. i wouldn�t wanna be gallopingmy horse down this road because i�m gonna end up, dumped off. your animal doesn�twant to cross a drain in the lab or you�re changing from two different types of flooringmaterial. give the animal a chance to look at the drain. just don�t force it up thereover it. give it a chance, put its head down,

and take a little look and that, or give ita chance to explore, maybe in the lab you can open up the pen and let the animal explorethe floor before you force it. but anything that�s like, looks different, well thisis cattle chains hanging down in chutes, and these, these kinds of things are especiallya problem, the first time you bring the animal into that facility. the really well trainedanimals, they�re gonna walk right through the chain. they�re gonna walk right overthe drain. well the new animal coming in, he�s gonna stop at it and their depth perceptionis poor. so they have to stop and put the head down. nonslip flooring, this is a verynice tire mat, that�s used in commercial feed yards. it�s a bit difficult to clean.uh, now we�re gonna see how your powers

of observation are. how many people, now behonest now, saw that that animal is looking at the sunbeam. well we gotta do better thanthat. i deliberately got this slide fixed so it doesn�t say anything about the sunbeam.talking about flooring. this is the kind of stuff i want you try to like, get away fromlanguage, and think about. now, look at that right there, he�s real cute but he�s inthe brace position. i can find, go on google images and you�ll find lots of picturesof that. no, that�s the first experience in the vet office and they�re slipping aroundon the floor. i tell them vet students, because they don�t wanna c-, they have the, havethe client, when they get a new puppy, buy a bathmat that has a rubber backing. get thedog all used to that, then bring that in and

put their puppy on the mat and then they cantake it home and the vet doesn�t have to clean it. that�s the way i tell it to thevet students. behavior principles of restraint. this applies to every animal. sudden, jerkymotions scares. there�s also an optimal pressure. i talked to a lady who�s reallygood at handling rats. she�d just pick them up, and she didn�t go crkkkk. and she didn�thave any big gloves on, they didn�t bite her, and she held them with just the rightamount of pressure, and she wasn�t picking them up by the tail, she was just holdingthem around the body, and they did not bite her. another principle is, do not triggerthe fear of falling. okay, linda panepinto is gonna be here later this morning. her slingworks really well because it completely supports

the pig and there�s no tendency of the pigto topple in that so you don�t get the fear of falling. but you trigger that fear of falling,that makes animals just get really scared. here�s some extreme fear behavior. horsespooks at flags in the wind. something new. i�ve had people say to me, oh, my steerwas fine at home and he went ballistic at the show. but you got a lot of scary stuffthere. flags, bikes, balloons. yeah, you better get him used to that before he goes there.also, it�s really important that the people who supply some of these animals get themhabituated to different things. i went into a research lab that had a lot of beagles init, and um, they had beagles there from two different suppliers, and beagles from onesupplier are totally crazy when you went up

there, and the beagles from the other supplierwere a lot calmer. well the place with the crazy beagles hadn�t done any work withthem to socialize them. okay so you get sheep from some place, you might wanna get somesheep where people have spent time walking amongst them, maybe they�ve taken them andwalked them through the chutes, so when they gotta start doing some stuff, they don�tget so freaked out over it. and ideally, you know, maybe get the same kind of chute systemthat you have at the lab and train them to that before you even get them. new experiences.new experiences are attractive when the animal voluntarily approaches and they�re scarywhen you shove it in their face and this is where you have an interaction with genetics.you take your flighty animal, your arab horse.

if i put a flag out on the pasture, the arabwill walk up to it first, but it�s gonna be the first animal to have a great big hugefear, uh, you know, response, if you shove it in their face. i call that the paradoxof novelty. novelty is both scary and attractive. i put a clipboard with paper on it down ina pen of cattle, they come up to it. when the wind flips the paper, they run away. andwhen i first did this, i go, it�s like a switch, alternating back and forth betweenfear and approach. it turns out that it is a switch. a switch has been discovered, iwas very interested to find this paper. and some of this research i reviewed with nancyirlbeck and cheryl morris, um, in a paper that�s in the journal of animal science,it�s called companion animal symposium on

environmental enrichment for companion, zoo,and laboratory animals. the easiest way to find it is to go to pubmed, type in grandin,t, you all know pubmed has to be last name and then the initial, and you can find iton the pubmed database. you will not find it on sciencedirect. um, and, and i thought,i went back and i dug up all the old literature and i also found this, on how the brain cango either go into seek mode or fear mode, sort of a biochemical teeter-totter. see thatexplains that when my antelope oriented, i knew not to push him past that orienting phasebecause they go splatting against the wall. and i�ll give you another example of howspecific they were. our trained antelope uh, were absolutely fine with lots of differentpeople, but when the roofers came to fix the

roof, they hit the fence. another thing welearned, and this is another important thing, the veterinarian who had been the dart gunman, could never work with them. you could bring all kinds of strange people in off thestreet, but the dart gun man was evil and it didn�t matter what-, how you dressedhim, it didn�t matter if he didn�t speak, they knew him. i know this is kind of a nastything, but if the animals have gotten a really bad fear memory with a certain person, unfortunatelyit�s going to better for that person not to work with them. and that�s not in thepaper because it was very difficult for the veterinarian who was a co-author to kind ofaccept that. now i always get asked, are animals afraid of getting slaughtered? well, theseare the places where i first started out and

you can see with that pen there, those cattleactually could jump out of there really easily but they don�t, the behavior was the samein both places. i�m not gonna say it�s stress free, it�s not. but the cortisollevels and the behavior were about the same in both places. you know a lot of the stressat the slaughter plants is fear novelty. it�s like bringing that horse into the sale barnand it�s just rearing and going berserk. now again on specific thinking, this is onthe movie set. okay, this was done on a real cattle operation, you see all the cattle outon the pasture? those cattle were attracted to all the vehicles with equipment and theycame forward to watch. this red heifer right here is a trained show heifer and they wantedme to get a publicity picture with this trained

show heifer, and so i knelt down, the heifer�sgetting ready to lick me, and the next thing i know she was rearing up and jumping on topof me and i turned around and there were reflector boards that they use for the lighting. andthey move the reflector board really sudden, like that. and i said don�t move it. thenthe next time he moved it, i was swearing. now the mistake that was made, the movie sethad a lot of white box trucks and they assumed that since the heifer was fine with whitebox trucks, she�d be fine with these things, and the one that she was scared of was a 4x8white piece of styrofoam. that�s all it was. but the thing is, it doesn�t move likea box truck. trucks tell you they�re coming. they move in a much more controlled way. yousee, this is a really good example of just

how specific that thinking is. because thatheifer had been exposed to everything on that movie set. tons of equipment, tons of people,she was fine. but she hadn�t been exposed to a fast moving reflector board. okay, what�scalled a home for one animal is scary for another. here�s bulls living amongst allthe whirligigs, but when i open the car door they ran away. that was something novel. here�sa pig living in a very nice place with lots of corn stock bedding. why is the pig eatingthe plastic booty? because it�s novel. it�s attraction to novel. only visitors wear plasticbooties, they don�t get that many visitors. so plastic booties is a gigantic, great biginteresting novelty. so getting back to environmental enrichment. one of the things that�s reallyimportant is having, is changing things. i

heard a really interesting story about a primatethat was self-injuring herself and the way they finally got that stopped was they puttrail mix in the puzzle feeder thing, and like on monday she�d pull out the greenm&ms, another day she�d pull the nuts out. and she�d pick something different eachday to pull out, just because it was different, and then she stopped cutting herself. okay,these cattle didn�t get scared of much because they were around all kinds of activity andyou better get them used to flags before you bring them in. now this is another principle.when you force animals to do stuff, and this is not something that i approve of, but theanimal that has the less fearful genetics often will habituate better to something that�sforced than the animal with the really flighty

genetics. you know in um, in, in veterans,you know they take veterans that have got post-traumatic stress syndrome. not everyveteran exposed to the same bad situation gets it. you see, some people get more scaredthan others. and i can relate to that because i�ve been on antidepressants for years tocontrol the fear, turned out my amygdala was three times bigger than normal. well here�sa heifer that somebody tied up to a fence, to train her, and she went bad. they triedthe forceful training method, it didn�t work with her. you see a holsteins reallycalm. you tie a holstein up, they pull back and go, oh, a little scared, get over it.a more flighty animal doesn�t get over it. i�m not a fan of forcing animals to do stuff.but when you get away with it, it tends to

be with genetics where it�s less flightygenetics. now this is habituating a little colt, just gently, and remember, when youwork, don�t pat, this is hitting. stroke it, and don�t do tickle touches. tickletouches are alerting. okay, that�s the temperament one, you know, some animals got differencesin temperament. the cattle industry for the last 20 years now has been selecting animalsfor temperament. calm animals, better weight gain. yeah but don�t overdo it, you�llhave trouble. like maybe uh, more susceptible to illness, never over select for a singletrait. something bad is gonna happen. alright we�ll show you belyaev�s foxes, got awhole chapter on this in the genetics book. in fact in the new, um, genetics and the behaviorof domestic animals, we got a whole chapter

by a belyaev�s student. they�ve continuedthe fox experiments. it�s okay, you got mr. snarly here, bite your hand off if youput your hand in his cage, so they started selecting for general foxes that wouldn�trip your hand off, and after about 20 generations, they got a black and white stocky border colliefox dog. see look at the difference in the shape of the animal too. you�re just selectingfor temperament and they kept doing this and then you got epilepsy. you see, you overdidit. it was fine up until a point but when you overdid it, then you start to get defects.over select for any single trait, you�re gonna get problems like um, excitable temperament.when the industry went into lean line pigs, they got pigs that bit tails, okay we�retrying to social house animals, oh, there

are certain genetic lines of commercial pigsthat are not fit for social housing, i�ll tell you that right now. now the industry�sstarting to weed those pigs out. there also was super lean, and had white hockey puckfur loin, um, but they�re just very aggressive. now nobody deliberately would select domesticpigs to be aggressive. it was an accident. it was a linked trait and the companies likemurphy brown that have successfully gone to group housing, they had to get rid of thatgenetics. there�s just some genetics of pig, of a regular domestic pig is not fitfor group housing. they�re nasty fighters. and then another thing you can have is uh,individual that�s real nasty. and of course you all know, mixed on neutral territory,but there�s some, i call those criminal

animals, that you have to, you just, it justisn�t gonna work, and we�re over selecting farm animals. produce, produce, produce. there�ssome signs that we�re getting lower disease resistance. we got pigs now that they�reputting biohazard hepa filters on the windows, try to keep the germs out but it�s not working.look at the layer, she�s nice and pretty when she�s young, this is what she lookslike when she gets old. nervous wreck that loses all her feathers. see this hen is puttingso much into her eggs, that when they get old, 20-50% have osteoporosis and broken bones.see, this is pushing that biology just too hard. look at the difference in the body shapehere between an egg-layer, slender, the brown one, and a white, plump thing, that�s theum, the uh, regular the broiler. and the leg

confirmation issues. we�re selecting forcertain production traits, and we started getting leg confirmation problems, pigs andcattle both. well we�ve gotta start making sure that the animals that we breed for pets,for food, and laboratory, the animals are not abnormal. you over select for any trait,you are gonna go into abnormalities. there�s a leg selection chart there for pigs, youcan get that off of national hog farmer magazine, you know, leg confirmation charts, it�sfree online, um, you know these are different defects. you know there�s corkscrew footin cattle, that�s genetic defect, just started showing up. this guy is really pretty, blueeyed, but a lot of these animals are deaf and have neurological problems. not nice.and this is a pig on one of those the genetic

line of really aggressive pigs and anotherpig ate its ears. well, a lot of these pigs now, people have gotten rid of them. rid ofthis genetics. you know, and then you read, you know, monstrosities like that that haveto calve by cesarean section, there�s a really gigantic, huge, german pig, just gottashow you my freak show. then you got the chinese pig, she�s all reproduction and no meat.okay there�s tradeoffs in genetic selection. i thought this was a very interesting experimentin science. they were looking at scottish wild sheep and the ones that had a strongimmune function had, were less likely to have twin lambs. and the ones that had twin lambs,had a lower immune response. you see, everything takes energy. people think they can go inand biotech their way out of it. bull. you

can�t override physics. it takes energyto make meat. it takes energy for reproduction. it takes energy for the immune system. inthe dairy cow, for example. production�s gone up like this, reproduction has gone downlike this and then if you feed it very expensive stuff, you can bump it up just a little bit.you might try to select for those traits, you won�t be able to feed it. it won�tbe able to eat enough. there�s another weird pig. alright, let�s bash dogs. there�ssome real monstrosities out there. now there�s the old-type bull dog, what about this freakazoid?how did we get into this, if it gets any more folds it�s going to suffocate. now the white,now somebody thought that statue was a dog, so i, the white animal there is the dog, butthat�s the 1938 vision, version, he�s

actually legs and a snout compared to thismonstrosity, where they just over selected. it can�t breathe, it can�t walk, and itcan�t have its babies naturally. okay, looking at some things with body posture, you seethat ni-, unlike animals in translation, that nice, relaxed open mouth, that�s very relaxed.if you have dogs and they�re in that relaxed position, the other dog there, i�m not gonnasay he�s scared, but when they put the mouth up like that, they�re getting more vigilant,just a little tiny bit anxious. and, but you get that really nice, um, kind of little half-openmouth like that with the-, not panting. you know, not hot and panting with the tongueway out. that animal�s very, very relaxed. uh, patricia mcconnell has a really nice bookon, on dog emotions, and a lot of very nice

pictures that�d be very good for peopleto have. and there�s my genetics and domestic animals book right there and i�ve got afarm animal book on improving animal welfare a practical approach, because my approachis how do we bridge the gap between a lot of the great scientific research that�sgoing on out there and the field? this is something i try to do, it�s not always aneasy thing to do, but i do try to do it. and we have a little bit of time here for questions,i�ve got five minutes. i�m gonna pick somebody. okay, back there.audience member: is there any way to decondition an animal that has had a fear response toa stimulus? temple grandin: is there any way to deconditionan animal that has had a fear response? first

thing you�ve got to do, if you can figureout what it is he�s afraid of, this is where, you know, i find i have to do a lot of troubleshooting, and if i can remove that thing, let�s say it is a lab coat, for example,i can just get rid of the lab coats. you see that�s the easy fix. but if you have a high-strunganimal, that�s uh, let�s say, and you don�t know what�s setting it off, theycan be very difficult to decondition, and the more high-strung the temperament is, theharder. now one of things you wanna try to do is turn on the seeking system, becauseremember on that teeter-totter, turn seeking on, that helps to reduce fear, but it hasa way of kind of flashing back. it can be very, very difficult to um, um, to totallyget rid of those things. like this dog that

fell off the boat, i mean it�s now a totallya grown-up dog, if they take it to the beach it will dabble in the water, they�ve neverbeen able to get that-, it�s a german shepard, um, you know, kind of a large-breed cross,and it�s terrified of water. now they haven�t worked really hard to try to decondition it,but i�ve, you know, its first experience with water was falling off a boat. slippingand falling and went in the water. it was 9 months old. it can be, it can be reallyhard. um, now sometimes i�ve, see the first thing you gotta do when you troubleshoot isbe more specific. okay what, okay maybe we can start the troubleshooting process. okay,what kind of animal is it? audience member: uh, well i was specificallytalking about a dog. we have a dog that had

a little girl who threw sand in his face,and now he�s scared of little kids. temple grandin: okay a little girl threw sandin his face and now he�s scared of little kids. so the fear memory is probably, youknow, the size of the person. and that�s, you can work on deconditioning it but it�snot easy. this is why we gotta have the emphasis on not letting these bad fear memories getstarted. and so the first time you introduce puppy to little children, we gotta make surechildren don�t man-handle it and maul it, that they�re gentle with the little puppy.also it�s extremely important to teach dogs about little children, otherwise you couldget a dangerous prey drive going towards little children because they won�t be people. youknow, little puppies have to learn, especially

things like rottweilers, they better learnthat toddlers are people too. you wanna make sure that that�s a pleasant experience andi bet you it was the first experience, or a very early experience with children.audience member: it was a puppy. temple grandin: it was a puppy? okay, that�sthe problem. and, and so then, and you�ve got a fear memory there, if a child�s liketwice as big it�s probably alright. you can work on desensitizing it. the problemwith these fear memories, you can make it better. but it�s imposs-, it�s like post-traumaticstress in veterans. you can do things to make it better. now the army right now has beenworking with beta blocker medicines like propranolol, and get the veteran, um, dosed up on propranololand then replay the, the memory. you know

then when you take it out of storage, maybestrip off the emotional memory. um, but it�s difficult. okay.audience member: um, what about an animal that has too much novel interest, so they,like sometimes we get, some of the pigs in our, um, lab animal [inaudible] so exploratorythat you go in with your plastic boots and they�re just all over your feet and youknow, they just, they just really� temple grandin: well okay, the question is,i wanna repeat it for the camera, was you got some pigs in your lab that are very superexploratory, they�re all over your boots and everything, and, and um, in, in some ofthese pigs, i�ve had some of these pigs commercially, um, they�ll actually biteyour boot and rip it, they�re like starving

for stimulation. and, and unfortunately thetype of pig that tail bites too. yeah, they�re um, a certain particular type of lean hybrid.um, and, and other pigs will come up and nibble at your boots, these guys, uh, the best thingyou can do with them is like, give them straw. the kind of enrichment they need is straw.they need fibrous things that they can destroy. um, where they�ve got stuff they can justchew up and destroy. and i actually did my thesis on this and i talk about this in animalsmake us human. i talk about um, uh, in animals make us human, i talk about pig experimentsand i found out if i put straw in for my pigs, and they were the type of real aggressive,you know, chewers, um, once they got the straw chewed up into little bits like this, it wasno longer interesting. and then i put a fresh

flake of straw in, like big long pieces andthen they were all over it. so i think one of the best things you can do is, first ofall, try to avoid buying that particular, buying that type of pig. there are definitedifferences in fighting, the tendency to wanna just, you know, bite boots and things likethat, attraction to novelty. and if you got those kind of pigs you need to just be puttingnew straw in there every day so they always got something to chew up. you know, then idid a little choice test of, of things to chew. so i had a hose hanging down, a rubberhose, i had a cloth strip hanging down, and i had a chain hanging down, and they wereconnected to little switches that went to a counter. of the clo-, the things they coulddestroy like the hose and the cloth were definitely

preferred over the chain that they couldn�tchew up. they want stuff they can chew up and that will help reduce some of that behavior.because i also found, when i had that kind of pig i had some of them housed in plasticpens, and when i went to clean the pens there were stimulus drive. they were biting at thehose and biting at the water. i go to clean the feeder and they�re like this all overme, and then my outdoor pigs where they had fresh straw every day, plus i gave them otherinteresting things to tear up like phone books, um, when i went in to clean the feeders, icould just push them away. and they weren�t like this, just all over me. so this kindof pig needs a lot of um, environmental enrichment stuff it can just chew up. i know, stuff thatclogs drains, that�s what they need. and

we�ll end on that, thank you for coming.