Animals Make Us Human

Last night I dreamed that I had given my parakeets and hermit crabs to someone who wasn't taking good care of them, and I had to rescue them and bring them back to the house I share with four cats--two of them good hunters--where it would be hard to keep the parakeets safe. In my dream, the birds were huddled on my shoulder for safety (which would not be a safe place in real life, as my youngest cat likes to nuzzle my chin with his head). Right now we have only the cats and a rabbit, as I gave away the only surviving hermit crab at the end of July to a family who got him a companion (despite the name, hermit crabs need company). I miss all the animals we used to have, but not the time it took to take care of them, especially the caged animals, who we thought needed some time out of the cage each day.

So when I was at the bookstore one day, even though I don't read a lot of non-fiction, I picked up Temple Grandin's Animals Make Us Human while waiting for the other members of my family to make their selections, or for it to be time to go to the next place...we use the bookstore in the city an hour away as an extended living room, going there when we're in between whatever other errands or delights we came for. Anyway, I thought I'd page through the book and get an idea of what the writing style was like (it's co-written by Catherine Johnson).

And the style wasn't too distracting. I found it a little choppy, in places, and sprinkled with invented words like "stereotypies" (repetitive behaviors), but nothing that really put me off. Then I got interested in the section on dogs, because it said that previous research I'd heard about on wolves, the whole "alpha wolf" idea, was wrong. Grandin says "the reason everyone thought wolves live in packs led by an alpha is that most research on the social life of wolves has been done on wolves living in captivity, and wolves living in captivity are almost never natural families." Both dogs and wolves need substitute parents, she says, to keep them in line. Throughout the book, Grandin makes a good case for the importance of field research--observing animals in the wild, like what Jane Goodall spent her life doing.

So I got hooked and had to actually buy this book, one I thought I'd just glance through and put back on the shelf. I read it section by section, after finishing the one about dogs in the store. The other part that surprised me in the dog section is that she thinks there's more dog-directed and possibly more human-directed aggression today than there was twenty years ago, and thinks it might be "an unintended consequence of leash laws." Although as the child of a mother who was absolutely terrified of dogs, I'm always glad to see that the dog barking at me is on a leash or behind a fence, I can see her point.

Since I've read a lot about cats (most recently, Stephen Budiansky's The Character of Cats), I didn't find anything that surprised me in that section, but the stories she calls "Lassie" stories about cats that rescued their owners were fun.

The part that I'll remember best from this book is about the animal welfare audits she does for various fast food chains. She says "today I teach auditor traning seminars and I also work with meat plant management to improve animal handling and design better facilities." She points out that people who want to help animals today are not cooperating, but instead arguing with each other:

"A good example is that the Humane Society in the 1970s used to send representatives to sit in on board meetings of the major livestock associations. That gave the Humane Society direct knowledge of how the livestock industry worked and what things they could change and still stay in business.
In the 1980s, the Humane Society of the United States, donated money to fund the development of my center-track restrainer system for meat plants. They would never do that today. Few animal welfare groups would fund something to help reform and improve the livestock industry. As people have become more abstractified they've become more radical, and today the relationship between animal advocacy groups and the livestock industry is totally adversarial."

This is something I've certainly seen, with last year's furor over the creation of an Ohio Livestock Animal Care Board (the local farmer who supplies our meat and eggs was against it).

This book also answers some questions Ron and I have always wondered about zoos. The last time we went, this summer, we told the kids that when we were younger, we didn't particularly like going to the zoo, because it was obvious to us that most of the animals were caged and unhappy. Now that zoo animals have bigger habitats, we said, they were happier. But we weren't really sure about the big cats, for instance, who often look bored. Grandin discusses this and says that they're some of the hardest animals to keep in captivity, because in nature they're nomads. She suggests enrichment activities which the zoo in the nearby city uses, so we're a bit reassured about all the times we've gone there for entertainment.

I'm still not sure about the title of this book, but have always believed that the way a person treats animals says something important about what kind of person he or she is. I had a houseguest once who kicked my cat. It was not a surprise when he turned out to be the kind of guy who would leave his pregnant wife and children for what he thought would be a less encumbered life. And when the mother of the child who wanted my hermit crab said she thought it would "teach him responsibility," I extracted a promise from her that she wouldn't let the crab go without food or water just because the child forgot.

Like the Delmore Schwartz story title, I believe that "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." So I got myself a plastic model of a hermit crab when we went to the zoo, and put it in my remaining crab climber to remind me of how much trouble the live ones were. Now I wonder where I can find an audio clip of some parakeets?