Animals in Translation Read Online Free PDF Page B

smaller, too. Anxious male animals are smaller than calm male animals, and I don’t see any reason why human males should be different. I think the German orphanage story probably tells us stress is bad for boys, too. That’s the famous case of two orphanages in postwar Germany where one was run by a nice headmistress, while a mean lady who made fun of the children in front of their friends ran the other. She was nice only to the eight children who were her special favorites.
    None of the children had enough food, and all of them were smaller than they were supposed to be. Then a natural experiment happened when the government gave the children living with the nice lady extra rations—at the very same moment that the nice lady quit her job and left, and the mean lady was hired in her place. The eight teacher’s pets moved to the new orphanage with the mean director. Doctors were measuring all the children’s growth, and they found that even though the children in the first orphanage were getting extra food, now that they were stressed by a nasty adult they didn’t grow as well as the children in the other orphanage. They had more food but grew less. The eight favorites grew better than anyone. Both orphanages had boys as well as girls, so I assume the boys’ growth was slowed by stress, too.
    With animals there’s no ambiguity: stress is horrible for growth, period, which means stress is horrible for profits. So even a feedlot owner who doesn’t care about an animal’s feelings doesn’t like using prods, because a stressed animal means financial loss.
    When I got to the feedlot it took me about ten minutes to figure out the problem.
    To get to the squeeze chute, first the animals had to walk inside the barn door into a round holding area called a crowd pen. That part of the procedure went off without a hitch. The cattle didn’t have any problem stepping inside the pen.
    Next they were supposed to walk into a curved single-file alley (it’s also called a chute) that led to the squeeze chute. That was where the cattle balked. They just would not walk into the alley. It was the exact same alley feedlots all over the world were using without any trouble, so no one could figure out what the problem was. They couldn’t see anything about their setup that was different from any other setup.
    But to me it was obvious: the alley was too dark. The cattle were supposed to walk from broad daylight into an unlit indoor alley, and the contrast in illumination was too sharp. They were afraid to walk into pitch-black space.
    That might seem a little surprising, since prey animals, like cattle, deer, and horses, usually like the dark. They can hide in the dark and feel safe, or at least safer than they feel during the day. But the problem wasn’t the dark, it was the contrast of going from bright sunlight to a dark interior. Animals never like going from bright to dark. They don’t like any kind of experience that temporarily blinds them, and that includes looking into a bright light when they’re standing in relative darkness. I’ve found that cattle won’t even walk toward a glaring lightbulb. You have to use indirect lighting at the mouth of an alley to make it work.
    As soon as I saw the setup I figured that was the problem, and I confirmed my guess when I asked the owner how the cattle behaved at different times of the day, and in different kinds of weather. When he thought about it, he realized that the facility worked fine at night. Things weren’t too bad on cloudy days, either. It was the bright, sunny days that were impossible, but no one had noticed the pattern.
    I think a number of things are at work when an animal reacts that way. Cattle have excellent night vision and are used to seeing well in the dark, unlike people. So the experience of going temporarilyblind in the seconds before their irises expand, which is something people take for granted,