Translating Animals
An interview with US professor of animal science Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin is widely known for her groundbreaking work transforming the lives of cattle and, in particular, ensuring each individuals end of life moment, within the slaughter-house, is more bearable and as stress free as possible given the circumstances. She is also widely known for her literature and talks on autism, being the first person on the autism spectrum to publicly share insights from her personal experiences. She graduated in 1966 from Mountain Country School, before going on to earn her bachelor’s degree in human psychology from Franklin Pierce College in 1970, a master’s degree in animal science from Arizona State University in 1975, and a doctoral degree in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989 (1)
I remembered watching a BBC Horizon documentary in 2006 on Temple’s work with cows. It was called ‘The Woman Who Thinks Like A Cow’ (2) so, therefore, I was over the moon when in 2018, I came across her book, written with Catherine Johnson, entitled ‘Making Animals Happy’ detailing how to create the best life for pets and other animals. The book included a chapter on cats. To be honest, I’m quite nervous of cows preferring the company of our feline four legged friends, so I had to buy, naturally!
The individual way she looks at animals allows her to translate her knowledge from the perspective of someone with autism to the ordinary pet lover allowing us a rare glimpse of another world we cannot possibly understand because we do not see or feel the same way as people like her.
It was for this reason, as well as a great admiration for her as an animal scientist, that I wanted to include an interview with her in in my book. I didn’t hold out much hope of ever getting a reply, knowing how extremely busy her life is and so when an email landed in my inbox saying she would be happy to be part of ‘Let’s Talk about Cats’ I was, not only surprised, but elated. (Sadly this interview didn’t make the edit of the book, which is why I am sharing on my website)
At first it was like telephone tennis. We kept calling each other and getting voicemails. It seemed impossible to arrange a time as she was always on the move and then there was the added inconvenience of time differences between the US and the UK. At one stage Temple asked me why I was never in. “What keeps YOU so busy all the time”? I explained that I was a feline behaviourist and worked daytimes and some evenings but, as with all events that have been vaguely organized with no firm arrangements, it was inevitable that we would never get one another on the phone or know what time was convenient or not for each other.
When Temple did finally ring me, after I had texted a time I was going to be home, all of my recording equipment suddenly refused to work. As she was speaking panic arose within me. The recorder on my husbands phone froze and the recorder on my computer also refused to function. I was gutted and had to stop Temple mid sentence because none of her words were being recorded. I tried in vain to get the recording instruments to work as we shared some small talk but to no avail. Temple’s time was limited as she was due to go into a live interview in front of an audience at a seminar and so sadly I had to say goodbye. I hoped that we could reschedule and thankfully we did.
We managed to talk again and also Temple very kindly gave me permission to use certain excerpts from her two brilliant books ‘Making Animals Happy’ (US title ‘Animals Make us Human’) and ‘Animals in Translation’ to aid with answering some questions.
So, without further adieu!
Thanks for taking the time to chat about cats!
Before we get onto the subject of cats! What is your first memory of animals and your love for them?
It took me a long time to figure out that I see things about animals other people don’t. I started to fall in love with animals in high school when my mother sent me to a special boarding school for gifted children with emotional problems. I was 14. Back then they called everything ‘emotional problems’. I was kicked out of school for fighting because kids teased me. The school had a stable and horses for the kids to ride and teachers took away horseback riding privileges if I smacked somebody. In order to save money the headmaster was buying cheap horses. They were marked down [in price – ED] because they had gigantic behavior problems. All the horses at the stable had been abused. But I had no understanding of this as a girl. I wasn’t any horse whispering autistic savant. I just loved the horses. I spent every waking minute that I didn’t have to be studying or going to school with those horses.
Your unique outlook on animal behaviour is aided by your personal experience as someone who is autistic. Can you talk us through how autism helps with connecting to animals?
Autistic people can think the way animals think. It took me 15 years to figure out that other people actually couldn’t see what the problem was, at least not without a lot of training and practice. They couldn’t see it because they weren’t visually orientated the way animals and autistic people are. I always find it kind of funny that normal people are always saying autistic children ‘live in their own little world’. When you work with animals for a while you start to realise you can say the same thing about normal people. There’s a great big, beautiful world out there that a lot of normal folks are just barely taking in. It’s like dogs hearing a whole register of sound we can’t. Autistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can’t, or don’t. Visual thinkers of any species, animal and human, are detail orientated. They see everything and they react to everything. I think this is probably the hardest part of an animals’ existence for normal people to relate to. Verbal people can’t just turn themselves into visual people because they want to and vice versa. I think that’s why I was able to become successful in spite of being autistic. Animal behavior was the right field for me, because what I was missing in social understanding I could make up for in understanding animals.
So, I guess your interest in working with animals, which ultimately led to you professionally advising on their behaviours, was very much tied into your studies on the human mind?
I owe a lot of this to the fact my brain works differently. People who love animals and who spend a lot of time with animals, often start to feel intuitively that there’s more to animals than meets the eye. They just don’t know what it is or how to describe it. I stumbled across the answer, or what I think is the answer, almost by accident. Because of my own problems, I’ve always followed neuroscientific research on the human brain as closely as I’ve followed my own field. I had to. I’m always looking for answers how to manage my own life, not just animals’ lives. Following both fields at the same time led me to see a connection between human intelligence and animal intelligence the animal sciences have missed.
In your book, Making Animals Happy, you make references to cats alongside Asperger’s and Autism. Can you elaborate for readers now?
Dogs read humans well. There’s a lot of research on that but cats are completely different and I think their differences make them difficult for people to read. The hardest thing for people is that cats don’t have expressive faces. They don’t signal with their faces very much and they have lots more bodily signals than either dogs or wolves (3). So, when people look into their cat’s faces, they’re looking at the wrong place. Another interesting things about cat’s faces: cats don’t have eyebrows the way people do. Eyebrows probably evolved to highlight facial expressions so I think the cat’s inexpressive face is one of the reasons some people think autistic kids are like cats. There’s even a book called All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome. Cats seem autistic because they don’t come across as being sociable or eager to please and also because their faces are kind of blank. Autistic people often have somewhat blank faces too.
Your work, in particular with the livestock and animal handling industry, was groundbreaking and revolutionary and centered on understanding what animals see and feel from a totally different perspective than that of a typical human. In terms of the pet cat and human relationship. What do you humans could learn from?
I believe the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it’s a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal, or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotional systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal’s emotions right, we will have fewer problem behaviours. To meet a cat’s social needs you need to keep the ‘fear’ ‘rage’ and ‘panic’ systems turned off as much as possible. You do that by providing friendly, positive companionship, either with you and your family or with another cat. To meet a cat’s intellectual needs you have to turn on the seeking system. Cat toys and clicker training are the best ways we have to do that for a cat.
I know the US has different views than the UK on the indoor/outdoor debate. What are your personal views regarding cats being kept exclusively indoors or being allowed to roam freely?
A lot of people think cats should be kept indoors for their own safety and also so they don’t kill a lot of songbirds. I’ve seen cats do very well indoors, especially when the owner has more than one cat or the cat has lived indoors its entire life. However, cats are genetically adapted to living free out of doors. If you live in a free country area, you should probably think about having an indoor/outdoor cat.
If you are going to have an indoor cat, you have to think about giving it mental stimulation. The key to animal welfare is to keep the positive emotion systems such as ‘play and seeking’ turned on. Turning on a cat’s seeking system for play is easy. Cats like anything that moves because cats are hunters and a hunter’s brain is triggered by movement. You just have to keep them supplied with toys that move. In an interview published online Dr. Karen Overall, veterinary behavior specialist, explained, “I think we’ve got an epidemic of under stimulated cats whose intellectual needs aren’t being met” (4). You can’t lock up a lone cat inside a bedroom and go off to work twelve hours a day. That kind of life is no better than what zoos used to do with captive animals. Dr Overall recommends that owners give their cats mazes, cat trees, food puzzles and screened in areas outdoors (5). These things lower a cat’s stress level by giving it choices. I agree with her advice. I also recommend buying some kind of clicker and a book on clicker training to train your cat, because learning new things stimulates a cat’s mind the same way learning stimulates a person’s mind. Using clicker training, to teach cat new things, stimulates its ‘seeking’ system.
In your book Making Animals Happy you talk a lot about the ‘Seeking’ emotion that animals feel, mentioning Dr. Jaak Panksepp (6) who describes it as ‘the basic impulse to search, investigate and make sense of the environment’’. I think cats have an abundance of this ‘seeking’ emotion. The old saying ‘Curiosity Killed The cat’ springs to mind!
Yes but people and all animals are born with these emotions. They don’t learn them from their mothers or from the environment. New things stimulate the curiosity part of the seeking system. Cats are super predators. When a cat stalks a mouse, its actions are driven by the seeking system. Curiosity and learning are also handled by the seeking system and a happy cat has lots of opportunities to explore and learn. All of that exploratory behavior is motivated by seeking. Cats are very curious animals because of their predatory nature. That’s probably why we have the saying Curiosity Killed The Cat. Curiosity is seeking.
Can you tell us about an interesting cat behaviour situation that has stuck in your mind?
My friend Jane, who lives in the city apartment, has a cat who always knows when she’s on her way home. James husband works at home, and five minutes before Jane comes home he will see the cat go to the door, sit down and wait. Since Jane doesn’t come home at the same time every day, the cat isn’t going by its sense of time, although animals also have an incredible sense of time.
The only explanation Jane and her husband could come up with was ESP. The cat must have been picking up Jane’s ‘ I’m coming home now’ thoughts.
Jane asked me to figure out how her cat could predict her arrival. Since I’ve never seen Jane’s apartment I used my mother’s New York City apartment as a model for solving the mystery. In my imagination I watched my mother’s grey Persian cat walk around the apartment and look out the window. Possibly the cat could see Jane walking down the street. Even though he would not be able to see Jane’s face from the twelfth floor he would probably be able to recognise Jane’s walk.
Next I thought about sound cues. Since I am a visual thinker I used ‘videos’ in my imagination to move the cat around in the apartment to determine how it could be getting sound cues that Jane would be arriving a few minutes later. In my mind’s eye I positioned the cat with its ear next to the crack between the door and the doorframe. I thought maybe he could hear Jane’s voice on the elevator. But as I played a tape of my mother getting onto the elevator in the lobby, I realised that there would be many when mother would ride the elevator alone and silent. She would speak on the elevator for only some of the trips, when there were other people in the elevator car with her, but not all of them. So, I asked Jane, “Is the cat always at the door, or is he at the door only sometimes”? She said the cat is always at the door.
That meant the cat had to be hearing Jane’s voice on the elevator everyday. After I questioned her some more, Jane finally gave me the crucial piece of information that solved the cat mystery: her building does not have a push button elevator. The elevator is operated by a person. So, when Jane got on the elevator she probably said “Hi” to the operator. That was the answer. The fact that Jane’s building had an elevator operator provided the cat with the sound of Jane’s voice while Jane was still down on the first floor. That’s why the cat went to the door to wait. The cat wasn’t predicting Jane’s arrival; for the cat Jane was already home. Cats have really good hearing, so Jane’s cat was using a sensory capacity we humans don’t have.
I read in your book Animals In Translation that you invented a squeeze-box (hugging machine) at the age of 18 as a form of stress relief therapy for yourself. This made me think about the thunder shirts invented for cats and dogs which are tight fitting ‘jackets’ which apply a gentle, constant pressure to advocate calmness. Can you explain how this came about for you and the theory behind it?
I got through my teenage years thanks to my squeeze machine. One summer when I was visiting my aunt, who had a dude ranch in Arizona (8) I saw a herd of cattle being put through the squeeze chute at a neighbouring ranch. A squeeze chute is an apparatus vets use to hold cattle still for their shots by squeezing them so tight they can’t move. The squeeze chute looks like a big V made out of metal bars hinged together at the bottom. When a cow walks into the chute an air compressor closes up the V, which squeezes the cow’s body into place. The rancher has plenty of space for his hands and the hypodermic needle between the metal bars. As soon as I caught sight of that thing I made my aunt stop the car so I could get out and watch. You might think cattle would get really scared when, all of a sudden, this big metal structure clamps together on their bodies, but it’s the exact opposite. They get really calm. When you think about it, it makes sense, because deep pressure is a calming sensation for just about everyone. That’s one of the reasons a massage feels so good. It’s the deep pressure. The squeeze chute probably gives cattle a feeling like the soothing sensation newborns have, when they’re swaddled, or scuba divers have underwater. Watching those cattle calm down, I knew I needed a squeeze chute of my own. When I got back to school that fall my high school teacher helped me build my own squeeze chute, the size of a human being down on all fours. I bought my own air compressor and I used plywood boards for the V. It worked beautifully. Whenever I put myself inside my squeeze machine I felt calmer. I still use it today.
I guess that is the ethos behind the thunder shirt, which seems to work for both cats and dogs. You talk of firm deep pressure, which I use on some cats in a grooming situation to help them feel safe.
The most frightening place for cats, even bold ones, is the vet’s office [My grooming table is similar to a vets table]. To keep a cat calm for medical exams and treatments you handle it in the same way good stock people handle a cow, using the principles of restraint I developed for cattle. No sudden jerky motions – use calm, steady movement, no slippery metal tops on the examining table. I tell people to bring a bath mat with a rubber backing from home to put on the table. Slipping causes panic in all animals’, stroke your cat firmly as a way of applying deep pressure. And do not use pats or light tickle touches.
What else can we learn about touch and handling cats?
I think the squeeze machine helped me have more empathy for animals. When I first started using the soft version of the machine, in my late teens, I didn’t know how to pet our cats so they really liked it. I always wanted to squeeze them too tight. Then after I used the soft machine I thought ‘I have to make the same feeling I have to go to the cat”. I walked out of the room and the cat was in the hall and I started stroking him, trying to transfer the feeling I had in the machine. Before are used the soft squeeze machine, BeeLee used to run away because I always squashed him. But that day he started purring and rubbing up against me I realise ‘I know how to pet kitties so they like me’. This happened immediately after I used the soft machine for the first time. I remember the exact moment I did it. I talked to one young woman with Asperger’s syndrome about her pet cat. She told me her cat didn’t like to be squeezed, but since she liked to squeeze the cat she kept on doing it. I told her, “You must not squeeze the cat” and I stroked her arm to show her how she had to touch her cat. Even a lot of normal people don’t realise that you have to stroke animals, not pet them. They don’t like to be petted. You have to stroke them the way the mother’s tongue licks them.
Is there anyone in particular who inspired you within the animal care/research industry?
I was very inspired by some of the scientists I met when I first started. There was a man named Jack Albright (11) who worked with dairy cattle and another person called Ron Kilgour (12) who worked with sheep in New Zealand. I remember some of my first meetings I went to where people like Jack Albright and Ron Kilgour were there. Ron Kilgour, an anthologist and animal psychologist, wrote a lot about the problems of anthropomorphising. One of his early papers told a story about a person who had a pet lion he was shipping on an airplane. Someone thought the lion might like to have a pillow on the trip, like some people do, so they gave him one and the lion ate it and died. The point was: don’t be an anthropomorphic. It’s dangerous to the animal. In my student days, even though everyone was against anthropomorphising animals, I still believed it was important to think about the animal’s point of view. When I read this story I said to myself. ‘Well, no, he doesn’t want a pillow, he wants something soft to lie on. Like leaves and grass’. I wasn’t looking at the lion as a person, but as a lion’. That kind of thinking was illegal for behaviourists, however, and wasn’t really encouraged by the ethologists either.
There is a chapter in my book on The Paw Project whereby I interview the founder Dr. Jennifer Conrad. What are your thoughts on de-clawing cats?
Well, I’d rather we didn’t do things like that. It’s painful. In surgery you are cutting the end of their finger off basically.
Why do you think de-clawing is still legal in the US?
I don’t know. Different states are different. I try not to get involved in politics.
It takes a very strong person to see some of the things you have witnessed in the slaughterhouses and livestock handling and transportation industry. What are your thoughts and feelings connected to humans and how some treat animals?
One of the things I noticed when I first started, I remember going to slaughter- houses in Denmark and seeing how civilized [the workers – ED] were. I noticed how places that treat their animals better tended to treat people better too. It makes me very angry when I see horrible things happening. When I first started I mistakenly thought that if I designed the right equipment I could prevent these problems. It’s a common mistake that engineers make: That you can fix management problems with equipment. Well, you cannot do that. That doesn’t work. You got to have the [right – ED] management and when I worked with McDonalds on the animal welfare audits one of the things that had to be done; three of the suppliers had to get rid of their plant managers then after they did that things changed. You got to have plant management that insists on doing things right.
And what are you thoughts regarding eating meat in general?
Well, I feel very strongly you have to treat the animal’s right. One of the big problems we’ve got now is what I call biological overload. I’ve got a new book I’ve worked on, edited with Mark Whiting, on how we are pushing animals biology too far. The book is called ‘Are We Pushing Animals To Their Biological Limits’ published by CABI. You push a diary cow to milk more and more and more and then you have problems with lameness, or problems with getting too skinny and they won’t breed back. There’s problems with beef cattle with lameness and it’s mainly caused by pushing the biology of the animal too hard. Chickens that get lame because they are growing really fast although the broiler industry have corrected some of those problems now. Lets look at pets. There’s cats that are terrible that people have bred just for looks. Persians that get cleft pallets…Bulldogs. You know, we have done some bad things to farm animals but we have done bad things to pets too. We have bred pets that are not functional and the bulldog is the number one example. I have a lot of problems with breeding animals that are not functional. Bulldogs, you cant walk it, it can’t have its babies naturally and it can’t breath. In fact there’s a picture online of a French bulldog being revived with an airline oxygen mask (13) because it passed out on a plane and was gonna die, it was the cabin. I have a bigger problem with breeding animals that don’t function than slaughtering an animal. It makes me very angry when I’m at a meat plant and they bring in some lame cattle and it’s not an injury, it’s just they have been pushed too hard and they are sore. With animal welfare we need to be looking out for things like lameness. Because, if you measure lameness, then it doesn’t creep up on you. If you don’t measure things that are bad then bad can slowly become normal and you don’t realise it’s happening. The dairy industry is actually working on lameness right now. They are working on producers to measure it.
What do you think the cat is most loyal to, an owner of its territory?
I think they really like their territory because my aunt at the range had a cat and when they had to sell the house and move the cat kept going back to the old ranch, which was maybe 4 miles away. He went back to the old ranch house and my aunt went and picked him up a couple of times and then, after that, they just gave him to the people that were living in the house. Luckily, the people were willing to take him. He just wouldn’t stay at the new place. Of course the new people at the ranch fed him so that helped him to stay. I think cats are more tied to places than dogs are.
Do you have cats yourself?
I can’t. I’m travelling about 85% of the time now. I’m in a breakfast room in a hotel right now.
I dealt with a behavior case once whereby a cat was only aggressive to a little boy who had Asperger’s who visited the home on weekends with his father (the boyfriend of the cat owner). The cat was not aggressive to the father. As someone who has a deep understanding of autism and of animals what springs to mind about hearing this feline behaviour?
The first thing I would find out is if the little boy did something to the cat
So, do you think a cat would pick up on an autistic child in terms of them moving differently as well?
Cats can definitely pick up on people’s behaviour. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a cat jump on the lap of somebody who hates cats. Seems like they just do it on purpose.
When you first started out did you come across any resistance to your ideas on animal behaviour?
What I found, when I started working with cattle, was that selling clients the new system: the new piece of equipment actually was quite easy. What was difficult was getting people to handle the animals gently and use the equipment properly. That was much more difficult than just selling them the system. I find people want the magic ‘thing’ more than they want the management. We’ll get a new corral [an area that is surrounded by a fence and that is used for holding animals, such as cows and horses, on a farm or ranch – ED], that solves all our problems. We’ll get a new computer or a new drug or something and it solves all our problems. I call that wanting the ‘thing’ more than they want the management. What I found when I first started; There were some good people in ranching that really did things right and they were easy to work with and there’s a lot of other people in the middle where it requires constant supervision to make sure they are doing things right. People are reluctant to say animals have emotions. There’s all that kind of stuff which I think is just rubbish. To say animals don’t have emotions. That’s just stupid.
That’s a good point to end on. Animals and their emotions. Would you care to comment on this further?
We know animals and humans share the same core feelings partly because we know quite a bit about how our core emotions are created by the brain, and there’s no question animals share that biology with us. Their emotional biology is so close to ours that most of the research on the neurology of emotions, or affective neuroscience, is done with animals. When it comes to the basics of life, like getting eaten by a tiger or protecting the young, animals feel the same way we do. The main difference between animal emotions and human emotions is that animals don’t have mixed emotions the way normal people do. Animals aren’t ambivalent; they don’t have love hate relationships with each other with people. That’s one of the reasons humans love animals so much; animals are loyal.
Thanks for sharing your words with us and giving me your time.
I have based my work with felines on trying to understand and see life from a cat’s point of view and agree with much of Temple’s statements regarding animals and how they perceive their world. However, my personal experience of life is very different from animals and this is where Temple accelerates. She also experiences life very differently from most people and therefore can solve problems more naturally following her own unique thought processes rather than thinking out of the box which takes effort for many of us. Trying to see and understand life from another’s perspective pretty much sums up how I feel all human beings should approach life, not just with animals but with our own species too. Showing empathy for how another sentient being survives on a day-to-day basis and what role emotions, evolutionary learning and past experiences play to aid the basic survival mechanism we all have. We are only just beginning to realise how intelligent and genius animals are. That they do not exist on this earth purely for the convenience of the human race, who believe they are far superior. There is a complex ‘animal’ language to learn before we can share the planet with animals and show true understanding of their own right to survive happily, to live and breath just like we would wish for ourselves. The Lisbon Treaty, which went into force on December 1st 2009 (9) includes the specific recognition that animals are ‘sentient’ (part of article 13 of title II), which means that they are recognised by humans as having feelings and perception; That they can feel pain and suffer; learn from experience; make choices; feel joy, fear or misery; and enjoy the company of others. (10) and yet most cultures, including the Western World, still see animals to be used specifically for our benefit only and to be cruelly treated whenever our needs override the humanity of a situation. Examples: The cruel practice of vivisection, halal meat, Foie Gras, de-clawing cats, dog fighting rings, bull fighting, keeping birds in cages, killing elephants for their tusks, using big game animals in circuses. There’s plenty more examples to list where the human race’s failure to recognise animals as beings worth our respect defies belief.
end…..
One can only hope the wise words of Temple Grandin, on the mental and physical wellbeing of our four legged friends’, are listened to in all corners of the world. Only then, with the knowledge of her teachings seeping into our consciousness, will the suffering of many animals, from human ignorance, be bought to an end.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anita Kelsey holds a first class honours degree in Feline Behaviour and Psychology (work based BA Hons) and runs a vet referral service dedicated strictly to the diagnosis and treatment of behaviour problems in cats. She is also a qualified cat groomer and specialises in grooming aggressive or phobic cats. Anita writes for Your Cat Magazine and is on their experts panel answering readers questions on cat grooming. She also advises on feline behaviour for the CFBA (Canine and Feline Behaviour) magazine as well as being a full member. Anita, a strong advocate of a vegan lifestyle, is based in London but consults all over the UK as well as international requests. She lives with her husband, a music producer, and two Norwegian Forest cats, Kiki and Zaza.
Her first book ‘Claws. Confessions Of A Professional Cat Groomer‘ was published by John Blake in 2017 with her second book, Let’s Talk About Cats just released on Amazon US and UK.
REFERENCES:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00791tq
- Bradshaw and Charlotte Cameron-Beaumont ‘The Signaling Repertoire Of The Domestic Cat and its Undomesticated Relatives’ in The Domestic Cat, ed. Turner and Bateson, 88.
- Interview with Karen L Overall by Marcel Durrand. Retrieved from http://www.catsplay.com/thedailycat/2003-03-31/culture_interview/ int_koverall/int_koverall.html
- Ibid
- Jaak Panksepp is a neuroscientist at `Washington State University. He wrote the book ‘Affective Neuroscience’ published by Oxford University press in 2004 and is considered one of the most important researchers in this field.
- Jaak Panksepp, in his book ‘Affective Neuroscience’ calls the core emotion systems the ‘blue-ribbon emotions. Three of these emotions are fear, rage and panic. Fear for animals and humans means when survival is threatened in any way, from the physical to the mental and social as described by Joseph LeDoux in his book ‘The Emotional Brain’ (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd.
Rage, as described by Dr Panksepp in his article ‘Aggression Elicited by Electrical Stimulation Of the Hypo-thalamus in Albino Rats, is a core emotion believed to be evolved from the experience of being captured and held immobile by a predator. Stimulation of the subcortical brain area causes an animal to go into a rage. Rage gives a captured animal the explosive energy it needs to struggle violently or maybe shock the predator into loosing its grip long enough for the captured animal to get away.
Panic is Dr Panksepp’s word for the social attachment system. All baby animals and humans cry when their mothers leave and an isolated baby whose mother does not come back is likely to become depressed and die. He states this is probably why people say it ‘hurts’ to loose someone they love so therefore Temple believes the panic system probably evolved from physical pain.
- A dude ranch is a vacation destination that hosts guests to share in their Western lifestyle activities https://duderanch.org/blog/2018/05/14/what-is-a-dude-ranch
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon
- https://www.ciwf.org.uk/news/2009/12/the-lisbon-treaty-recognising-animal-sentience
- Dr Jack Albright was a US diary scientist. He received a masters and PH.D. Degree in dairy science from Washington State University. He passed away in 2014: http://www.thebullvine.com/news/jack-albright-cattle-behavior-pioneer-passes/
- Dr Ron Kilgour was a pioneer n the study of farm animal behaviour in order to promote animal welfare and improve their productivity. But he also had an encompassing and compassionate approach to life that spanned many organisations and causes. He died in 1988
https://kilgour.wordpress.com/about/
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/plane-crew-rescue-dog-oxygen-mask-flight/story?id=56436659
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