Animals in Translation

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Authors: Temple Grandin
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are used to seeing on a ranch. Anti-backup gates hang down from overhead instead of being attached on one side, and basically look like a cow- or pig-sized dog door in a house. Plants install one-way gates in single-file alleys to keep the cattle from backing up into the long line of animals behind them. The pig or cow pushes through the gate—the same way a dog pushes through a dog door—and the gate falls down behind each pig or cow after it walks through. It’s not flexible like a dog door, so you can’t push it backward, only forward.
    The animals hate having to push through the gate. That’s the problem, the going-through. The anti-backup gates bother the animals so much I don’t like to use them. I work with the cattle gently enough that they’re all happy to keep walking forward, and I can just tie the doors up out of the way, where the cattle don’t see them and don’t have to deal with them.
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    You could make up the same kind of list for any animal, although it would be different for each one. Bats have sonar and dogs don’t, so the list of common distractions for bats is going to have some sonar distracters on it, while the dog’s distracter list won’t. But any list of common distractions for an animal would be highly, highly detailed, exactly like this one.
    T HE D IFFERENCE B ETWEEN A NIMAL V ISION AND H UMAN V ISION
    Although I created this list for cattle and hogs, you can use this list to predict trouble spots for any other animal if you think about what these eighteen distracters have in common.
    First of all, fourteen out of the eighteen distracters are visual, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a ratio like that for most animals. Butto predict what kind of visual object will distract or frighten an animal, you have to know more about what animal vision is like.
    It’s pretty different from ours. For instance, you always hear that dogs “don’t see well,” which is true as far as it goes. Dogs don’t have very good visual acuity, which is the ability to see the tiny details of what you’re looking at clearly and crisply. People with 20/20 vision have excellent visual acuity, and a lot of animals don’t. That means that most animals aren’t going to be frightened by tiny objects, simply because they can’t see them well.
    A typical dog has a visual acuity of 20/75, which means that a dog has to stand twenty feet away to clearly see an object a person with normal vision sees well standing seventy-five feet away. The dog has to get much closer to the object than we do. This isn’t due to nearsightedness but to the fact that dogs have fewer cones in their retinas than people do. Everyone probably remembers from biology class that cones handle color and daytime vision, and rods handle nighttime vision. Basically dogs have traded good visual acuity for good nighttime vision. A dog doesn’t see any objects as sharply as a person does, including an object that’s right under his nose. That’s why it’s so hard for dogs to see a piece of kibble you’ve dropped on the floor for them to eat. If they didn’t watch it fall, most dogs can’t see it lying on a mottle-colored tile floor (though some can).
    There’s also a lot of variation in visual acuity among the different breeds of dogs, as well as among individuals of a breed. One study found that 53 percent of German shepherds and 64 percent of Rottweilers were nearsighted. You might wonder whether being nearsighted matters to a dog since everything it sees is fuzzy to start out with, but tests show that it does. A nearsighted dog has much worse visual acuity than a normal-sighted dog. Interestingly, although German shepherds tend to be nearsighted, only 15 percent of the Shepherds in a demanding program for guide dogs were myopic. 2 Probably the nearsighted dogs were flunking out of the program without the trainers’ knowing

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