is now dressed in black and videotaped against a black curtain. The only thing the dolphin can see is the trainer's white gloves making the signs against a black backdrop. The dolphins are able to understand the videotaped hand signals, too. At this point, the images are more abstract, and the dolphins are taking the first steps toward understanding symbolic representation of words.
My experience as a visual thinker with autism makes it clear to me that thought does not have to be verbal or sequential to be real. I considered my thoughts to be real long before I learned that there was a difference between visual and verbal thinkers. I am not saying that animals and normal humans and autistics think alike. But I do believe that recognizing different capacities and kinds of thought and expression can lead to greater connectedness and understanding. Science is just beginning to prove what little old ladies in tennis shoes have always known: little Fifi really does think.
Bird Savants
The ability of birds to migrate is based on capabilities that resemble savant skills. It is possible that savant skills are part of an older memory-imaging system that is masked by higher thinking skills. Professor Floriano Papi, in Italy, has written an important book, titled Animal Homing, on the abilities of animals and birds to migrate and home. Since the ancient Romans, carrier pigeons have been used to carry messages. How does a pigeon find its way home after it has been taken far away in a cage?
Birds navigate by using a combination of an innate sense that enables them to detect the earth's magnetic field and memories they have acquired. In some birds, the innate magnetic detection system is coupled with genetic programming that forms the basis of an instinct to migrate. This will get the bird headed in the right general direction, but information from memory is also essential for accurate homing and migration. If a young bird migrates with its flockmates, it simply learns visual landmarks and other information, such as constellations and orientation of the sun. Some birds, such as the European teal, can distinguish and memorize the constellations. Papi reports that some birds can make visual calibrations of constellations, correcting for the earth's rotation during different times of the year, which doesn't seem all that different from the intense savantlike visual memory.
Clara Parks, whose autistic daughter has great artistic talents, noted that when her daughter painted a picture of their house, the constellations she included were very accurate. Mrs. Parks has commented that her daughter's eye is like a camera. Possibly, her visual skill and birds' navigational skills have similarities. This explains migration, but it fails to explain how a carrier pigeon can find its way home over a landscape it has never seen before. The pigeons rely on visual landmarks when they fly over familiar territory, but when they fly over unknown territory, they rely on smell. When a pigeon is transported from its home loft to the release point, it remembers smells along the way, and it uses these smell cues to get back home. Pigeons deprived of their sense of smell will become lost. Those with their sense of smell intact will also get lost if they are transported in a container that blocks smell. It appears that visual landmarks are the preferred method of homing, but a bird will switch gears and use olfactory cues when it finds itself over strange territory where familiar visual landmarks are absent. It may be using «smell pictures.»
A fairly high percentage of people with autism have a very acute sense of smell and become overwhelmed by strong odors. I am embarrassed to admit it, but when I was a young child, I liked to sniff people like a dog. The scents of different people were interesting. Some animals have highly developed senses which are more acute than ours. Bloodhounds can track a fugitive for miles by smell, and predatory birds have greater visual acuity than humans. Many animals have very sensitive hearing and can hear high-frequency noises that are out of the range of human hearing. Many people with autism share these hyperacute senses. They are unable to concentrate in the classroom because they can hear talking in three other rooms. I have often observed that the senses of some people with autism resemble the acute senses of animals.
Emotions in Farm Animals
The manager of a very large swine farm once asked me in all seriousness, «Do pigs have emotions?» To him, pigs were simply pork-producing entities. We have seen that their ability to think and learn exceeds conditioned stimulus response, but do they experience true emotions? Are the feelings of a sow defending her piglets or an antelope running in fear from a lion similar to feelings in people under similar circumstances? Even a chicken can be highly motivated; Ian Duncan, at the University of Guelph, found that a hen would push open a very heavy door to reach a nest box, though she was not motivated to push open a lightweight door to reach a rooster. Is this behavior driven by emotion?
Early in my career I befriended two pet steers at the Kelly feedlot in Maricopa, Arizona, while I was doing a photography assignment for a company that made meat packaging equipment. The advertising agency wanted a photo of a great majestic Angus steer against the blue Arizona sky. To get the picture I had to lie down on the ground and wait for the cattle to come up to me. Cattle are less afraid of people when they reduce their size by kneeling or lying down. These two black steers let me touch them, and by the end of the afternoon they would allow me to pet them. At first they seemed to be afraid, but then they started to like it. They stretched out their necks to get stroked under the chin.
About two weeks later I returned to the feedlot, and I wanted to see if the steers would remember me. I stopped my truck in front of the pen, and the black steers immediately ran over to the fence and stuck their heads out to be petted. They wanted to be petted even though I did not offer them food. They simply wanted to be stroked.
There are many other examples of both farm animals and wild animals seeking pleasurable contact with people. Sows that have become pets will turn their bellies toward people so the people will scratch them. At one farm, a pet sow would squeal and become agitated if people walked by and failed to stop and rub her belly. When they stopped and rubbed, she would lie down, stretch out, and appear to be in bliss. Rhinos in a game park in Texas also solicited petting. When people walked up to their enclosure, one fellow would push his body up against the fence so that visitors could rub a soft spot where his rear leg joined his body. After he was petted and fed a few oranges, he would run along the fence and jump up and down like a calf on a spring day. To me, he appeared to be happy.
To the scientist who wants objective data, these anecdotes do not prove that animals have emotions. But scientists have proved that laboratory rats are capable of recognizing a familiar person and seeking him out. Psychologist Hank Davis found that lab rats will bond with a person who has petted, handled, and fed them. When a rat is placed on a table between a familiar caretaker and a stranger, it will investigate both of them and choose the familiar person most of the time. In most mammals and birds, the young will become very upset when they are separated from their mother. When calves are weaned, both the cows and the calves bellow for about twenty-four hours. Some calves bellow until they are hoarse.
Cattle will also bellow for departed penmates. This is most likely to occur with Holsteins, which are very calm cattle. Their social behavior is easy to observe because the presence of an observer is not likely to disturb them. I have seen Holstein steers bellowing to penmates that were departing in a truck. The cattle that were left behind watched as their fat penmates walked up the ramp to get on the truck that would take them to Burgerland. Two steers stared at the truck as it turned out of the parking lot. One stretched out his neck and bellowed at the truck, and his penmate on the truck bellowed back. The nice feedlot manager was worried that his cattle knew they were going to die. They had no way of knowing this; they just didn't like being separated from their buddies. Research by Joe Stookey and his colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan confirms that cattle do not like being alone; the cattle in their study would stand more quietly during weighing on a scale if they could see another animal in front of them.
Studies of animal responses to stress and fear may provide more reliable evidence that human and animal emotions are similar. Hundreds of studies of rats, cats, cattle, pigs, monkeys, and many other animals have shown that when animals encounter something that scares them, the levels of cortisol (stress hormone) in their blood rise. Adrenalin is pumped throughout the body, and both heart rate and breathing greatly increase to prepare the animal
