58 pages • 1-hour read
Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Cats”
Cats are not hyper-social, and because they are not domesticated in the sense that dogs are, they cannot be trained using methods based on social approval. Wolves began the domestication process 100,000 years ago, while cats likely began to approach human settlements around 10,000 years ago, after the dawn of agriculture. There is some evidence of cats in hunter-gatherer societies, but scientists are still debating the likelihood that cats’ presence among humans was common before humans began to establish settlements and farms. Cats are said to have a mutualistic rather than a symbiotic relationship with humans; this means that they benefit from proximity to humans but do not rely on them. Dogs, on the other hand, were vital to early humans’ attempts to guard their settlements and to hunt, and humans provided dogs with the food they needed to survive.
Cats have had a markedly different experience with humans than dogs. During dogs’ domestication process, dogs that were tamer, calmer, and better at guarding settlements were preferred by humans, and the process of natural selection ensured that each successive generation of dogs further exhibited these traits. Cats, on the other hand, were incapable of guarding settlements, and all cats had relatively similar hunting abilities. The cats that hunt rats and mice in cities now are almost genetically identical to the cats that first sought out human settlements in the earlier chapters of the agricultural revolution.
Cats differ from dogs in that they are harder to train and cannot be trained using social approval or negative reinforcement. They also lack the emotional connection to humans that dogs have. Dogs and humans can read one another’s facial expressions and body language. Likewise, dogs live alongside humans in family groupings that resemble wolf family units, and they are therefore “used to” human family structures and happily function within them. By contrast, cats do not experience life with humans in the same way as dogs and thus have a reputation for requiring humans to earn their regard.
Coat color in animals is typically tied to behavioral patterns for reasons that scientists do not fully understand. Grandin claims that black cats and Siamese cats tend to be friendlier than tortoiseshell and orange cats. However, socialization also impacts behavior. Between the second and seventh weeks of a kitten’s life, they must be handled by as many kind humans as possible in order to develop friendliness and an orientation toward humans.
Understanding the fear system in cats can help humans to better care for them. Cats are wilder than dogs and therefore have a stronger innate fear of humans. They are more likely to become stressed when they encounter new humans and are also more likely to hide from them. Similarly, they are also likely to be afraid of the vet. Cats respond well to physical touch that incorporates pressure, and petting cats can help to calm them. They can also be trained to associate their carriers with safety. Cats also urine-mark objects or locations when they are afraid or anxious, as part of an attempt to re-establish their territory. Anxiety medications can help to mitigate this behavior, but a better approach is to gain a thorough awareness of the individual cat’s triggers. Some cats also feel anxiety about their litter boxes, and this emotion causes them to urine-mark or defecate outside of the box. Solutions involve changing the kind of litter, the box location, the flooring under the box, the number of boxes, or the type of box in order to help alleviate the cat’s stress.
Cats also experience rage, which is often activated by the fear system. Cats can become enraged very quickly in part because they have small frontal lobes: the part of the brain that inhibits emotion. Additionally, because cats have an active fear-response system, they easily become enraged; extreme fear produces rage, and cats struggle to calm down once they are triggered. Even cats who get along with each other can experience redirected aggression, or else the fear of a new factor (like a stranger) can cause one cat to become violent with the other.
Cats are more social than they are commonly believed to be. In captivity, they form colonies with rigid dominance hierarchies, living together relatively happily and usually without conflict. In the wild, they form colonies that lack rigid dominance hierarchies. In these situations, females are more social than males, but all of the cats live together by choice. Even so, they hunt alone, which is perhaps where their reputation for being solitary originates. Although they are not as in tune with humans as dogs are, they do enjoy the company of humans, and domestic cats often get their social needs met through interactions with their owners.
Cats are also “super-predators” (96) that are both physically and mentally equipped to hunt. Their seeking system is set up to encourage curiosity and exploration, but it is developed specifically in service of predation. Owners can redirect the seeking system toward play in order to keep cats happy and to minimize fear, rage, and panic. Cats should be given toys and mental stimulation, but owners can also train them using clickers and treats to encourage certain behaviors. This training itself becomes a form of stimulation and will help to keep the cat’s seeking system activated.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Horses”
Horses are prey animals that are largely motivated by fear. They survive by fleeing or kicking at predators and are hyper-sensitive to rapid movements, which they interpret as representing an oncoming predator. Horses are not naturally tame, and each horse must be socialized. Grandin argues that older socialization methods are inhumane. It used to be common to tie foals to posts and throw objects at them in order to habituate them to rapid movement and deactivate their flight mechanism. For many horses, however, such treatment is traumatic and deeply harmful.
Instead, Grandin recommends brushing mares each day in front of their foals so that the foals learn that humans are not a threat. The author also recommends gradually exposing horses to rapid movements and other triggers. Horses are especially afraid of bicycles, balloons, and flags. Because show horses will experience environments with balloons and flags, they must be habituated to such triggers. The author recommends simply tying balloons and flags to the horse’s enclosure and letting the horse explore these objects on their own.
Fear is a major driver of horse behavior in captivity as well as in the wild, as horses can develop negative associations that are difficult to counter. For example, a young horse might have a traumatic experience with a particular tool or object and remain fearful of that object until its handlers undertake a slow re-exposure regimen. The author recalls one horse that developed a fear of rakes because one fell and made a loud clattering noise as the horse was being saddled. A trusted handler had to reintroduce the horse to rakes.
Horses are also detail-oriented and notice small changes in their environment. If they are only introduced to wearing a saddle and going at a walk or trot, they may develop a fear response to wearing a saddle at a full gallop; saddles feel different at every gait, and a horse must be habituated to each. Horses must be slowly introduced to different bits. Handlers cannot switch bits without first allowing the horse to get used to it slowly.
Grandin first realized that horses were more sensitive to their bits than was previously believed when she began to take an imagistic approach to considering horse behavior. As a person with autism, Grandin thinks visually, so she made an effort to look at everything in horses’ enclosures through horses’ eyes, without trying to translate what she saw into language. That unique way of thinking allowed her to identify small changes in the kinds of bits that were being used. While humans did not realize that a slightly different piece of metal would be a potential stress trigger, Grandin realized that the change would seem greater to horses.
It is important to know and recognize fear responses in horses. Fearful horses switch their tails and raise their heads up. When truly terrified, they bug their eyes out until the whites are visible. The author urges handlers to prevent fear in their horses and to make sure that their horses do not develop fear-based responses to triggers. It is easier to prevent fear than it is to re-expose horses to feared objects and situations. Fear can also transform into rage, and horses that are exposed to too many fear triggers can develop rage issues and aggression. Horses are also social animals and should not be kept alone or spend too much time in stalls. They need companionship, and those whose social needs are not met can also develop a rage response. Many of the horses that are sold by their owners and then cycle through various auctions often end up in slaughterhouses because of behavior issues. The author notes that almost all of these issues would be preventable with more thoughtful handling.
There is a new trend called “horse whispering,” in which trainers focus on the horse’s sensory experience and look for small behavioral cues to guide their training. Grandin urges trainers and handlers to focus on their horses’ emotional responses to training, arguing that “horse welfare depends on good training” (124), and asserting that horses respond more favorably to positive cues than to punishment. In fact, Grandin notes that negative reinforcement can quickly become abusive. Clickers can also be used to train horses, and trainers who use clickers will develop even better communication with their horses than those who do not.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
As Grandin continues to emphasize the importance of Using Core Emotional Systems to Improve Animal Welfare, she actively adapts her model to different animals and scenarios, drawing upon a blend of common experience and historical detail to support her points. In her chapter on dogs, for example, she first shares the history of dog-human interactions and then discusses how that history can be utilized by dog owners wishing to better train their pets and provide a healthier living space. Grandin’s treatment of cats also mirrors these principles, and both chapters foreshadow the concrete points that she will later make about the need for scientific research and observational data in all human-animal interactions.
Her focus on historical detail becomes particularly important in her discussion of cats, which unlike dogs, have never been fully domesticated. By framing cats as a partially wild species even today, she advocates for greater understanding of the various emotional triggers that inform cat behavior (and perceived misbehavior). While cats have also lived alongside humans for at least 10,000 years, that history has been mutualistic rather than symbiotic. Additionally, by framing cats as “super-predators” that are better equipped to life in the wild or on the city streets, she emphasizes the fact that cats are essentially quasi-domesticated animals whose needs differ significantly from those of dogs. Ultimately, she presents cats as a complex species with a unique history that informs the behavior of modern-day domestic felines.
In discussing cats’ quasi-wildness, Grandin once again references core emotional systems to emphasize that cat caregivers should approach their felines with a cat-centric rather than a human-centric attitude. Broadly speaking, Grandin argues that “the key to animal welfare is to keep the positive emotional systems such as play and seeking turned on and to keep the negative emotion systems [of] rage, fear, and panic turned off” (99). Because cats are wilder than dogs, they have a greater innate fear of humans, other cats, and changes in the environment. They have never learned to trust people implicitly, as dogs have, and cat caregivers should be mindful of their cats’ specific fear triggers. In a nod to the fact that core emotional systems inform animal behavior, she notes that fear in cats often manifests as undesirable behavior such as urine marking or eliminating outside of the litter box, and she once again advocates for improving animal welfare when she advises against using outdated behavioral models that rely on negative reinforcement to attempt to stop the behavior. Instead, she recommends examining and addressing the underlying cause of the unwanted behavior. Her model is gaining in popularity in the research sciences and has led to the use of depression and anxiety medications to treat particularly fearful cats.
The core emotional systems also inform Grandin’s approach to addressing rage in cats; her advice can help cat caregivers to better understand their felines. Specifically, her explanation of cat biology and psychology is particularly illustrative, as when she states that cats are prone to rage and struggle to self-calm once triggered because their frontal lobes are small. Armed with this practical knowledge, human caretakers can remain vigilant against potential triggers and provide their pets with a calming environment whenever they see signs of rage. This level of understanding transcends old behavioral models that observe and note the behavior, but then attempt to eliminate it without first identifying its source. Ultimately, Grandin’s approach to cats is much more grounded in cats’ emotional response systems and can help humans to better care for their pets rather than returning a so-called “problem” animal to a shelter.
Grandin’s chapter on horses overwhelmingly focuses on using core emotional systems to improve animal welfare, as when she demonstrates that adopting a horse-centric approach to handling and training can benefit horses and improve their daily lives. By presenting horses as inherently fearful prey animals whose fear systems are hyper-developed, Grandin immediately advocates for training approaches that accommodate this scientific fact, and just as with cats, she rejects traumatic training methods that overexpose horses to fear triggers in a misguided attempt to desensitize them. The author notes that effective training should use the core emotional systems to reduce horses’ fear by introducing potential triggers gradually. Proceeding from the assumption that understanding fear is the key to effectively training and handling horses, Grandin offers practical advice to help individuals provide better conditions for their horses so that the animals can be effectively raced or shown. Because horses are commercial animals that are often used for work, ranching, or in shows, this chapter explicitly touches upon The Tension between Animal Ethics and Productivity.
This chapter also develops the idea of Autism as a Framework for Understanding Animals. Grandin is a well-known autistic advocate who firmly and consistently presents autism as a problem-solving tool rather than a disability. In this chapter on horses, she shows how she used her neurodivergence to better understand distress in horses. That she was able to think in an imagistic way and visualize the horses’ enclosure from their perspective illustrates the idea that neurodivergence be an asset when it comes to better understanding animals. Specifically, Grandin noticed small changes in the horses’ environment that might be a key trigger. Moments like this both ground Grandin’s work within the field of animal ethics and establish it as part of a broader body of knowledge about neurodivergence and society.
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