Going Where Knowledge Leads Us

Temple Grandin, professor of animal science, bestselling author, consultant to the livestock industry, inventor of animal handling devices, and renowned speaker, appeals to many people for many different reasons. That she is a high-functioning autistic and successful academic is one such reason, but the fact that she has gloriously overcome this disorder, referred to as Asperger’s, is the main reason. But the messages that she brings to those in the animal community, including the dog community, is really the combination of all of her many gifts: she believes her autism gives her insight into animal behavior; she sees a strong connection between autistic behavior and animal behavior; she has been educated in the field of animal science to better understand and apply that insight; she speaks and writes well on the subject. All strengthen her appeal to those of us who surround ourselves with dogs.

Most people know Dr. Grandin from the Emmy award-winning HBO film, Temple Grandin, for which she acted as advisor and consultant. But her life has actually been fuller and more interesting than any film could portray. She probably came to the national spotlight in the neurologist/author Oliver Sacks’ 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars. The title essay describes her description of how she feels around neurotypical people, the term used in the autistic community to identify anyone not on the autism spectrum.

Dr. Grandin’s speaking audience around the world is wide and diverse, but sometimes she speaks exclusively to those involved in the various segments of the dog community. That was the case in late 2010 when she presented a full-day seminar, A Look at the Emotional Lives of Animals, at For Your Canine Training Center in the Chicago area. This training center offers classes and activities based on relationship centered training, hoping, as stated in their publications, “to help people develop good communication skills to enhance the dog/human relationship while having fun learning new skills in a calm, relaxed environment.”

That would seem a perfect recipe for using the experience and knowledge that Temple Grandin possesses and the size and obvious appreciation of the audience proved it. The range of her presentation was wide and she began by praising Dr. Ian Dunbar, an animal behaviorist who was born and trained in Scotland, but joined the University of Guelph, Canada, in the late ‘80s. Ms. Grandin credited him as being one of the first academics to discuss emotion, or feelings in animals. Many of us remember Dr. Dunbar from his regular columns in the AKC Gazette in the ‘80s, a time in which tried and true training methods of animals of all species were being questioned.

Topics covered, studies cited, researchers praised, comments made—it was a day filled with material, and some of her knowledge was presented in small bites, little nuggets of information:

• Neurotransmitters are the same in all mammals and the mammalian brain is the same across all species.

• There are certain things that you cannot train an animal to do.

• Species-specific behavior motivates animals.

• Predatory animals have ears that move together; prey animals have ears that move independently.

• Most animals see yellow really well.

• In general, heavy-boned animals are calmer in general than fine-boned ones.

• Cattle with hair whorl patterns above the eyes are more excitable in temperament (she gave a possible explanation for this relationship: hair patterns in the fetus form at the same time the brain forms).

• It was very easy to turn a wolf into a dog.

As enriching as the day was, one of the most rewarding aspects of having spent the day with her was where the discussions led us to explore these fields on our own. She touched only briefly on some topics due to the time constraints, but gave us ample details for future inquiry. One such topic was Dmitry Belyaev’s now-famous research into domestication: how does it work? Dr. Belyaev’s work is widely known and his writings on this subject widely available, but briefly, by using fur farm-raised foxes and selecting harshly, carefully and exclusively for one trait—temperament—he and his team were able to compress thousands of years of domestication into 40, a remarkable feat.

While the entire project, which is still ongoing years after Dr. Belyaev’s death, is fascinating, what captures the dog-breeder and trainer’s attention are the many physical changes that occurred: white patches of fur on the face, the loss of the fox’s strong musky odor, wagging tails that curl, drooping ears, and dog-like barks, overshot and undershot mouths and more. The theories explaining these physiological changes that accompanied the single selection for temperament are many and complex, but all fascinating. On the subject of “floppy ears,” Charles Darwin wrote in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species, that “not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears,” a feature not found in any wild animal except the elephant.

One of the hopes in this ongoing research at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences is that defining the genes important to friendly, outgoing and social behaviors in foxes might lead to treatment or prevention of autism or other human neurological disorders. As interesting as all of this is to us, imagine how interesting it must be to Temple Grandin, who has devoted much of her life to understanding autism.

When Dr. Grandin made the statement that “acquired traits can be inherited,” with the emphasis on “can,” I thought I had misheard her, and it illustrates why lectures and seminars like this are important, even on subjects that we think we know about. Didn’t this fly in the face of everything we have been taught? Every book we read in our “doggy life” stressed this simple, biological dictum. If a giraffe’s neck stretches longer by eating leaves from taller trees, that giraffe’s own progeny will not inherit its longer neck. Right? Well, maybe, maybe not. Recent studies at MIT and at the Tufts University School of Medicine casts doubt on this old dictum. An article in MIT’s Technology Review in February, 2009, states: “The effects of an animal’s environment during adolescence can be passed down to future offspring….” And this may be especially true, and probably true, in the case of single cell organisms and prions. Stay tuned.

Nowhere is the debate between nature and nurture more heated and confused than in the purebred dog community. We tend to believe in the inheritance of certain skills and abilities when we engage in field trials, coursing events, earth trials and more, especially when dogs are awarded for their instinctive, inherited behavior. However, we get a little testy when that inheritance involves less desirable, less attractive traits that may get us crossways with the ill-informed breed specific legislation crowd. Looked at with an unprejudiced eye and an open mind, most people—lay people and professionals alike—realize that behavior is shaped by both. Dr. Grandin has edited a book on this subject, Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals, a textbook for veterinarians, livestock producers, laboratory animal researchers and technicians, etc. Selling for a hefty price on Amazon, it is a subject dear to her heart and her professional mind and well worth the read.

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Gretchen Bernardi

berwyck@ezl.com

Short URL: https://caninechronicle.com/?p=78

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