Talking to Animals

by Jon Katz

  Giving Elvis an apple was like giving a pea to an elephant, but he loved them and chewed them deliberately and with gusto, drooling bits of apple and spittle all over the ground. After a week of this routine, Elvis began to pay closer attention to me. When he saw me come out of the farmhouse, he trotted to the gate and waited for me. I asked him for nothing, gave him no commands, and moved slowly and predictably in his presence. I was establishing trust.

  Elvis was used to seeing humans in tractors dumping feed. There had been little one-on-one interaction with humans. This was as new to Elvis as it was to me.

  Remembering that food means life to animals, I brought Elvis his apples three times a day and waited while he chewed each one. Sometimes, when I came out in the morning, he would be waiting for me, anticipating my arrival. Sometimes, I saw, he got excited, snorting and drooling, rushing toward the fence. If I had been inside the pasture, I might have been pushed right up against the gate.

  But food is only a first step toward gaining trust, toward opening the doors of communication with animals. It can be a gateway to visualization but is very different from it. Food alone is training and trust; it is not really about understanding.

  After three weeks, I opened the gate and came into the pasture. The danger here was Elvis getting excited and running into me. When he came toward me, or got too close, I held the apple behind my back, then walked out of the gate. After two or three days, Elvis learned to stop. He never got the apple unless I held up my hand and said in a soft voice, “Come here.” He caught on quickly.

  A few mornings later, after I was sure he grasped the idea of waiting, I decided to try visualization, the first test. Elvis leaned over me and tried to nudge me with his giant head; he wanted me to fork over the apple he knew was behind my back.

  But I didn’t have an apple.

  I paused and held my hand up in a kind of “stop” gesture. If he got too close, I flicked him lightly in the nose with my thumb. He looked startled and froze. Flicking isn’t a sophisticated or especially positive training method, but when you are training a three-thousand-pound steer, a flick is less troublesome than a fly bite. And it’s gentler than the methods many farmers use.

  I closed my eyes and cleared my head. Animals like Elvis can sense human feeling and emotion; they can literally smell it. Expressions on my face, my body language, my demeanor and state of mind are all details that animals focus on, even if people miss them.

  It was critical that I feel confident and look confident. It was important that I believed in what I was doing—animals read that. I stood up straight, puffed out my chest a bit. I moved away from Elvis and took a deep breath, telling myself that I was absolutely certain about my ability to control this great beast. I pictured it, pictured it again, made every effort to project it.

  Elvis was drooling prodigiously now in anticipation of food. I took a deep breath, told myself again I could do this, and imagined him standing still, obeying my command to stop. If it didn’t work, I would have a big disappointed steer coming rapidly toward me.

  It did work. Elvis seemed to understand what I wanted. We both stood stock still for the longest time, perhaps three or four minutes. I projected images to him conveying calmness, stillness, patience.

  He didn’t move. This was exciting. I could feel that we had communicated in some way. The apples had established a bond—I had gotten his attention, which is important—but I had moved past that bond, deepened it. I was building the ladder I would climb to reach a better understanding of animals. First, trust, then attention. Visualization, exchanging the images of life. Then projecting confidence and clarity. Then listening and, finally, communication.

  I was able to project the right emotions—confidence and clarity—and Elvis was doing exactly what I had asked him to do in my mind. And I had received images back: Elvis chewing contentedly on his apple, Elvis standing still in the pasture alongside me. He still wanted the apple, but I had also gotten another image into his head, another idea. To be still and wait.

  While many behaviorists choose to make animal lovers happy by reporting on how smart animals are, and how they are just like us in so many ways, Temple Grandin, a gifted animal scientist and author, has devoted much of her life to studying how different they are from us, how they really think. She has broken new ground in learning how to talk to animals and how to listen to them.

  More than any behaviorist I have read or studied, Grandin has learned to see the world in much the same way cows and pigs and sheep see the world. And as someone with autism, she has also studied the profound ways in which autists and animals often think alike, thinking through images rather than words. Two of her landmark works, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism and Animals in Translation, have influenced me greatly, affirmed many of my instincts, and kept me on the right path.

  Growing up as an autistic child, Grandin writes, she learned to convert abstract ideas into pictures as a way to understand them. She visualized concepts such as peace or honesty with symbolic images. In her mind, peace was a dove, honesty the image of placing one’s hand on a Bible in court.

  I read dozens of behavioral journals each year, and sometimes I think that behaviorists are not immune to the sources of funding or the passions of the moment. No behaviorist ever got a fat grant for writing that animals are not as smart as we think. Every year I read another story about how many words some border collie knows—eight thousand at last count. I have lived with border collies for two decades, and though mine are very smart, they are not linguistic geniuses.

  I don’t really see the point of teaching them a lot of words. That isn’t how they communicate with the sheep, one another, or with me. Like Grandin, I celebrate their differences from us. I don’t need to make them a mirror of me.

  They know their names, “lie down,” and “get the sheep,” and while they may know thousands of words, they don’t know the difference between a plow truck with a diesel engine and a flock of sheep: they will try to herd both, given the chance.

  In recent years, the idea that animals are just like us, with our thoughts, fears, jealousies, and loves, has become epidemic. As someone who is regularly invited to speak about dogs, I can report that the very idea that dogs and human children are different is a shocking and controversial concept for millions of people. However, my idea is that animals and people are very different, and our failure to understand that makes real communication with animals almost impossible.

  In Animals in Translation, Grandin writes that “animals and autistic people don’t see their ideas of things; they see the actual things themselves. We see the details that make up the world, while normal people blur all those details together in their general concept of the world.” We can’t rely on words to communicate with animals, no matter how many they may understand. We need to see the world in the same way they do, and that means seeing it visually and in great detail.

  Animals see details people don’t see. They can smell our emotions and read our body language and intentions. When I put a syringe or medicine in my back pocket and go out to the pasture, my donkeys will take off before I get near the gate. If I put a cookie in my jacket pocket, they will bray joyously at the sight of me and wait until I get to the gate. It happens every time. They can look at me, the way I walk and hold myself and look at them, to determine instantly if I am coming for business or pleasure. They listen to me, they see me, they understand me.

  Animals have senses and perceptive powers beyond our imagination. Just as Grandin learned that a shadow on the ground or a sudden change in light can frighten a cow, so I learned that everything about me—what I am thinking, feeling, wearing, intending—is important to a dog (or a steer), is a fundamental part of the way we will communicate.

  It is not helpful to think of animals as being just like us, or to celebrate the idea that they are more like us than we could possibly imagine. That is a falsehood that diminishes both species. It distracts us from the work we need to do to understa
nd the real nature of animals. In many ways they are less evolved than we are. They do not have the power to improve their lives or have consciences; they seem helpless against the ravages man has inflicted on the earth and on their lives and habitats. In many ways they are better than we are—more accepting, less destructive, more intuitive.

  I called Peter and told him I had trained Elvis to stay. I said I could get him to come on command as well. He didn’t believe me. An hour later, he pulled into my driveway in his pickup with three other dairy farmer pals packed in.

  All four grizzled, sunburned farmers piled out of the truck. They crossed their arms and stood doubtfully by the gate, waiting for me to enter the pasture and get a steer to stay.

  I was anxious. I knew there would be consequences if I was wrong. Within an hour, the story would be all over the county that some dumb outlander from New York City had tried to get a Swiss steer to stay and gotten his ass spread all over the pasture. And to be honest, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure yet myself. Visualization sounded a little strange, even to me. Had I really communicated with Elvis in this way? Really gotten him to stay? Or perhaps he was just confused. Maybe I was.

  Peter took me aside. “Look, no offense,” he said, “but I don’t want to see you get hurt. You sure you know what you are doing here? I’ve been around cows my whole life, and I’ve never trusted a big steer like that—and I like him—to stand still just because I wanted him to.”

  I explained to Peter that it was more complicated than that. Just stand back and watch, I said. Peter said I reminded him of the guy from Siegfried & Roy whose trained tiger mauled him nearly to death. “He thought he could trust the tiger, too,” he cautioned.

  Well, it wasn’t Las Vegas, but I had my own show to put on. I saw that Peter had brought along a cattle prod. When I asked him about it, he said he was going to give it to me so I would have some protection if things went badly. I thanked him, but declined. I opened the pasture gate and walked in. I was actually emboldened by my audience. I felt I had been given the chance to prove something—to them and to me.

  The farmers were watching eagerly, like hockey fans sitting right behind the glass. The smirks on their faces were pronounced and visible even from afar. Elvis was standing about fifty feet from me. He turned and started to drool, his enormous brown eyes opened wide. He started to trot, and it was like a hill rolling toward me.

  I took a deep breath, held up my arm, and said, “Stay.” I said it in a loud, clear, and confident voice. As I spoke, I pictured him standing quietly in the pasture. He slowed, but kept coming. I pictured him coming to a dead stop, I cleared my head of words and other images and focused on that picture.

  Elvis took a few more steps, then came to a halt.

  I heard the gasps and exclamations from the gate—“Jesus Christ,” “Look at that,” “He got him to stay,” “He did it.” Elvis was drooling great quantities of spittle, but he was fifteen feet from me, and there were no apples. I waited two or three minutes, then I walked toward him at a steady pace.

  I patted him on his neck, talked to him enthusiastically and in a high voice, then walked back to the gate and waved to him to come to me. Domesticated animals love and need attention. Elvis quickly attached to me. He got treats like apples and carrots and he relished the attention. He even got sprayed so that the horse flies stayed off him.

  I was confident now, and focused, and I could actually feel the connection as if there was a channel of energy connecting the two of us; emotions and thoughts were passing back and forth between us.

  I knew what I wanted Elvis to do and he knew what I wanted him to do. We were in sync, together. It was not a case of my giving him orders, or shouting commands at him; it was more symbiotic, a real partnership. He got to live instead of go to slaughter, the fate of most steers, and he got extra care and affection.

  Elvis was not my child, or even my buddy. He was a fellow traveler on my journey through the world. We were different, yet we were connected through the experience of living. This is the spiritual part of communication.

  I took out a syringe filled with antibiotics the vet had prescribed for an infection in one of Elvis’s wounds, as well as some salve for his wounds and bites. I saw the farmers tense up again. When their animals needed treatment, they would confine the steers and cows in narrow and tight stalls where injections could be administered through metal bars and they would be protected against kicking and lurching.

  I simply showed the syringe to Elvis, gave him a big carrot, imagined the needle going into his side, and stuck it in. I was careful once again to precisely visualize what I wished him to do, and to remind myself that it would happen, to be confident and sure.

  Elvis snorted and flinched, but he did not move. He crunched his carrot and looked at me.

  The farmers were impressed. They said they had never seen anyone get a steer to “stay” or “come” or be still for a big needle. They peppered me with a score of questions. Their tones had shifted from dubious to curious.

  Their support was important to me. Farmers have taught me some of the most important lessons in my research about talking to animals; they are among the world’s greatest animal lovers. They know their cows in the most intimate and personal ways; they see them every single day, they milk them, breed them, midwife their births, treat them when they are ill.

  As part of my research, I spent months on farms and inside dairy barns, watching the ways in which farmers understand and communicate with their animals. I was shocked to see how one man could easily control eighty large dairy cows, often in the dark, and even in rain and snowstorms. Ed Anderson, a farmer in Jackson, New York, used a number of different techniques to control and communicate with his cows.

  He would rattle the pasture gate to alert them to milking time, or utter a low whistle when grain was put out. The cows would appear out of the darkness and mist, come through the gate, cross the road, and each go into their own stall, where they would wait to be grained and hooked up to milking tubes.

  Ed would talk to the cows and sing to them, but most of the time, he just tried to think like them. “We talk to each other all the time now,” he told me. “They let me know when they are hungry, sick, or scared. I let them know when they need to stand still for some milking and be calm.”

  Ed could stop a herd from crossing the road simply by turning sideways and just coughing—it is a sound, he says, that startles and confuses the cows and causes them to stop. He could also stop them by putting a bucket in front of a doorway he didn’t want them to enter. If a strange object was in the way, they would stop.

  Ed says he is so close to his cows that the lines of communication are sometimes blurred. When he comes into the barn in a bad humor, the cows are quiet. When he is happy, there is a great din of “mooing and muttering,” as he calls it. By now, he says, the communication is mostly wordless. I pressed him to describe how that communication happens, and he talked about receiving images from his cows. He introduced me to the idea of translating images. “It isn’t always what you see,” he said. “Sometimes it’s an image you have to interpret. You have to think about it sometimes. You can’t solve an animal’s problem unless you put yourself in their place; then the images make sense.”

  For example, he once got an image of cows running in a panic down to the pasture gate. He got it every day for nearly a week. He got on his ATV and drove up to the top of the pasture hill, and looked through his binoculars and saw a mountain lion running through the woods across the valley. He kept the cows in the barn for a week, and when he let them out, there was no sign of the mountain lion, no more images. But he was certain he had received a message.

  I have interpreted many such messages from my animals, especially the dogs and the donkeys. Once I saw an image of the donkeys lying down, and I checked their legs and found an infected scrape on the knee of Simon, my oldest one. I got an image once of my Lab Lenore rushing frantically out in the backyard. I took her outside, and she ran
into a corner and vomited. I received a message in the form of an image from one of my border collies—a quiet place, almost a nest, under some rocks—and I knew she was very ill, something confirmed by my vet.

  Word of my experiments with Elvis swept quickly through the farming community in my area, and soon I was giving demonstrations and discussing my theories. Ed Anderson was one of the first farmers to come by and watch Elvis. Elvis stood and came for me, and stayed still for a few minutes for good measure. As a final gesture, he came over to the gate, pulled Ed’s hat right off his head, and ate it. He did not tell me he was going to do that.

  Elvis and I had a sweet relationship over the two years that I had him. He nearly bankrupted me with the hay he ate and the equipment I had to buy to maintain his lifestyle. As expected, his great legs began to give out. The vet came to look at Elvis’s legs and warned me that they would soon be unable to bear the steer’s weight. He would fall to the ground, he said, and be unable to get up. His great weight would cause his lungs to collapse; he would struggle to breathe and either die a painful death or have to be shot, assuming someone with a rifle was around to notice his plight. The vet urged me to euthanize Elvis before he suffered further.

  Another factor was that I could no longer afford to keep Elvis, and it was not rational or appropriate for me to do so. Steers are not pets, and ought not be confused with pets. It was one of the most painful lessons I learned in my search to understand the true nature of animals. It was also one of the most important. A farm teaches you when to let go, and when not to let go. I was learning when to let go.

  Reluctantly, I arranged for Elvis to be taken to a slaughterhouse known for its quick and humane methods. When they came for Elvis, the truck pulled up to the gate, then two men got out and put up metal barricades on either side of the back door. They were nervous when they saw the size of Elvis—he had come down to the pasture when he saw me, and he stopped and stared at the strange truck.