Read an Excerpt
The Emotional Lives of Animals and Children
Insights from a Farm Sanctuary
By William Crain Turning Stone Press
Copyright © 2014 William Crain
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61852-082-1
CHAPTER 1
Fear
One afternoon I was out in the pasture digging up nettles. After a bit, one of our five goats, Mattie, left the others and came over to me. She put her head next to my hand, and I rubbed her neck. She tilted her head so I could rub it a few seconds more, then she left to rejoin her companions. As she walked away, I had the nice feeling you get when an old friend reaches out to you. I thought about the length of time she had been with us: four and a half years. That's not a real long time, I thought, but we've been through a lot. During her first weeks on the farm she was so scared of humans that I wouldn't have dreamt that she would ever come over to me in such a friendly way.
I first saw Mattie in a live meat market in the Bronx. Live meat markets allow customers to walk in and select the kind and size of the animal they want slaughtered and butchered. This is done on the premises, so customers can be certain their meat is fresh. In most of the markets, a majority of the animals are chickens, which are usually crammed on top of one another. Many of the markets also sell ducks, guinea hens, rabbits, goats, and sheep.
Ellen and I had driven by this particular market in the Bronx many times, and we had often seen a large sheep standing near the front door. Occasionally we saw one of the goats. Later we learned that most farm sanctuaries oppose the purchase of animals from live meat markets; the purchases, they point out, support the markets' business. We later came to see their point. But at the time, the sight of the animals made us want to do something. So when our farm sanctuary was ready to house animals, in February 2008, we decided to save a few from this market. In particular, I had my mind on the sheep by the door. We also decided we would purchase two goats.
Ellen and I rented a truck, put hay in the back, and drove to the meat market on a chilly Sunday morning. When we arrived, we were joined by our farm's first caretaker, Stacy, and her friend Tom. We walked into the store, talked to the manager, and purchased the sheep we had seen by the door. We also bought a second sheep—a recent arrival who was the only other sheep on the premises. The sheep ran for their lives, but the workers captured them within two or three minutes.
When I turned my attention to the goats, I started feeling upset—even a little sick inside. How could we decide whom to save? Saving two meant determining that the others would die! But the manager didn't ask us to choose. He just told his workers to capture two goats. As soon as the workers stepped into the goats' room, all of them, like the sheep, ran for their lives. The goats were trickier and much more difficult to catch. Although the goats had almost no space to run, it took the workers at least fifteen minutes to grab hold of two of them. So we didn't make any selection; the two goats presented to us were simply the first two the workers could capture.
Once a worker got hold of a sheep or goat, he grabbed the animal by the feet and flung the animal upside down. He then dragged the sheep or goat about thirty feet across the cement floor. When he reached the large scale for weighing, he flung the animal onto it. If the animal was very heavy, another worker helped throw the animal onto the device. We pleaded with the workers to be gentler, but they ignored us. We paid the manager, put makeshift leashes on the animals, and with some pushing from behind, guided them into the back of the truck. They were all trembling and cowering.
On the trip back to the farm, Ellen drove one car, Stacy and Tom drove another car, and I drove the truck with the goats and sheep. The trip would ordinarily take an hour and a half, but I lost contact with the cars and took a wrong turn. For another half hour, I couldn't figure out how to get back on the correct highway. Soon I began to worry about the animals' health. The truck doors are all closed, I thought. If this trip takes longer than I planned, will the animals get enough air? I knew nothing about such transports. Should I pull the truck over and open its back door to give the animals some air? Or might they jump out and run onto the highway? Finally, I did stop and peek in. They were huddled together and breathing okay.
After three hours of driving, I steered the truck up to the barn. Ellen, Stacy, and Tom were waiting. I sensed that they were irritated by my delay, but they didn't say much because we all had to focus on getting the animals out of the truck and into the barn. All the sheep and goats were scared to death. Pointing to Mattie, Tom said, "This one is trembling something awful!" Tom tried to calm her by stroking her back, but to no avail. He told her, "You're scared now, but you don't know how lucky you are."
Stacy named the animals, and we kept the sheep and goats in a quarantine stall for four weeks, while we had them tested and treated for parasites and other illnesses. During this period, Ellen and I had to work in the city, but we traveled to the farm several days a week. I spent most of my time sitting quietly in a corner of their stall, hoping that if I were unobtrusive, they would get used to me and become less fearful of humans. This seemed to work, but only slightly.
When we finally let the goats and sheep into the pasture, their first act was to inspect the fences. They walked to each section of fence, sniffing and examining it. All the while, the farm's large mare (whom Stacy brought with her when she took the job of caretaker) was watching from outside the fence. Then, when the sheep and goats finished their inspection and drifted to the center of the pasture, the mare began running, jumping, and snorting. To me, she seemed to be saying, "Come on! Play!" The goats and sheep spent about thirty seconds running and jumping, too, but then stopped. They weren't sufficiently comfortable to continue.
Silent Animals, Silent Children
Four days later I heard loud "baa" sounds. At first I didn't know where the sounds came from. Then I saw they were from our own sheep and goats. I suddenly realized that these animals had been silent for over four weeks! And as I thought about the meat market, I didn't remember "baa" sounds there, either. Why were the goats and sheep so silent?
Ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz say that if we wish to understand animal behavior in domestic situations, we need to transpose our images to their natural environments. In the wild, it is highly adaptive for many mammals to be silent in times of danger. Any noise might inform a predator of their whereabouts. For over four weeks, our goats and sheep had gone through a traumatic period when they felt at great risk. So an instinctive response—silence—kicked in.
My thoughts then turned to a human childhood symptom. I had long been puzzled by the fact that young children sometimes stop talking when they lose a parent. For instance, a four-year-old boy who came to my college's mental health clinic became mute for several months after his father left the family and died. The boy didn't exhibit other symptoms; he simply didn't speak. Some of the clinic staff offered a psychoanalytic interpretation. Perhaps, they said, the child unconsciously believed that his words expressed bad thoughts that killed his father. But there was no evidence to support this interpretation. At the farm, it struck me that children who lose parents suddenly feel unprotected, somewhat like our goats and sheep, and this vulnerability triggers an instinctive silence. Children's silence, that is, might be part of our mammalian ancestry, a survival mechanism developed in our evolutionary past.
Other children exhibit "selective mutism." They typically speak at home but not in other situations, such as school. In these cases, too, children might feel unprotected, and the instinctive response of silence, shared with other animals, is activated.
If this speculation has merit, support for it might emerge in children's play therapy. For example, a mute child might hide a child doll when large, "bad" toy figures are near, indicating that the doll feels unprotected. And the therapist's timely acknowledgement of this feeling might help the child feel understood. The child's symptom wouldn't be expected to suddenly disappear, but children do appreciate being understood, which often allows them to become more relaxed and active in the therapy.
Freezing
An evolutionary perspective also might cast light on perplexing behavior in an experimental situation created in the 1960s by Mary Ainsworth. In order to understand toddlers' attachment to their mothers, the mothers are asked to bring their one-year-olds to an unfamiliar room. After a few minutes, the mother briefly leaves her child alone with a research assistant. The mother's departure is distressing to most children. Even children who have developed basic trust in their mother sometimes cry, and they happily greet her when she returns.
This experimental situation has proved to be a very productive research tool. It has enabled researchers to classify children's patterns of attachments to their mothers in consistent and meaningful ways. However, for a long time, some behaviors struck researchers as odd and difficult to classify. The two most common behaviors occur when the mother re-enters the room. In one case, the child approaches the mother, but the child's head is averted. In the second case, the child freezes. The child looks like he or she is in a trance. In 1990, psychologists Mary Main and Judith Solomon concluded that children exhibiting such odd behaviors "lack a strategy" for dealing with the stressful situation, and Main and Solomon created a new attachment category for such behavior, calling it "Disorganized/Disoriented." Studies have found that this general category fits about 14 to 24 percent of toddlers.
Main and her colleagues suspect that the children in this general category are frightened by their mothers. Main's speculation is supported by other research, which suggests that such mothers can fly into unpredictable outbursts of rage. It is understandable, then, that a child in the strange situation might approach her mother for security but also avert her head in case she might be hit.
But why would a child freeze?
When the children freeze, they are not just silent. Their immobile behavior seems more drastic. It strikes many researchers as outright bizarre.
Freezing is more understandable when we consider our evolutionary past. Numerous species of mammals freeze when predators pose an immediate threat. Freezing is adaptive because predators rarely, if ever, attack anything that is perfectly still. It's quite possible that our own distant mammalian ancestors employed this defense, and that it remained adaptive for early humans, after they branched off from other primates. It was an effective defense for the early humans in the forests, open woodlands, and savannas, where leopards and other predators roamed.
My speculation, then, is that the toddlers who freeze are so terribly frightened that an ancient, innate response comes to the fore. If this speculation has merit, the label "disorganized/disoriented" is misleading, as is the conclusion that the toddler "lacks a strategy." Freezing is not just aimless behavior. It's a primordial physiological reaction that evolved because it served a purpose. It enabled our ancestors to survive. It might not seem strategic in modern circumstances, but it was effective for millions of years and is therefore something to which the organism resorts.
By analogy, imagine a group of soldiers who run out of ammunition and must rely on early human weapons—rocks and sticks. The soldiers don't have much chance of victory, but the rocks and sticks do have a purpose. The soldiers' use of them is not merely "disorganized/disoriented" activity. Similarly, in an overwhelmingly frightening situation, some toddlers automatically fall back on one of the organism's early survival mechanisms, freezing.
Therapists and parents might discover that an unexpected benefit accrues when they try to understand seemingly bizarre and disorganized behavior more positively, as an effort to cope and survive. Because children often pick up on adult attitudes, children might feel a new respect, and the overall tone of the adult-child interactions might improve.
CHAPTER 2
Play
A few weeks after our first goats arrived, we saw a change in one of them, Mattie. She seemed to be gaining weight faster than the others. Our caretaker Stacy was the first to raise the question: "Could she be pregnant?" We asked the veterinarian who made farm calls to see if this was the case, but he couldn't tell. As time went on, Mattie began showing clearer signs of pregnancy and one night she went into labor. Stacy stayed with Mattie through the night. The delivery ran into some difficulty; Stacy had to help position the head. Then the baby, a boy, boomed out. Stacy named him Boomer.
Boomer was full of energy and loved to play. By seven days of age, he was sprinting back and forth in the aisle of the barn, apparently just for the fun of it. When he was ten days old, he ran out to the pasture in the morning and tried to climb up a rock that was about one and a half feet high. But when he reached the top, he slid down backwards, landing with a thud. He climbed back up and jumped down—backwards—and this time he landed perfectly. He climbed up and jumped down several more times. He leapt forwards and backwards, and each time he added a new spin while in the air. He looked like a platform diver experimenting with new stunts. Seeing that I was observing this, Stacy said, "It's funny that he never just jumps, but always tries something new. He's full of antics. He's always playing around."
A few minutes later, I decided to sit on the rock, and Boomer climbed up and rested beside me. But he soon became restless and left in order to run about again. As he sprinted away, he kicked out his legs to the side, first in one direction, then in the other. The side-kicking had a screwball look. Then, as if to show that he had only been fooling around, he leapt high into the air and tucked all four legs under his body in a picture-perfect pose.
Boomer disappeared from my sight into the barn, but then remerged. He walked over to our old rooster, Silky, and stretched his neck out to touch Silky's beak. Silky just stood there. It looked to me like Boomer was saying hello to this elegant old fowl. Then Boomer ran off again, looking for new fun things to do.
All this time, Boomer's mother Mattie looked on from a distance, but she didn't intervene. According to the great Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen, this kind of unobtrusive watchfulness is characteristic of the parents in many species. The parents' style, Tinbergen said, is that of "watching all the time, but acting only when the baby demands it."
Play in Children
Like Boomer, human children also like to run, climb, and jump. But human parents rarely stand by as unobtrusively as Mattie did. When we lived on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, I often watched parents with toddlers on the streets and in the parks. Almost invariably, when a child attempted to climb stairs or jump off a low structure, the adult intervened, saying things such as "Be careful!" and "Hold it. Let me show you." The grown-ups considered their children's actions too risky to leave to the children themselves. And so the young children, who were initially so enthusiastic about climbing and jumping, were deprived of the thrill of independent mastery.
Young human children, of course, don't just run, climb, jump, and engage in physical play. They also engage in symbolic fantasy play, as when they use sticks to represent people and create imaginary scenarios. But modern human adults restrict this make-believe play as well. In an effort to improve academic skills, schools have largely removed free, make-believe play from kindergartens. In addition, many schools have reduced recess and have increased homework in the elementary school grades. As a result, childhood games such as hide-and-seek, snowball fights, jump rope, and informal sports—the games children play on their own, without adult supervision—have become rare. Today's educators consider free play as relatively frivolous—certainly nothing to stand in the way of increased academic instruction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Emotional Lives of Animals and Children by William Crain. Copyright © 2014 William Crain. Excerpted by permission of Turning Stone Press.
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