Post date: Dec 13, 2008 7:08:39 PM
For those who aren't familiar with her work, Temple Grandin is an autistic woman who feels her autism gives her insight into the way animals perceive the world. She has written extensively about her work as a consultant with the cattle industry. Here's a good summary from a review of Grandin's book Animals in Translation:
"If there's an overarching theory to the book, it's that the frontal lobes in autistic people don't work very well, mimicking the depleted frontal lobes in animals. The frontal lobes are what allows generalization, but that generalization comes at a price, the filtering out of a great deal of raw information. When that filtering doesn't happen, the brain gets overloaded; it's as though every sensory input is turned up to 11. Things that you and I would overlook, like a plastic bottle on the ground or a yellow raincoat, will bring an entire line of cattle to stamping halt on their way through a plant. Grandin sees things that way, too, which is why she can design systems to reduce the need for electric cattle prods."
I've been interested in Temple Grandin's work for a long time, but my experiences with Trevor have inspired me to go back to read "Animals in Translation" with fresh eyes.
The first week I had Trevor as a 7-week-old puppy, we were in the back yard at night practicing "go potty." A plane went by overhead. Baby Trevor tipped back his head and tracked it all the way across the sky, mesmerized. It's something my labs would never have done, and it was my first clue that he was unusually attuned to his visual environment. But it's not just his physical environment that he's attuned to--the sound of dog barking in the distance can stop him in his tracks.
I wouldn't say that he's a fearful dog. He's a social butterfly who loves nothing more than being out in public with his many friends and fans. But he's also a soft dog who is not a natural daredevil. I would even call him a control freak (speaking as a fellow control freak). You learn a lot about a dog about training him for agility. Trevor had a perfect startline stay from the beginning. He aced his weave entries. He's a graceful natural jumper. He easily mastered following my cues. But getting him (and keeping him) on the contacts was another story. The contacts made him uneasy. We would get to a level of basic competence on one of the contacts and then lose it. For most of last winter, he went through phases where he would do either the teeter or the dogwalk, but not both. He seemed to regard them as mutually exclusive--they were too similar, yet scary in different ways. After months of trying to train a zippy 2o/2o A-Frame, I gave up and switched him to a running AF, in the hopes that it would stop him from creeping on the descent.
It took a lot of work and perseverance to get Trevor semi-consistently doing the contacts, and we're still in a delicate state where it doesn't take much to derail Trevor's confidence.
Even in his daily life, Trevor is the kind of dog who needs to check out strange things in his environment before he can relax and move on. So it's no surprise to me that this tendency is playing out on the agility field.
From "Animals in Translation," here is the list of "tiny details that scare farm animals," correlated with Trevor's agility experiences (a lot of these are specific to the cattle industry):
Touki makes for an interesting comparison, because she is also a soft dog who has a tendency to get spooked. But in her case, the pattern seems to be that a bad experience sets up a negative association that can take a long time to erase (i.e., Kelly fell down next to the kitchen door, and Touki would only go through the doorway backwards for months afterwards). Other than occasionally fixating on a menacing garbage can and barking at it hysterically, she doesn't tend to react to out-of-place objects in her physical surroundings.
To be continued!