Rural Intelligence bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes: Last week Peter wrote about animal learning, and whether domestic animals like farm animals might actually learn by observing humans. This week what's on my mind is the other side of the equation: whether humans, by observing the animals with whom they share the world, can ever really know what's going on in those animals' minds. The question was raised for me very starkly on Wednesday, when we sent three piglets and four older sows off to market. I've previously described some of the chaos we encountered in trying to load pigs onto a truck. They are low to the ground, heavy, and very strong. Virtually everyone who observes them also concludes that they are extremely smart, unbelievably willful, and justifiably suspicious when we try to remove them from their comfortable homes to a new location. We tried to account for these factors in planning their departure. Having done this several times before, we thought we had learned how to get them to go where we want them to. We built a chute with t-posts and metal pig fence panels that would connect their domain to where the trailer would park. We lined the chute with burlap, on the theory that pigs do not challenge fences they cannot see through. We locked them in their pens well before the truck's arrival, and did not feed them that day so that they would be hungry. We loaded up several crates of cast-off apples from the Rider Farm to entice them to follow us. We lined the roadway from their pens to the chute with electric fence wire, and five of us got ready with solid black freight palettes we would carry as shields and use as a moving wall to follow them, keep them moving forward, and prevent their turning back.
The scheme worked beautifully with the young pigs. We didn't even need the palettes. They followed the apples and trotted right onto the truck. It worked pretty well with our lumbering, slow, oldest sows, whose useful time on the farm is behind them and who are destined to soon become bacon and sausage. But with the slightly younger Tamworth-Ossabaw cross sows, who are far bigger and more willful (Peter would say demonic), things went haywire. One of the sows, deciding to return to her pen, totally mangled a 16 foot metal cattle gate we had closed behind her. Her sister, who weighed in at well over 400 lbs, entered the chute, but in a last ditch effort to avoid entering the trailer stuck her snout under the burlapped pig panel and ripped it out of the ground, oblivious to our presumption that pigs respect opaque walls. She pushed the panel over her head, brushed off our efforts to restrain her as if we were no more than bumps in the road, charged through the fence line, trotted off into the pasture, and vanished in the woods. Once this final humongous sow was out there, we each voiced our theories about how to get her back and whether it even would be possible to do so. Each of us was confident in our clear understandings of pig psychology, and the opinion of each contradicted the other's. I felt very proud that I was able to find her out in the head high brush and, by positioning myself to her rear, but visible over her shoulder, managed to walk her over a stream bed and through an opening in our fence to get her back to the starting point. But once we had her on the road back to the truck, we were in constant, vigorous, debate over how best to move her forward. Try to funnel her into a narrow opening or leave the roadway wide open? Prod her with sticks or lead her with apples? Run at her and yell to scare her in the right direction? Or walk slowly with an advancing phalanx of pallettes that would force her into the trailer? Was she so upset that we should let her calm down, or should we upset her further to make her run away from us toward the shelter of the truck? Ultimately, it was a little bit of all of the above that worked, and she was virtually shoved into the trailer. We succeeded. But it took close to 40 minutes of determined effort by me, Peter, Darlene and two helpers, with some bemused hints from George Atkinson, who awaited with his Critter Carrier. Somehow I don't think we have got the workings of the pig's mind down to a science yet. Peter had determined last spring that these troublesome sows were demons because of their repeated break-outs into our neighbors' yard. Whether they are, in fact, demonic, or simply follow their innocent desire for certain comforts our neighbors' yard affords, is a debate Peter and I often have. Not just about the pigs. If the sheep break into the grain barrel and eat an unhealthy quantity of grain, Peter is convinced that they know they've transgressed, and behave like 4-year-olds caught in the act. He argues that, if they've marauded, and they are all standing huddled together in the barn with their heads hanging down, looking sheepish, as the expression goes, it is a clear sign of guilt, a sense they have been naughty. They recognize that he is not pleased. For my part, I don't see the guilt or the moral sense when I see them in similar circumstances; I only see sweet nonchalance. We're both quite sure we understand sheep psychology very well. And maybe we both do, because perhaps the sheep are reacting to two different human reactions, to Peter's anger and to my indulgence, with appropriate poses of their own.
After a day of arguing our own vigorous differences, I was intrigued the next day to read back-to-back articles in The New York Times that centered on disputes among those who study animal psychology. One described a tug of war in Ohio between industrial farmers and animal welfare activists over the confinement of egg laying chickens in tiny cages and of pigs in birthing crates. So far the dispute has produced a movement toward somewhat less confining agricultural practices that fully please neither side. The industrial egg producers who keep their layers confined to small cages, for example, strenuously assert that the chickens are quite happy living in these very confined spaces because they have a constant supply of fresh food and water, while their waste products are instantly conveyed away. You can tell they're happy, the producers say, because they keep churning out the eggs. The animal welfare activists are equally sure that such conditions are cruel to the chickens, denying them the opportunity to fly up and perch, take dirt baths, to forage, and the like. Each side is absolutely convinced that it knows what the animals are thinking and feeling.
Immediately preceding that article was a full page devoted to the travails of Dr. Marc Hauser, the popular and prominent Harvard professor who has studied animal cognition with a view to understanding, among other things, the biological underpinnings of human morality and evil. Dr. Hauser has been placed on leave for this academic year over questions about his research, and whether the data underlying some of his published studies actually exist. One critic examined videotapes experiments from which Hauser reported that certain monkeys recognized images of themselves in mirrors. The critic said he found no evidence from those videotapes of any such self-recognition. I must pause here and acknowledge some bias, because we've spent substantial social time with Dr. Hauser on several occasions, and I've always found him to be an incredibly creative thinker, a fantastic communicator, engaged with exploring life from a remarkably fresh perspective, and with a keen moral sense underlying it all. It is most distressing for me to see his integrity and his life's work questioned in such a public and humiliating way. I find it hard to believe that he fabricated evidence. But even if I didn't know him, I would have to wonder whether this academic dispute over what was observed in Dr. Hauser's experiments isn't simply an artifact of the same human differences I observed the previous day in moving the pigs. We each can look at the exact same animal behavior and see radically different psychological processes at work. We each seem to see what we expect to see, based on our preconceptions about how the animal's mind works. To each of us the thoughts, intentions and reactions we think we're observing in the animal seem indisputable. Maybe some of what we project is a matter of self-interest, but I suspect most of it is impelled by something much more basic in our psyches, some fundamental way we've always perceived the forces of life. In human affairs, too, I am a relativist while Peter is a moralist. It should not therefore be surprising that I see much animal behavior as morally neutral on the animals' part (sheep will be sheep) while he sees right and wrong, guilt and innocence. And perhaps a similar dynamic underlies what these various scientists, farmers and animal welfare advocates perceive when they observe animal behaviors. Academics try to design experiments to that make the study of animal cognition a verifiable science rather than just the projection of our preconceptions. But the judges of the experiments are still human. At the frontiers of the field, where the scientists seek ever more subtle understandings and connections, these human observers may have considerable difficulty getting past their expectations and agreeing on just what their animal subjects are thinking." —Mark ScherzerFor the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
