Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin

live around animals you know it well. Anytime an animal of any species hears a sudden sound, something they weren’t expecting, they stop what they’re doing and orient to the source of the sound.
    When I worked with pigs at the University of Illinois I saw the orienting response every time a small plane would fly over the farm. The pigs couldn’t see the plane from inside the barn, but the minute that plane could be heard approaching the farm all activity in the barn would stop dead, and every animal stood perfectly still. After about two seconds of focused listening the pigs went back to their normal hubbub of activity. You can see the same thing at a horse stable when a garbage truck backs up to the dumpster. As soon as the backup warning starts beeping every horse will stick its head out of the stall at the exact same moment and stand at the alert. They look like they’re saluting the truck.
    I think the orienting response is the beginning of consciousness, because the animal has to make a conscious decision about what to do about that sound. If he’s a prey animal, should he run? If he’s a predator, does he need to chase something? A predator might need to flee, too, of course, so a predator actually has two decisions to make.
    Intermittent sounds keep hitting that orienting response. That’s why it’s impossible to get to sleep when you’re hearing an intermittent sound like a beeping elevator in a hotel or an intermittently beeping clothes dryer. A friend of mine with a nine-year-old autistic boy told me a story about her son, who had gotten into opening and closing doors repetitively. She was exhausted one day, mostlybecause her son didn’t sleep well at night, and she needed to take a nap, but when she lay down her son started opening and closing the sliding pocket door to the laundry room next to her bedroom. He would wait a few seconds in between each new door closing, just long enough for her to start to drift off to sleep again, and then suddenly she’d hear a rumble-rumble- thump and the door would hit the doorjamb again. Even though the sound was muffled, she said she was frantic after about ten minutes of this. It’s the Chinese water torture principle. If you had water pouring on your head continuously you wouldn’t like it, but you could learn to ignore it. Having drops of water dripping on your head intermittently is literally torture.
    B EING O BLIVIOUS
    The funny thing about the checklist is that probably the only thing on it that would bother a herd of humans you were trying to move through a feed yard chute is the intermittent sounds. Humans wouldn’t bat an eye at anything else on the checklist—jiggling chains, sparkling puddles, shiny spots on metal, little pieces of moving plastic, slowly rotating fan blades, even a continuous high-pitched sound—nothing on this checklist would be any problem for human beings at all.
    They wouldn’t be a problem for humans, because humans wouldn’t take them in.
    I’ve mentioned the Gorillas in Our Midst video, in which a lady dressed in a gorilla suit walks onscreen during a basketball game pounding her chest and 50 percent of all viewers don’t see her. If 50 percent of normal human beings can’t see a lady dressed up like a gorilla, it’s small wonder employees in meatpacking plants don’t notice jiggly chains.
    In their book Inattentional Blindness, Arien Mack at the New School for Social Research in New York City and Irvin Rock, who was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, until he died in 1995, explain that people don’t consciously see any object unless they are paying direct, focused attention to that object. 5 This means that a human being walking through an alley won’t see, muchless be bothered by, sparkling puddles or shiny spots on metal or jiggling chains. None of that stuff is there for them unless they’re looking for it. Normal