Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin Page A

them with cattle prods, screaming and yelling and so on, to try to get the cattle moving.
    4. M ETAL C LANGING OR B ANGING
    This one’s universal. You see it everywhere in feed yards and plants—metal gates, sliding doors, squeeze chutes—everywhere. People in the industry call it clatter, and clatter is something you always have with metal equipment. I recommend plastic tracks for sliding doors, so you don’t have metal sliding against metal, and now a company named Silencer makes an extra-quiet squeeze chute that’s good, too.
    5. H IGH -P ITCHED N OISE
    Examples: backup alarms on trucks and high-pitched motor whining.
    I remember my first experience with this at a big beef plant in Nebraska where they’d just put in one of my cattle-handling systems. They used a hydraulic system that gave off a high-pitched whining noise, and the noise would get the cattle all agitated so my system didn’t work. We changed the plumbing to eliminate the noise and the cattle became a lot calmer.
    6. A IR H ISSING
    Another one you see everywhere. The problem with high-pitched sounds like hissing air and hydraulic squeals is that they’re too close to distress calls, which are almost always high-pitched. High-pitched sounds are one of the few things humans will usually notice, especially if they’re intermittent, because we inherited a built-in alarm system from our animal ancestors that’s still working. That’s why humans choose high-pitched intermittent sounds when they want to make sure they get people’s attention. Police cars, ambulances, garbage truck backup beeps—it’s almost always a high-pitched intermittent sound. The people who design these systems instinctively go for the kind of sound animals use to signal danger.
    7. A IR D RAFTS B LOWING ON A PPROACHING A NIMALS
    I don’t know why cattle don’t like this; I just know they don’t. Whenever cattle are out in a big storm, they’ll turn their bottoms to the wind. I also hear stories about dogs hating to have air blown into their faces or their ears. This seems to be something kids like to do to dogs, so I’ve heard quite a few of these stories.
    8. C LOTHING H UNG ON F ENCE
    I say “clothing” because the problem almost always is clothing, but anything hanging on a fence can scare animals. Usually what happens is that people get hot, take off their jackets and shirts, and hang them on the fence. Sometimes people will drape towels or rags on the fence, which is just as bad. Once I went to a ranch that had a wiggling plastic jug wired to the fence and that was causing problems.
    The worst is when you have yellow clothing hanging on fences. I first saw this happen at a plant in Colorado. It’s the same problem as the bright yellow ladder against the gray wall I mentioned a while back. No cow will walk toward a sudden patch of bright yellow color.
    9. P IECE OF P LASTIC T HAT I S M OVING
    Anything moving is a problem for animals, but usually I find the problem will be a piece of plastic. That’s because people in the industry put plastic all over everything. They’ll tape it over a window to keep the cold air out, or wrap it around a pipe because the pipe is dripping, and it always vibrates and jiggles. Plastic just has a way of getting stuck all over the place, especially now, with the new food safety rules. Employees pull plastic off big rolls and make raincoats out of it, or aprons and leg guards; the plants let the employees make anything they want out of the stuff. Then it ends up gettingcaught on something where it jiggles and scares the animals. Paper towels will also scare pigs and cattle if the wind is blowing it. I had a paper towel problem at five or six different places.
    10. S LOW F AN B LADE M OVEMENT
    I’ve seen this in several different places. Animals don’t have a problem with an electric fan that’s turned on the way autistic children do. A lot of autistic