Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.

There’s a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three.

The big companies are like steel and activists are like heat. Activists soften the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.

Animals like novelty if they can choose to investigate it; they fear novelty if you shove it in their faces.

Sometimes you have to go outside your field of study to find the right people.

Bad things always happen when an animal is overselected for any single trait. Nature will give you a nasty surprise.

What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals.

Our whole image of wolf packs and alphas is completely wrong. Instead, wolves live the way people do:7 in families made up of a mom, a dad, and their children. Sometimes an unrelated wolf can be adopted into a pack, or one of the mom’s or dad’s relatives is part of the pack (the “maiden aunt”), or a mom or dad who has died could be replaced by a new wolf. But mostly wolf packs are just a mom, a dad, and their pups.

For example, the main reason zebras never got domesticated is that they’re ultra-high-fear. Zebras may bite people and not let go. They injure more people in zoos than the tigers do.

Fieldwork is probably always more likely to be holistic than lab work or mathematical modeling because in the field you can’t get away from the whole when a research project starts.

Being negative is natural and being 100 percent positive takes work.

The memory feats of food-caching animals that can remember the location of hundreds of food stores are highly similar to the ability of some people with autism to memorize every street in a city. My theory is that savant-type skills occur when memories are sensory-based instead of language-based. Language leads to abstractification and loss of detail. Animals naturally lack language and autistic people have language problems because of a disorder, but in autistic people and animals the cause of sensory-based memory is the same: thinking and remembering in pictures instead of words.

intense stereotypies—stereotypies an animal spends hours a day doing—almost never occur in the wild,

Instead of making the children do good behaviors by threatening to punish them if they don't, the teachers watch the children until they spontaneously do a good thing and give them rewards to reinforce the behavior and make them more likely to do that behavior again in the future.

Behavioral trainers never talk about vices and depravity. Behaviorists are some of the most "optimistic' teachers and trainers there are, because if a person or an animal isn't learning, a behaviorist is trained to examine what "he" is doing wrong, not what the person or animal is doing wrong. This means that behavioral teachers and trainers don't blame the student.

How many people would even try to be Jane Goodall today? Jane Goodall was a superb fieldworker who lived with animals, observed them closely, and understood them. She did her work in the field, not behind a computer making mathematical models of chimpanzee population.

Positive control is the opposite (of aversive control). Even though the teacher or psychologist has created an environment that "controls" the persons behavior through positive reinforcement, the person doesn't feel like he's being controlled probably because he is getting reinforced for behaviors he didn't "have" to do ... described as those that we 'like' or 'chose' to engage in.

miles a day, which is illegal in most towns. Even if it’s not illegal, it’s dangerous. So you have to figure out substitute behaviors that keep your dog happy