Ive followed this womans work for a long time.I have also worked with animals as a vet and in many other capacities.Very sucessfully,and I dont mean the money .And in my opinion as an animal professional for far longer than I care to reveal,
I believe this woman can help you understand a little something when it comes to animals seeing things etc..
Because she is dead on.
And yes Cheetah,animals do responds to frequencies that we cannot detect.Bigtime.So there are many factors that play into this besides what I have presented with Grandins research.
Fact.Horse dont like the smell of decay.It is a survival response.Of course they dont want to go thru a burial ground where they could detect those smells even though you or I cant.
Fact.They also dont like unstable ground.Old burials are full of holes and soft spots.And there is a ton more.But its late and Im tired.Im not discounting what anyone else chooses to believe,but yes,it would be a good thing to do a bit of study before coming to a conclusion that it is always spirits.
http://www.enotalone.com/article/5550.html
That feedlot consultation was the kind of thing that started to give me a reputation for having practically a magical connection to animals. Meanwhile I was always mystified by these situations, because to me the answers seemed so obvious. Why couldn't other people see what the matter was?
It took me fifteen years to figure out that other people actually couldn't see what the problem was, at least not without a lot of training and practice. They couldn't see it because they weren't visually oriented the way animals and autistic people are.
I always find it kind of funny that normal people are always saying autistic children "live in their own little world." When you work with animals for a while you start to realize you can say the same thing about normal people. There's a great big, beautiful world out there that a lot of normal folks are just barely taking in. It's like dogs hearing a whole register of sound we can't. Autistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can't, or don't.
I don't just mean this metaphorically, either. Normal people literally don't see a lot of things. There's a famous experiment by a psychologist named Daniel Simons, head of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois, called Gorillas in Our Midst, that shows you how bad people's visual awareness is. In the experiment they show people a videotape of a basketball game and ask them to count how many passes one team makes. Then, a little while into the tape, while everyone is sitting there counting passes, a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the screen, stops, turns, faces the camera, and beats her fists on her chest.
Fifty percent of all people who watch this video don't see the gorilla!
Even when experimenters ask them directly, "Did you notice the gorilla?" they say, "The what?" It's not that they don't remember the lady in the gorilla suit. Anyone who's forgotten something he saw will remember it when you give him a prompt. These folks actually didn't see the lady gorilla in the first place. She didn't register.
The experimenters tested out their theory with another video in which an actor suddenly changes into a whole different person, wearing a completely different set of clothes. Seventy percent of normal people don't notice that, either. They also don't notice it in real life. In one study a blond-haired man wearing a yellow shirt handed students a form to fill out, then took the completed form behind a bookcase to file. When he came back out he was a dark-haired man wearing a blue shirt. He wasn't the same guy in disguise; he was a whole different person. It didn't matter. Seventy-five percent of the students had no idea they'd just interacted with two different people.
The scariest study, though, was the one NASA did with commercial airplane pilots. The researchers put them in a flight simulator and asked them to do a bunch of routine landings. But on some of the landing approaches the experimenters added the image of a large commercial airplane parked on the runway, something a pilot would never see in real life (at least, let's hope not). One quarter of the pilots landed right on top of the airplane. They never saw it.
I've seen photographs from the study, and what's interesting is that if you're not a pilot, the parked plane is obvious. You can't miss it, and you don't have to be autistic to see it, either. I'd bet the ranch that the only people who could possibly miss that plane would have to be commercial pilots. If you're a professional, expecting to see what a professional normally would see, there's a 25 percent chance you'll miss a huge commercial aircraft parked crossways blocking the landing strip in a flight simulator.
That's because normal people's perceptual systems are built to see what they're used to seeing. If they're used to seeing gorillas in the middle of basketball games, they see gorillas. If they're not used to seeing gorillas in the middle of basketball games, they don't. They have inattentional blindness.
I have no idea how a visual thinker would do on these experiments, but my guess is visual thinkers would see the gorilla a lot more often than verbal thinkers. I'm almost positive there's no prey animal on earth who would miss that gorilla, that's for sure, though I think predators would see the gorilla, too. A predator, by the way, is an animal like a dog or a cat who hunts and kills other animals for food; a prey animal is the animal the predator hunts. There's also another category of animals you don't hear about as much, which is the scavenger animals (like vultures) who do eat meat but don't kill the animals they eat. All animals, including human beings, fall into at least one of these categories, and quite a few — including a lot of primates — belong to more than one. Humans are more predators than prey, but we share qualities with both. In terms of the size of our teeth, we're defenseless, but as soon as we developed tools we became predators.
It's so hard for normal people to see what scares cattle that I finally developed a checklist of mostly visual details for plant managers to look out for. Things like pieces of metal that wiggle, reflections on water, bright spots, contrasts of color, and air hissing or blowing in their faces. I tell the owners, if you have three "bad" details you have to correct all three. Then your animal will walk up the chute without any trouble and you can throw away your electric prod.
Visual thinkers of any species, animal or human, are detail-oriented. They see everything and they react to everything. We don't know why this is true, we just know from experience that it is. I've had interior designers tell me, "I see everything." The worst thing that can happen to an interior designer is to work with a sloppy contractor. The designer will see every little flaw in the contractor's work. Tiny mistakes no one else even notices, like grout that's slightly uneven, will jump out at visual people. They go crazy. Visual people feel horrible when little details in their visual environments are wrong, the same way animals do.
I think this is probably the hardest part of an animal's existence for normal people to relate to. Verbal people can't just turn themselves into visual people because they want to, and vice versa.
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I hope this book will help regular people be a little less verbal and a little more visual. I've spent thirty years as an animal scientist, and I've spent my whole life as an autistic person. I hope what I've learned will help people start over again with animals (and maybe with autistic people, too), and begin to think about them in a different way.
I hope what I've learned will help people see.
