By Russell Working
Horses circled the center ring while acrobats performed on their backs. Monkeys raced around the hippodrome atop Shetland ponies. Educated Pigs jumped hurdles, leaped through hoops of fire, tumbled barrels along, and climbed ladders.
Like every major circus, when Ringling Bros. rolled into town in 1892, it unloaded hundreds of performing animals, both wild and domesticated. Along with them came a mighty cavalry of workhorses to pull the cages and bandwagons.
These animals were wrangled by trainers and menagerie men who—at least the good ones—possessed a keen understanding of animal psychology. Some trainers could be abusive and cruel, but the best knew that gentleness and understanding were better tools for working with animals.
Such thoughts came to mind recently when I ran across an interview with American scientist and animal behaviorist Temple Grandin. Grandin, who is autistic, became famous for her ability to perceive the world as animals might. Oliver Sacks wrote a memorable profile of her in The New Yorker, and a subsequent movie brought her story to millions.
Following are a few highlights from an interview with and a post about Grandin at Tufts University. There’s also video of a lecture she gave there. (No, despite this and my recent post on Jumbo, Tufts is not slipping me greenbacks to ballyhoo the college.) I have slightly edited the questions for brevity and clarity.
Q: Is it true that animals have emotions?
Grandin: It’s stupid to say that animals don’t have emotions. You can express feelings in a much more complex way with language, but dogs have the same neurotransmitters [that humans do]. And [our] psychiatric drugs work on dogs.
Q: How would you describe your relationship with animals?
Grandin: Well, when I first started working with animals, I started looking at what cattle were seeing when they went through [stockyard] chutes. And at the time, I didn’t know that I was a visual thinker, that other people tended not to see these things. But it was obvious to me and I found if you take the distractions out of a facility—whether it’s a vaccinating facility or a meat plant—they go through the facility more easily.
Animals are sensory-based thinkers; they’re not word thinkers. It’s all about what they see, what they hear, the tone of the voice. They can tell whether it’s happy or whether it’s angry by the tone of the voice. It’s a sensory-based world; it’s not a word-based world. Get away from verbal language, then you’ll start to understand animals.
In my book, Animals in Translation, I talk about the “black-hat” horse who was abused by somebody wearing a black hat. He became terrified of black hats. White cowboy hats were fine. Black hats were bad. You see it’s specific, because it’s a picture.
Q: Can you give us an example of a situation in which an animal might see or perceive something differently than a human?
Grandin: First of all, a lot of our animals don’t see red, so they’re dichromat. So they’re going to see red as gray and a lot of blue, yellow and green probably. But it’s a sensory-based world.
Think about when the dog checks out the local tree. He knows who’s been there, how long ago where they there, are they a friend, are they another dog he doesn’t like? It’s like checking out the gossip. There’s a smell complexity. It’s sensory complexity we can just imagine.
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For more about my novel manuscript, The Elephant Box, click here. Why a circus blog? Learn more here.
The Elephant Box 
Very interesting story!