have read a bit more of "animals in translation", and while I still don't
know why the kids poop on the floor and how to stop it, I did get a few
more insights.  the main one is between the difference between pain and
suffering, and now that I am aware of it, I will be a lot more careful
post surgery.  she differentiate between pain and suffering for me.  so
post surgery, a ferret might feel a lot of pain (especially given the
types of surgery they go through), but they may act fairly normal because
they are not suffering i.e. the pain doesn't bother them.  she mentions
a dog who showed no signs of suffering post surgery so the owner wasn't
restricting her activity, and the dog almost got into pretty serious
problems because she wasn't healing properly (her activity was keeping
the wound open internally).  I'd only had a few surgeries on my ferrets,
but because they'd always acted like they are not in pain, I usually let
them run around after a day, and all I make sure is that they can't climb
stuff.  now I'll probably make them rest a lot more.
 
another point that stuck in my mind is on animal welfare.  people get
lost in the details and forget the big picture.  she pointed out
differences betweeen inputs and output in plant inspections.  i.e. you
want to observe whether any chickens are lame rather than look at the
farm's records to figure out if they are turning off the lights at least
4 hours a day (apparently turning off lights slow down a chicken's
growth, and if farms don't do that the chicken have support problems),
or other details that may cause chickens to have abnormal growth.  one
reason is that you are observing the animals, another reason is that you
won't be at a farm when they are supposed to have their lights off, so
you'll be trusting paperwork, which can be easily forged (you really
need to read the book for details).  and her point is that people get
distracted by the myriads of things that can cause a problem and forget
to look for whether there is an actual problem or not.
 
I think the above can be translated to say spot inspections on petstores.
what we really want to do is to go into a petstore and look at the
ferrets there and see that they are bright eyed, active, and clean,
because any thing else could be faked.  for example, you may go into a
well maintained petstore and looked at the ferrets there, and complain
because there's a lot of poop, the food dish is empty and there's very
little water in the bottle.  however, it may just be that you went in
just before a cleaning and check up is due.  you could also go into a
petstore where the food dish is full, the waterbottle is clean, and
there's almost now poop in the cage, and it may be that the petsore had
just done its weekly maintenance in that cage.  if you look at the
ferrets themselves, however, there would be no deceptions.  in the first
store, the ferret would probably be active and curious.  in the second
store, the ferret may be dehydrated and listless.  but if you just look
at the environment, you may decide the first store has a problem.  so it
seems a checklist of a store should focus on the animals, and then if the
animal has a problem you assume the store may have a problem and give
them a list of things to fix that may have caused a problem with their
animals.  another advantage with this system is that you have many less
things to look for, since each problem in an animal could be caused by
multiple things.  as well, if you have a hundred things on a check list
and a few of them are wrong, it looks a lot less critical than 1 or 2
things on a checklist of 10.  I hope my explanation is not too confusing.
 
anyways, I find this book fascinating, even more so than her book on
"genetics and the behaviour of animals".  I'm a Temple Grandin fan
for sure now.  I will be picking up a copy of her book "thinking in
pictures".  her mom also wrote a book called "a thorn in my side" about
raising Grandin that could be quite interesting as well.  I am somewhat
envious of the ability of autistic people to think visually.  I wonder
if there's a way for the rest of us to improve our ability to think
visually.
 
here's grandin website, which also have a lot of intesting articles for
reading:
 
http://www.grandin.com/
 
Selina
[Posted in FML issue 5071]