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probably makes them panic. Also, cows don’t live in houses with electricity and drive around in cars at night the way we do, so they don’t develop a mental category called “eyes adjusting to an abrupt change in illumination.” Last but not least, animals are so intensely sensitive to the visual world that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that sudden huge changes in illumination are physically painful in some way. People don’t enjoy the experience of moving from brilliant light to a dark room, either, but for a cow it must be overwhelming.
    Maybe when those cattle started to walk out of the sun into the chute they felt like they were going blind for real. They might have been having the same reaction you or I would have if we were driving down the street and suddenly went blind every time we drove through an underpass. If you went blind every time you drove through an underpass you wouldn’t drive through underpasses.
    I always tell people: whenever you’re having a problem with an animal, try to see what the animal is seeing and experience what the animal is experiencing. There are lots of things that can upset an animal—smells, changes in routine, exposure to things he hasn’t experienced before—and you should consider all of them. Anything in the sensory realm can upset an animal. But don’t forget to ask yourself what your dog, cat, horse, or cow may be seeing that’s bothering him.
    At that feedlot, all they needed to do was get more light inside the barn. They could have fixed the problem themselves in five minutes if they’d been able to think about the chute from the animal’s point of view. The answer was right in front of them. I really do mean directly in front of them, because the people who built the barn in the first place had installed a big sliding garage door on the front of the barn that the owner had left closed.
    When I told him all they needed to do was open the door, it turned out that it hadn’t been opened once since the lot was built. They didn’t even know if they could open it after all this time. But they got a couple of guys to put their shoulders up against the door, and after a few minutes of straining and grunting they got the thing open. That was the end of the problem. The cows all walked into the chute just as nice as could be.
    W HAT P EOPLE S EE AND D ON’T S EE
    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