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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.

2. How Animals Perceive the World
    T he problem with normal people is they’re too cerebral. I call it being abstractified.
    I have to fight against abstractification constantly when I’m working with the government and the meatpacking industry. A big part of my job now is trying to make sure all food animals are given a humane slaughter, but even though there’s a lot of support for animal welfare it’s getting harder to make good reforms instead of easier. It’s harder because today government regulatory agencies are all run by people who’ve been to college, but who in some cases have never even been inside a meatpacking plant, let alone worked in one. It’s terrible. I keep telling them, “You have got to go out there and visit a plant.”
    Things were different in the 1960s when I was visiting my aunt’s ranch in Arizona. That was my first experience with the United States Department of Agriculture. At that time livestock were being attacked by screwworms all over the West, Southwest, and Mexico. Screwworms are the larvae of a fly that lays its eggs in open wounds. The wounds can be from anything—a cut, a tick bite, or even a newborn’s navel. (Screwworms can attack humans, too, and like to lay their eggs inside the nostril.) When the eggs hatch the maggots come out and eat the animal alive. Other maggots eat dead flesh, but screwworm maggots eat live flesh and they are deadly.
    Up until the USDA got involved, my aunt had been digging the maggots out of wounds on her horses by hand. She would pick each maggot out with a tweezers, drop it on the ground, and squash and stomp it. Then she’d blob screwworm paste all over the wound tofill it up so no flies could get back in and lay more eggs. The paste looked like black roofing cement. If you didn’t do this, the horse would die. A screwworm infestation was a hideous, horrible thing.
    The USDA fieldworkers figured out how to get rid of the screwworms by taking advantage of a quirk in their reproductive system. The screwworm’s developmental sequence goes from egg to maggot to pupa to fly, and the USDA bred a bunch of screwworms and irradiated the males when they reached the pupa stage, making them sterile. Then they put the pupae in little paper boxes, like a Chinese takeout box, and dropped the boxes out of airplanes. The flies would come out of the boxes and mate with lots of females, and the females they’d