A Sailor Who Lacks a Boat

me:

i’m obsessed with this painting called tomato king and i’m even more obsessed with the man who drew it. his name is stuart dunkel and he is a classical oboeist and he also paints tiny little oil paintings of mice living their best lives. he looks like this.

Me: you will not earn what you desire by banging the cabinet door.

My cat: This is a test of wills, is it not? We shall see if your ability to put up with my incessant banging outlasts my eternal lust for snackie treats. Years of conditioning have hardened me for this purpose. bang bang bang

Me: ksst!

My cat, throwing herself to the ground like she's been shot: Oh! Oh I have been assailed in my own home! Have mercy, have pity! Surely in the cruel darkness of your heart there is some mote of goodness that might stay your hand! Do not strike me, I pray you!

Me: ok

Here is a book titled “The Pleasing Trees Of St Kew” - St Kew is a civil parish area in Cornwall, in England. It’s a very pleasant book listing all the trees the author particularly likes in that area. There are quite a lot of them.

So one time when I was doing my high school volunteer hours at this animal shelter, she showed up and said she had some kittens to drop off and some to pick up. I thought it was weird but I figured she fostered them and so I assumed she fostered cats and that explained the amount of random cats I’d see at her place (turns out she’d lure strays in for spaying/neutering and then take them to shelters around the area for socializing and ideally adoption).

So she dropped off three extremely socialized and friendly kittens that I guess she had picked up 2 days prior. And then grabbed a kennel thing with five feral-ass kittens one of the donors found near a dumpster.

I had seen them earlier but the day manager told me they had just gotten them the day before and they had not been socialized because they were waiting for “the expert”. And I guess that was this lady. So she puts on these thick black gloves and goes “Sweetheart can you hold this for me? I gotta prep the babies”, and I held the kennel still while this woman just 100% no fear sticks her hand in there and grabs a kitten that is NOT happy about it. She then grabbed it by the head gently, wrapped a tea towel or some type of cloth thing around it, and then laid it down to do something that was like equal parts origami fold and burrito roll?? Idek. Point is the kitten was PISSED. But it couldn’t move or anything because she wrapped it and secured the wrap with one of them big old timey baby pins. And she did it to the others as well. It didn’t even take her 5 minutes lmaooo. Then she put them back in the kennel and went home.

I asked the manager about it and he said “Oh yeah she’ll be here in 2 days to drop them off. She has a M E T H O D.” And just as he said she showed up two days later, with 5 perfectly friendly kittens in tow!

Sometimes we obvs have to handle kitties/other animals that don’t want us to for things like medical issues/getting them to a safer location/etc. - when that’s done obvs the kindest thing is to minimize their stress however we can (providing hiding areas/touching only as necessary or invited by the animal/using rewards and distracted/etc)

This isn’t that. This is “flooding” for the purpose of “learned helplessness”.

Flooding is basically providing a whole lot of the stimuli the animal finds overwhelming/aversive until they’ve become desensitized to it, essentially stacking triggers in a way that overwhelms the animal’s senses and they become desensitized to them.

Learned helplessness is the process through which an animal (or person) is forced into experiencing a stimulus while the means of reaction or escape are removed from them. They can’t engage with that fight/flight response regardless of how much pressure is applied, their appeasement behaviors or reactions etc. are completely ignored while they are forced to comply with the stimulus until they give up and no longer react since reaction/any appeasement or other behaviors have never gotten them away from or stopped the stimulus

Read more here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dogtrainingnation.com/dog-training/dealing-with-learned-helplessness/amp/

The downsides: it’s a very easy way for someone to get hurt (human or animal).

It also doesn’t teach the animal an APPROPRIATE response or make them less fearful of the trigger- if anything they’re more afraid of it, they just can’t get away.

It also removes a lot of the warning signals we should actually appreciate like appeasement behaviors or hissing/growling/small nips or swats. They’ve learned that those behaviors don’t do anything/don’t help, so they are much more likely to escalate to a much more dangerous or larger behavior they haven’t tried yet with minimal warning - like a full on fight for survival/major bite. This is how you get people saying “they have no warning before they attacked, the dog/cat bit out of nowhere”. It’s just categorically false. They always give some sort of behavior signal, and if not it’s only because it was drilled out repeatedly. Taking the smoke alarms out of the fire detector to stop the beeping isn’t going to put out the fire.

Of course the caveat is that it can be much faster than truly doing the work through more ethical methods with a more solid behavioral base, since you can just go right in and throw everything at the animal directly. That might be a very real factor when dealing with young animals going through socialization periods/adoptions/all sorts of shit in a short period of time. For some things the flooding might be “minor” in that WEEEEEE know it ultimately won’t hurt the animal and they’re not actually at risk and it may actually feel nice for the animal - but the cat doesn’t know the pat isn’t going to hurt/that petting is what the human wants and we’re not a scary monster gonna eat em. This kitten is doing everything possible to say “please don’t eat me and please don’t make me fight u” and be a nice kitty.

The new director practices positive reinforcement techniques and retrained all of us so we can socialize kittens without potentially traumatizing them. It sometimes takes longer, but they’re absolutely MUCH happier without the learned helplessness that this method fosters.

This video (and the two following it) shows how Ginger went from attacking people to trusting humans again through the use of positive reinforcement and humans respecting her boundaries.