I think classical conditioning happens a lot more than we realize it, with both good and bad consequences.

I haven’t actually read the pig paper yet, so I can’t comment on it and what they found besides for what Grandin says.

I think Grandin sometimes gets off the mark with her own interpretations and theories, so I do try to be careful with what she says. “Animals Make Us Human” is chalk full of information about animal emotions, much of which is purely her theorizing. We can’t know emotions, we can only know and interpret the behavior we see.

However, she has done great things for the welfare of many production animals (beef cattle, swine, layers, broilers) and I think she does have many good ideas for improving animal welfare. I like her approach—rather than attacking and alienating people in industry, she looks objectively at where we are now, what direction we should be headed in, and what steps we can be taking to improve welfare. (Including helping advocate about positive training for cats, dogs, horses.)

Mary

What happens in a lot of classical conditioning situations is that it is done by people without intention and can increase the anticipation (aka stress situation) which results in aberrant or stereotypical behavior.

Livestock, zoo animals, and pets all pick up on the nuances of patterns in the daily routine and even if you don’t use a particular stimulus intentionally–they exist whether people are clued into the subtle triggers or not.

Pacing, barking, trotting, and other behaviors escalate in many patterned situations.

This is one of the reasons I prefer that handlers NOT be predictable.

I wrote about this some time back (before IMATA did a discussion forum on this) called Consistency versus Predictability as related to training errors.