detailsâ was a core difference between animals and people. The first small detail I saw spook a cow was shadows on the ground. Cattle will balk at the sight of a shadow. Then the workers get out the electric prods, because they have no idea whatâs scaring the cattle, so they canât fix it. I first saw cattle get spooked by a shadow thirty years ago, and Iâve been seeing it ever since.
The next detail I noticed was that cattle were afraid to enter dark places. That got me on the track of thinking that differences in contrast were important for animal behavior, which is true, but it didnât tell me that detail per se was the issue.
I finally realized that animals perceive way more details than people do when McDonaldâs hired me in 1999 to help them implement the animal welfare audit Iâd originally created three years earlier for the USDA. They had a list of fifty meatpacking plants they purchased beef from, and they had announced that all fifty plants had to pass my audit or get thrown off the list.
McDonaldâs was already auditing their suppliers for food safety, so they asked me to train their auditors to monitor animal welfare, too. It was easy to train the auditors, but it wasnât easy for all the plants to get in compliance, even though they wanted to. Good intentions werenât enough. We had to help plants figure out what they were doing wrong.
One of the criteria the plants had to meet to pass my audit was that employees couldnât use the electric prod on more than 25 percent of the animals. Any plant that couldnât get its prod usage down to 25 percent had to analyze what the problem was and correct it. But sometimes no one at the plant could see why their animals were balking.
Always, when I would go out to the plant to analyze the situation, I would find two things.
First, the problem was always a small detail, usually a detail the humans hadnât even noticed. The entrance to the chute might be too dark, or there might be a bright reflection on a metal bar that was causing the animals to balk.
Second, to get their prod scores down a plant had to correct all the details that were scaring the cattle. They couldnât just correct some of the details or most of the details. They had to correct all of the details.
There was this one hog plant on the list that had four things they had to fix. Three involved lighting and the fourth was that they needed to put up some metal sheeting to prevent the pigs from seeing people moving around up ahead. This is something most people donât realize: cattle and hogs raised for food are domestic animals,but they arenât naturally tame unless theyâve been socialized to humans as babies. So they get jittery when theyâre walking through a chute or alley and see people moving up ahead of them. All domestic animals, including cats and dogs, have to be socialized to people. The plant had to make all four corrections to get their prod scores down. They couldnât just fix three and let it go at that.
That turned out to be true at all the plants. No plant had zillions of bad details; about the most any plant had was six. But if they had four bad details they had to correct all four. For the animals every detail was equally bad and equally important. Thatâs what made me realize that details are the key, and thatâs when I started preaching the importance of detail in all my talks and all my articles and books.
Only highly visual people react to details the way animals do. I knew one interior designer who was supervising a renovation of her own bathroom and the contractor cracked one of the marble tiles. She couldnât stand it. Every time she went in the bathroom she saw that crack. It jumped out at her and sheâd get upset all over again. She knew she was different, but thatâs what made her good at her job. She saw the visual details most people didnât.
Nancy Minshew, a research