Cl4—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, June 20,1981
Animals punching time clocks? Ani
Read our story about working animals. Then color
these characters to get them ready for work.
Some animals perform jobs better than man
Since prehistoric times, humans
have domesticated and trained
animals to help them perform
onerous chores. It started with
caveman training dogs to help m
the hunt, and today people are still
dreaming up new schemes to make
animals do their dirty work.
Over the years pigeons,
especially, have been found to be
cooperative workers. “During the
four-month Prussian siege of Paris
in 1870, pigeons carried hundreds
of thousands of official and private
messages to and from the outside
world,” says the National Wildlife
Federation’s bimonthly
publication. “The messages were
inserted in a small goose quill and
attached by waxy silken thread to
the strongest tail feather.”
During World War II British
forces dropped pigeons in baskets
from airplanes so that local
residents could retrieve them,
attach any information that might
be of interest to allied forces and
then release the birds. After cir
cling the area once or twice the
pigeons would head for home,
perhaps hundreds of miles away
Researchers now think pigeons
may have a future as assembly
line inspectors checking for
defects in drug capsules or elec
tronic equipment, for example.
Human inspectors tend to make
errors about 15 percent of the time,
whereas pigeons make errors only
one percent of the time, one
psychologist found
“And they don’t get bored,” adds
National Wildlife. “Studies have
found that they can remain on the
job for three days straight without
sacrificing accuracy. The birds do
loaf on the job, though, so most
pigeon projects call for three birds
inspecting in tandem, each a check
on the others.”
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r I ;
The technique used m training
pigeons and other animals is called
positive reinforcement, developed
by B.F. Skinner, the famed
behaviorist. It involves using food
as a reward when, for instance,
a pigeon spots a defective drug
capsule and ignoring wrong
behavior. Animals are not starved.
The reward is part of a daily
ration.
British submarine commanders
employed this technique during
World War 11. Their submarines
would release large amounts of
bread in the water, and gulls would
flock to it. After a while, the birds
gathered naturally at the sight of a
long, dark shadow sliding un
derwater. Spotters ashore alerted
the authorities. No one o knows how
many German U-boats' fell victim
to a flock of hungry gulls.
Positive reinforcement has also
been used to tram macaques,
short-tailed monkeys, to harvest
coconuts from the tallest palms in
the field of southern Thailand. And
in Boston, a capuchin monkey
named Hellion does household
chores for a 24-year-old man who is
paralyzed from the shoulders down
as a result of a car accident.
Hellion can turn on the lights, put
cassetts into a tape recorder,
retrieve food from the refrigerator
and feed her owner.
The military has a long history of
putting animals to work. In one
battle with the Romans, Hannibal
set elephants m his front lines,
ready to charge. His plan back
fired, however. Spooked by
trumpets and irritated by the
enemies’ darts, the elephants
turned and stampeded into their
own cavalry.
Today, the U.S. Coast Guard is
training pigeons to spot orange,
yellow, and red the colors of life
Blue Collar Beasts?
jackets, buoys, rafts, and flags.
The pigeons will be carried in a
plexiglass bubble beneath a
helicopter and will peck at an
electrical switch when they see
these colored objects floating on
the ocean below.
The Navy, meanwhile, has long
used sea lions and other marine
mammals to retrieve or deliver
objects at great depths. “Ap
parently,” says National Wildlife,
“they work better than humans,
who require scuba gear, decom
pression chambers, medical
Who me? Work!? Those other animal&.may mean. Besides, l*d like to see the guy that
be dumb enough to work, but I keep busy would try to make me work..."
running around on the range all day looking
personnel, good weather, and a few
days to complete a mission.”
A Navy porpose has carried tools
and messages to aquanauts in a lab
200 feet below, off the California
coast. Sea lions have recovered
antisubmarine test rockets at
depths of 490 feet And a killer
whale has been trained to recover
dummy torpedoes from depths of
1,600 feet.
During World War I, pigeons
were commonly used as “spies,”
carrying messages back and
forth across enemy lines.
Whenever the gentians occupied
new territory, they made it a
practice to destroy'd!! the pigeons
in the area. An estimated one
million Belgian, pigeons were
captured or killed in that war.
Probably the most famous was
Cher Ami, a plucky British racing
pigeon. When an American bat
talion advanced too far ahead of its
lines,, it was surrounded, and
neigher humans nor birds could
get through heavy fire to report the
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