Colorado Authors

Author Grandin Offers Hope for Animals, Autistics

By Jenny Shank, 6-10-05

Despite driving rain outside, the Boulder Book Store was packed Thursday night for an appearance by Temple Grandin. Fans who missed out on seats scrambled to secure spots where they could peek over bookshelves for an unobstructed view of the riveting Dr. Grandin. Grandin, who earned her Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois, is a professor at Colorado State University, a consultant for livestock industry facility design, an author, and something of a media phenomenon in part because she is a high-functioning autistic who is able to explain her perceptions with great precision. She spoke generally about her most recent book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior before fielding questions for over an hour, enlightening the audience about the dangers of breeding skinny-headed Collies, the humane way to slaughter a cow, and why computer scientists should not mate with one another.

It was difficult to believe that Grandin has a condition that hinders her ability to socialize—the crowd was eating out of the palm of her hand, laughing at her every punch line, gasping at her descriptions of cruelty to animals, and cheering her advocacy for a fresh approach to autism.

Confident, blunt, and foursquare, Grandin seemed every bit the consummate Westerner, sporting a glinting silver belt-buckle and elucidating a moderate position on animal rights that basically amounts to: Eat meat, but don’t traumatize the animal that produces it. Her work has transformed the livestock industry, and according to her website, “In North America, almost half of the cattle are handled in a center track restrainer system that she designed for meat plants.� When Grandin began consulting in slaughterhouses, she reported that “it wasn’t the horror show that some of the animal rights activists say it is, but it wasn’t a garden of roses either.�

At animal facilities that she’s designed in Greeley and Ft. Morgan, she eliminated everything that would provoke a fear response in the cattle, getting rid of startling reflections, blocking the sight of moving equipment or people, illuminating dark chute entrances, and installing non-slip flooring.

She reported that “fear is the main emotion in animals and in autistics,� and the audience’s questions were evenly divided between the two topics. Animal lovers wanted to know whether she ate meat (she does) and “Can free range chickens actually be happy?� According to Grandin, they can indeed, but that happiness comes at a price of 30-40% higher production costs.

Several audience members asked questions that related to their own autistic children; one man asked how she would redesign schools to better suit the needs of autistic children. She replied that in terms of high school, lower-functioning autistics get along fine because they are put in special ed and the regular students leave them alone, but the higher-functioning autistics, “the science nerds and the weird kids get tortured and teased.� She reported that she had been kicked out of school because she threw a history book at a girl who teased her.

The solution for high-functioning autistics is to send them to community college, encourage them to take classes online, and put them in with their intellectual peers. “It’s unfortunate that schools are getting rid of woodshop, welding, drafting and other classes that autistic kids would be good at and that teach skills they could use to earn a living.� Grandin cited her book Developing Talents: Careers for Individuals with Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism as a manual on how to steer autistic children toward fruitful careers. She said the main problem with current treatments for autism is that “we’re pounding away at the deficits instead of building what they can do for their careers.�

Grandin reported that autistics cluster in certain fields, particularly computer science and engineering, and as evidence of this, she cited that the zip codes from which her website is most commonly accessed for information on autism are those in Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft, and the Silicon Valley. She is a believer in the benefits of autism to society, saying that “If you eliminated autism from the gene pool, all you’d have was a bunch of social yackety yacks with nothing on the hardware, and no buildings with functioning lights.�

On the other hand, just as breeding for any one specific trait in animals results in “bad becoming normal,� Grandin said that because genetics account for 60-90% of autism, “if you take two brilliant computer programmers and put them together, they will end up with low-functioning autistic kids.�

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