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Temple Grandin, PhD (Assistant
Professor of Animal Sciences, Colorado State University) is one
of the world’s foremost authorities on livestock facility design
and humane livestock handling. The most unusual thing about her
accomplishments is that she is autistic, the victim of a
developmental brain disorder. Autism affects areas of the brain
that are involved in abstract thought, language and social
interactions. Born in 1947
in Boston, Massachusetts, her father was a real estate agent and
her mother a writer, singer and actress. Temple did not talk
until she was 3 ˝ years old and she vocalized her frustrations
by screaming, chirping or humming. She displayed the classic
symptoms of her condition; she didn’t want to be held or
touched, and was prone to burst into raging temper tantrums when
provoked.
In 1950 her parents were told she
was autistic and brain damaged and should be institutionalized.
They refused to take that route, however, and her mother devoted
her time to improving Temple’s life—enrolling her in a course of
speech therapy and reading to her continually at home. The
family hired a caregiver to play with Temple and keep her from
retreating into a corner. When she was old enough for school,
her parents found private schools with sympathetic staff, people
who could work with the child’s special needs.
Temple now credits this early
intervention with pulling her out of her shell of isolation.
As a child, she had panic attacks and was obsessed with anything
that rotated or whirred, but was soothed by doors. She spent a
summer during her teenage years at her aunt’s cattle ranch in
the West, and this changed her life’s course. She was fascinated
by the squeeze chute in the corral, and climbed into it. She
found it had a soothing effect on her nervousness. After she
went home, she built her own squeeze chute in her bedroom—an
early version of what would later be used in many schools and
treatment centers for autistic children. Her summer on the ranch
also helped her sense that animals and autistic people both rely
on visual clues. She thinks in pictures, rather than words, and
this helped her to understand the way animals see and react to
their environment.
After high school, she graduated
with honors from Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire in
1970. Medical professionals discouraged her from using the
homemade squeeze chute, and didn’t understand the things she was
trying to learn, but eventually she found a mentor who
recognized her abilities and interests. That teacher suggested
she try to learn why the squeeze chute worked for her, by
studying science. She entered graduate school in animal science
at Arizona State University to get her masters degree and began
working with the cattle industry. Later she earned a doctors
degree from University of Illinois.
She worked for more than 20 years
in agricultural industry before becoming a lecturer and
professor of animal science at Colorado State University. She
was livestock editor of the Arizona Farmer Ranchman for 5 years
during the 1970’s, and became an equipment designer for Corral
Industries in Phoenix, Arizona in 1974. She recognized that
cattle, like autistic humans, experience stress and anxiety when
confronted by certain sights and sounds, so she redesigned the
typical chute for slaughterhouses.
After working for that company,
Grandin realized she had poor communication skills; she was
often blunt--which alienated her coworkers. She decided she
would be better working on her own, and founded her own
equipment and consulting business (Grandin Livestock Handling
Systems) in 1975.
Her ideas were met with
skepticism from the livestock industry at first, but meat
processing plants quickly realized that cattle hesitated less in
chutes of her design, and plant efficiency improved. Grandin’s
recommendations for improving conditions for hog slaughter
(housing them in less crowded conditions--and keeping them cool
by hosing them down if necessary—before slaughter) resulted in
lower stress levels and better meat quality. In pork, high
stress prior to slaughter leads to meat classified as PSE (pale,
soft, exudative—“oozing”). Her improved conditions for cattle
led to reduced levels of glycogen in the muscles (affecting the
pH balance of the meat) and hence a reduction in “dark cutters”.
Her autism, which was originally
considered an impairment, became an asset in her life work. Her
inner understanding and empathy for how animals perceive their
world, react and cope with it enabled her to improve the way we
handle them. Autism helps her to see things as animals do, and
has given her a unique perspective.
She has also helped further our
knowledge about autism, and is now a prominent speaker and
author on this subject. She told her personal story in her book
“Emergence: Labeled Autistic” (published in 1986), which stunned
the world. Up until then most professionals and parents assumed
that autistic children could never achieve a productive life and
that it was impossible to modify and control the characteristics
of autism. This book was released again 10 years later when she
was becoming prominent in her field of livestock handling
Helping the Livestock Industry
Today Grandin is an associate professor of animal science at
Colorado State University. Her writings about cattle handling,
flight zone and principles of grazing behavior have helped many
stockmen reduce stress on their animals, and her cattle
facilities and curved chute designs are used worldwide. She has
developed objective scoring systems for assessing livestock
handling and more humane slaughter systems.
Her many areas of research
include cattle temperament, reducing dark cutters, effective
stunning methods at meat plants, genetics and behavior of
domestic animals, safe handling of cattle and horses, and
safe/humane restraint. She teaches courses on livestock behavior
and facility design and consults with the livestock industry on
design, handling and animal welfare. Today many stockmen use her
livestock handling facility designs and more than half the
cattle in the US are processed at packing plants using a
restraining system and innovations that she developed, that
comply with the humane-handling guidelines she wrote for the
American Meat Institute. She credits her developmental brain
disorder for her success as a scientist and her innovations in
livestock facilities.
“When I first started working on
these things back in the early 1970’s, people thought I was
crazy. One of the first things I noticed was that cattle would
go through some facilities very readily and in other facilities
were balking. I would get down in the chute and realize that
they were seeing shadows, or looking directly into the sun, or
there was a coat on the fence or a chain hanging down, or
something else distracting them,” says Grandin. The people
working cattle were not taking these things into consideration.
Cattle notice small visual details that most people fail to
notice.
“I began designing facilities,
and did some of my first ones in 1974 and 1976. One reason I
wanted to make the chutes curved is because then when the cattle
are entering the chute they can’t see all the people and
commotion down at the other end. Also, cattle have a tendency to
try to go back the way they came from. A curved chute takes
advantage of that tendency,” she says.
During the past 3 decades her
facility designs have become standard for many livestock feed
yards. “A lot of people ask me why my curved layouts are so
spread out and big. Chutes don’t work very well if you jam
cattle up too tightly,” she explains.
“There are a lot of curved
facilities out there that don’t work, and the reason why they
don’t work is because the cattle are jammed in too tight and the
corners are too sharp, or they dead end at the squeeze chute.
One thing that’s very important is that as an animal is standing
in the crowding pen, looking up the curved chute, he must see
that there’s a place to go. If it dead-ends at the squeeze
chute, and that’s what he sees, that’s the worst mistake you can
make. Also you want to lay out a round crowd pen so the cattle
are coming around the bend, and you can use their inclination to
want to go back where they came from,” she says.
Low Stress Handling
She also stresses the fact that people need to stay calm
when handling cattle. “A calm animal is always easier to handle
than a scared, excited one. When we can get people to calm down,
stop screaming and yelling, and stop using electric prods,
cattle can be worked easier. People should not be carrying
electric prods around. Those should only be picked up if an
animal absolutely refuses to go into the squeeze chute. Another
tip is to only fill the crowd pen half full,” says Grandin.
“I always want people to measure
their handling. So often I’ve gone out and worked with people
and they get their handling really nice, and I come back a year
later and they’ve reverted back to their old rough ways. I call
that bad becoming normal. The only way to prevent that is to
measure handling. If you put 100 cattle through the chute, how
many fell down? It shouldn’t be more than 1 percent--otherwise
you have a slippery floor or are getting them too excited. How
many cattle ran into something like a gate or a fence? How many
did you use your electric prod on? How many cattle are bawling
when you catch them in the squeeze chute? If they are bawling,
you are either hurting them or they are very upset.
Obviously, if you are branding
them they are going to bawl. But otherwise, you should be able
to bring them up the single file alley and catch them in the
squeeze chute without any vocalization or direct response to the
squeeze chute or prod. You can measure this.” If you keep track
of these things and put a number on it, you can tell if your
handling is improving or reverting back to bad.
“One of my biggest frustrations
has been to teach people how to do it correctly and then have
them slip backward. About 20 percent of people learn it well and
can keep their handling methods good, but most of them lapse
back gradually, and it can be so gradual they don’t realize its
happening. So you have to keep track,” she says.
“Another thing is that you want
cattle to exit the chute walking or trotting. How many went
faster? I call those speeders. How many speeders did you have,
coming out of the squeeze chute? The simplest way to measure
exit speed is by whether they are walking or trotting versus
running or jumping. You can easily count how many speeders you
had. I want most of them at a walk or a trot, and I want that
measured. This is what I’m most adamant about now; I want
handling measured, with people keeping track of it with numbers.
Then they can tell if their handling is getting better or
worse,” she says. This is the only way to monitor handling,
except for the people who really want to learn stockmanship and
take it seriously, focusing on it all the time.
“Most people are not willing to
take time to learn the fine points of stockmanship. But if
people get the animals scared and excited, it takes 20 minutes
or longer for those animals to calm down. It would save time to
go slowly, and not get them all scared and excited,” she says.
“Some people are such good
stockmen that they don’t need good corrals, but a good facility
helps, and also helps keep people from getting hurt. Safety is
another reason to have a good design. Many people get hurt by
cattle, if they get the cattle excited,” she says.
Train the Cattle to Get Them Used to Different Things
Another thing people don’t always understand is that cattle
differentiate between a person on a horse and a person on the
ground. It’s very important that cattle learn how to work with
both. “There’s nothing worse than cattle coming into a meat
packing plant with no prior experience of people on foot. I have
seen this, where even at the feedyard everything was done on
horseback — even bringing them into the vaccinating chute area.
Then when cattle go to the packing plant they freak out when
they see people on foot, and it can be very dangerous,” says
Grandin.
Some of the wildest cattle she’s
ever encountered at a slaughter plant were some that had never
been handled on foot. In checking the background on those
cattle, she found they had come from a feedlot where all the
handling was very calm and low-stress but it was all done on
horseback—even when moving them into a chute for vaccinations.
To ensure that cattle are easy to
handle both horseback and on foot, they need some experience
with both. Cattle are sensory-based thinkers; information is
stored in their brain as specific pictures and they see a person
on foot and a person on a horse as two totally different things.
If they are used to one, they feel safe and relaxed. But
anything new and different is immediately frightening. They must
be carefully and quietly introduced to new experiences before
they leave the ranch or feedlot.
To work cattle with horses, on
foot, or with dogs, they need to be trained to work that way.
Cattle that have never been worked with dogs can also be
dangerous and unmanageable. Cows tend to become extremely
agitated and usually try to chase the dog, viewing it as a
predator to be driven away from their calves. Even the cattle
that are used to being herded with dogs can become more wild and
dangerous if you try to handle them in confined areas (like a
crowding pen, sorting alley or chute) with dogs.
Grandin says that some of the
dangerous behavior she’s seen in cattle from certain feedlots
includes kicking at people when confined in close quarters.
These were cattle that had been worked with dogs. A dog biting
at cattle that can’t get away will cause the cattle to kick
–sometimes lashing out with both hind feet. Using dogs
inappropriately just teaches cattle to kick and they may then
kick at a human when similarly confined.
The secret to having calm,
unstressed, easy-to-handle cattle involves thinking like they
do. This includes working with them instead of against them,
understanding the way they view the world around them, and
getting them used to new experiences gradually and quietly. It
also means treating them with understanding and respect.
Grandin’s efforts at educating people, giving stockmen a better
look into animal thought/emotions, has helped improve stock
handling on many farms, ranches, feedlots and packing plants.
Grandin’s Contributions to Understanding Animals and Autism
In her career with the livestock industry, Grandin has
written numerous articles, book chapters and technical papers on
animal handling, and 45 scientific papers for journals. She has
also tried to help people understand the bond we have with
animals, and the way animals think. Two of her 7 books have been
on the New York Times bestseller lists. One of her recent books
is “Animals Make Us Human”.
Her book “Animals in Translation:
Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior” was
dictated to her co-author by telephone, and published in 2005.
In it she states that people were animals once, and when we
became human beings we gave something up. She says that being
close to animals brings some of it back.
Even though her passion is animal
science and humane treatment of animals, she is also very
involved with helping educate people about autism. Many children
have milder forms of this disorder and she wants to help make
sure these children can be helped to develop to their potential
Another book, “Thinking in
Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism” included a
foreward written by the eminent neurologist Oliver Sacks. He
also wrote a book about Grandin’s incredible achievements,
titled “An Anthropologist on Mars”. With co-author Kate Duffy,
Grandin wrote “Developing Talents: Careers for Individuals with
Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism”. She lectures
frequently on autism and urges people to view the condition in a
different light. She says, “We’ve got to have a lot more
emphasis on the talent, and not so much emphasis on the
disability.”
THINKING IN PICTURES
UNDERSTANDING AN ANIMAL’S BRAIN
In late October 2009, Grandin was the keynote speaker at
Missouri State University College of Veterinary Medicine’s
Human-Animal Bond lecture series. She told her audience that
she, being autistic, is a total visual thinker. Animals’
thinking is also sensory based. “Their memories are going to be
in pictures, smells and sounds. They are very sensitive to tone
of voice. There’s a whole world of cognition without having
language,” said Grandin.
She said that animals’ emotional
systems are very capable of fear, rage, curiosity, separation
anxiety and most of the feelings we humans experience. These
emotions have been studied and mapped in neuroscience but have
not been studied in veterinary medicine; what is known in one
scientific field has not been discovered or applied in another.
“Neuroscience has its journals.
Veterinary and animal behavior sciences have theirs, and people
usually don’t cross disciplines—but I have always tried to,”
said Grandin. All too often one scientific field is not aware of
the findings of another. And the animal science profession (and
stock raisers) are generally not aware of any of these studies
and papers.
During Grandin’s graduate work in
animal science (earning her doctorate from University of
Illinois) she took neuroscience classes and began reading
neuroscience journals extensively. The studies that were
published in this field were of great interest to her because
she realized she had special insight into animals’ emotions and
thinking.
“If you don’t have a verbal
language, the only other way the brain can store information is
in sensory-based ways. There is no other way. People with autism
process information in the primary visual cortex. When I access
my memory, I go into the graphics files, which in most people
are hidden under the language,” explained Grandin. There is
clinical evidence that this is the way animals think.
“The brain makes file folders and
puts sensory-based information in them. In a normal human,
language covers up the more sensory parts of the brain. I don’t
think with the language parts of the brain. The desktop is
language. Underneath is the visual, sensory-based part.”
Note: for Temple Grandin’s
facility designs and other cattle handling information, look at
her website:
www.grandin.com - She also has videos on YouTube. One of
those describes the right and wrong way to lay out handling
facilities. She has written several books including her recent
“Humane Livestock Handling” (2008), “Thinking in Pictures,”
“Animals in Translation” (which was a New York Times best
seller), her textbook “Livestock Handling and Transport,” and
her current best seller “The Way I See It: A Personal Look at
Autism and Aspbergers.” An HBO movie about Temple Grandin’s
life, and the amazing influence she’s had in changing the way
people view animal handling and autism, will be coming out in
February.
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