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The Joys and Pains of Being an Animal

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By DWIGHT
GARNER

Published: January 20, 2009

Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to
Decode Animal Behavior” (2004) occupies a special place among the animal books
of the last few decades. Ms. Grandin’s autism gives her a special understanding
of what animals, whether house cats or cattle, think, feel and — perhaps most
important — desire. There is a revelation on almost every page, and Ms.
Grandin’s prose (she wrote with Catherine Johnson) is ungainly in the best
possible way: blunt, sweet, off-kilter and often quite funny.

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to next paragraph

Joel Benjamin

Temple Grandin

ANIMALS MAKE US HUMAN

Creating the Best Life for Animals

By Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson

342 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

Related
An excerpt from "Animals Make Us Human" (pdf)

Ms. Grandin’s new book, “Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for
Animals,” also written with Ms. Johnson, picks up where “Animals in Translation”
left off. It has a slightly different focus: she concentrates this time on the
emotional rather than the physical life of animals, although the two are clearly
related.

There is a good deal of rehashing of material from her previous book, and she
leans more here on the ideas of others than she did before. But to remark that
“Animals Make Us Human” is a slightly lesser book than “Animals in Translation”
is like saying Randy
Newman’s “Good Old Boys” is a slightly lesser album than “Sail Away.” If you
liked the first one, you’re going to like the second.

Ms. Grandin bases many of her observations in “Animals Make Us Human” on the
work of a Washington
State University neuroscientist named Jaak Panksepp who identified a series
of core “emotion systems” in animals: seeking, play, care and lust (on the
positive side) and fear, panic and rage (on the negative).

“The rule is simple,” Ms. Grandin writes. “Don’t stimulate rage, fear and
panic if you can help it, and do stimulate seeking and also play.” Ms. Grandin
employs Dr. Panksepp’s terms throughout “Animals Make Us Human,” but they are
really only a framework for her more interesting riffing and observations.

There are provocative chapters here on dogs (Ms. Grandin quibbles with some
of the alpha-male ideas of Cesar Millan, television’s “Dog Whisperer”) and cats.
Ms. Grandin is at her best, however, when she is talking about animals like
cows, pigs, horses and chickens, as well as wild animals and those in zoos.

Ms. Grandin has designed humane and stress-free slaughter systems that are
used now to process about half of all the cattle in the United States and
Canada. There is some cognitive dissonance here. She is often asked, she tells
us, “How can you care about animals when you design slaughter plants?”

Her reply is that “some people think death is the most terrible thing that
can happen to an animal.” She argues that “the most important thing for an
animal is the quality of its life.”

She adds: “The more I observe and learn about how dogs are kept today, I am
more convinced that many cattle have better lives than some of the pampered
pets. Too many dogs are alone all day with no human or dog companions.”

She worries about the “totally adversarial” relationship between animal
advocacy groups and the livestock industry. She has kind words for companies
like McDonald’s and Wendy’s (she has consulted for both), which are forcing
their suppliers to treat animals more humanely. But she also praises activists.
“The big companies are like steel, and activists are like heat. Activists soften
the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.”

One of the major points in “Animals Make Us Human” is the importance of
hiring and training good people to work with livestock. Strong, caring managers
are needed; bullying and sadistic employees should be fired; and because
turnover in these industries is high, constant training and retraining are
necessary, as well as constant auditing from the outside.

Ms. Grandin is in favor of almost total openness — she’s among the writers
who believe that slaughterhouses should have glass walls. “No animal should
spend its last conscious moments in a state of terror,” she writes, and any
visitor should be able to observe that they do not.

Ms. Grandin loves solid, declarative sentences: “Cattle hate being yelled
at”; “Pigs are obsessed with straw”; “Cows like to learn new things.” So I’ll
add one of my own: We’re lucky to have Temple Grandin.

But here’s something I thought about while reading “Animals Make Us Human”:
while I would not want Ms. Grandin to discontinue her work with animals, even
for a day, as a reader I’d be curious to watch her unusual mind play over other
topics.

She has already written one very fine memoir, “Thinking in Pictures” (1995).
I can envision a second, with a slightly different focus. Human beings can often
be made to feel like cattle, especially in large cities. What would she have to
say about subways, housing projects, stadiums, prisons, office cubicles,
long-distance buses, shelters for the homeless, elevators or, I dunno, the
security line at La Guardia? What are her thoughts about urban planning in
general?

I’d spend $26 to find
out.

More Articles in Books
» A version of this article appeared in print on January 21, 2009, on
page C1 of the New York edition.

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Past Coverage

HOLIDAY
BOOKS; Animals (December 7, 2008)

The
Caged Bird Speaks (November 9, 2008)

Audubon's
Species (October 7, 2008)

Night
Moves (June 22, 2008)

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