NEWSBYJEFFREY MASSON

I just received and read the book by Temple Grandin Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (with Catherine Johnson, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). It is a very puzzling book. For example, nowhere in it have I found any explanation for the title. I can easily believe that animals make us human, but I would dearly love to know how Temple Grandin understands this rather cryptic phrase. I am also not clear on what she considers the "best life for animals," her subtitle and an idea to which she does not devote much space. She is far more loquacious on how to kill animals, which I would have thought was antithetical to creating the best life for them, although she argues, and many people agree (though not me), that a "good" death is part of a "good" life.

Also, "good" can mean different things to different people. For example, when talking about cows, her specialty, Dr. Grandin writes, "Being separated from mama is a gigantic stress for baby." True, very true. But what does Dr. Grandin take away from this? "They gain less weight because of fear and stress." In other words, separating the calves from the cows is bad business; the calves gain less weight and are therefore "worth" less (in the eyes of the rancher). What is good for the cows would be to live the life they were evolved to live and not to be slaughtered long before their time. This is something Dr. Grandin does not even consider as part of the good life. It is a bit like writing a book about life on death row and focusing on which facilities are least expensive. It is missing a very large elephant in the room!

Dr. Grandin says that she loves animals, and I am sure she believes this is true, and I cannot argue about what she feels. But one does wonder. She writes, "Both pigs and children with autism are obsessed with the things they like to manipulate," forgetting that the pigs are in an entirely artificial environment. There is no reason whatever to believe that her descriptions of what pigs do in farms correspond even remotely to their natural behavior in the wild. Moreover, for somebody who loves animals, her comments often have a bizarre tone, even a ghoulish one, to them. Take, for example, what she says about pigs being killed (p. 198): "Today in a large, well-run audited pork plant you can carry on a normal conversation next to the pig stunner and hear only a few intermittent squeals." This sentence gave me the chills and made me wonder whether we inhabit the same universe. Don't those squeals, however few they are, keep her up at night? They would me. I really don't think Dr. Grandin realizes the effect of some of her statements on the reader.

She can be very sensitive. Writing about chickens, she describes a terrible example of cruelty on the part of the people killing them and notes, "These are intelligent, sentient, living birds. It's horrible" (p. 210). On the next page she even describes how some of the older birds ("spent hens"--a phrase she dislikes as well) are killed by being sucked up in a vacuum truck that is used to clean sewers.

And yet just two pages later, she goes into a detailed analysis of the gas used to kill these chickens, saying that in her view "some discomfort during gas inhalation may be a small price to pay to eliminate stressful live shackling. Gasping and head shaking may be acceptable, but if the chicken tries to escape from the container, the gas mixture must be changed." Her compassion has been overwhelmed, it would seem, by a professional interest in killing. I know how angry some people become when one takes the name of the gas ovens in Auschwitz in vain, but how is it possible to avoid thinking about German engineers standing around discussing the various ways to eliminate Jews? Dr. Grandin never asks the only relevant question here: Is it right to do this at all?

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Shortly after making the switch from lacto-ovo vegetarianism to veganism, I picked up a wonderful book titled The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals. Had I not already made the switch, I wouldn't have made it through the book without doing so (and indeed, the vegetarian author became a vegan as a result of researching and writing the book).  Because so many people, including many vegetarians and vegans, simply don't realize how complex and wide-ranging nonhuman animals' emotions, thoughts, and relationships really are, I've been encouraging people to read it ever since reading it myself. The stories contained within are funny, devastating, heartwarming, and astonishing. I am honored today to share a guest post from the author of that book (and a couple dozen others), Jeff Masson, whose most recent work, The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food, will be published in March. -SE
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There is a scent of change in the air these days when it comes to food. More and more Americans are concerned about where the food they eat comes from. Is it local? Is it organic? Does it come from a small farmer? People are turning away from the large conglomerates that produce most of our food for good reasons: they recognize that these agribusinesses are harming our planet and our health. Books like Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (who was even being suggested as a possible food czar--President Barack Obama read his "Letter to the Next President" and seems to have taken in the lessons), the work of Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame in school gardens, and the efforts of many other authors, chefs, and food activists are increasing the general public's knowledge and sensitivity to matters of great concern to our future.

I am impressed--I am even awed. But I am also greatly concerned that far deeper-reaching concerns are not in the forefront of these authors' minds and works. I refer to the 10 billion animals a year who are killed (if the word "murder" were not so loaded with human freight, it would be a far more descriptive term) for their flesh. My two boys, 12 and 7, recently asked me about this: "Dad, can it really be true? Do we really kill that many animals every year in the United States, just to eat them?"

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