Temple Grandin Brings Me to Tears (of Frustration): Animals Make Us Human Reviewed

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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There are some things about the book that I appreciate: She does know something about cattle and writes, "Cattle hate being yelled at." The emphasis is her own, and so is the insight--and it is excellent. I like, too, that she insists that animals, all animals, have feelings and that too many veterinarians and physiologists deny feeling and emotions in animals. She seems to genuinely feel bad for the animals: "One of the biggest frustrations in my career has been that I'd do an installation at a plant and train the workers and get the handling real super-good [sic] then I'd come back a year later and find they'd reverted to using the electric prod and screaming at the cattle. This is true everywhere - ranches, feedlots, slaughterhouses" (p. 168).

But the thing is, she can never take the next step to questioning what she does. Well, that is not true. She did question it once, but quickly found she could enter the river called De Nile within seconds. Consider this extraordinary passage: "I vividly remember the day after I had installed the first center-track conveyor restrainer in a plant in Nebraska, when I stood on an overhead catwalk, overlooking vast herds of cattle in the stockyard below me. All these animals were going to their death in a system that I had designed. I started to cry and then a flash of insight came into my mind. None of the cattle that were at this slaughter plant would have been born if people had not bred and raised them. They would never have lived at all" (p. 297).

That seems to have pacified her conscience forever! One moment of true insight, when she cried, was quickly stifled by a dumb cliché. It is an argument used by many people who become very annoyed if you say that we wouldn't want our children born into a world where they would be murdered, no matter how humanely or painlessly, after having lived for just a few months or years.

Denial seems to be Dr. Grandin's main defense: When she is shown a tiger kept in a cage on a big ranch, she writes, "This tiger looks fine to me, and if you took his cortisol levels I bet they'd be normal." She says this because "he had an enriched social and physical environment when he was a cub," so anything that happens to him later is fine! "His current environment seems to be OK for him," she writes (p. 22). Will she justify anything? No, she too has her line in the sand, but it is so far into the desert that the meat industry feels safe to lionize her and elevate her into a minor cult figure: she lets them off the hook.

She is a master at this ability to overlook the deeper significance of something she knows. I cannot tell whether it is a profound naïveté or something else entirely. For example, on p. 259 she describes big game hunting safaris that can cost up to $40,000. Her comment? "These prices will support a lot of local people ... sacrificing some warthogs, or wildebeests that are held on private land may be necessary to motivate landowners to preserve their land as wildlife habitat." It is highly unlikely that this money will go to the locals who need it, and surely an advocate for animals, as Dr. Grandin says she is, would recognize there are other ways to benefit both people and animals, for example, wildlife tourism.

She seems never to have met a cliché she couldn't learn to love: "A dog never does grow up mentally, you have to keep on being a good parent and setting limits" (p. 36). She just takes some common wisdom she reads about and accepts it without a moment's thought. Dogs are neotonous, true, but of course they grow up mentally. The neoteny refers to something completely different (how domesticated animals retain juvenile traits). Of course dogs grow up mentally, like every other animal. A grown dog is different from a grown wolf, but that is true of any two species of animals. Konrad Lorenz may have argued that the grown dog is nothing but a juvenile wolf, but we know that he so misunderstood domestication that he was willing to make an odious comparison of over-civilized Jews to more natural Germans. We know where this led, although it took many years for people to learn the full extent of Lorenz's Nazi connection (it was not just the ideology; he was up to his ears in Nazi work as well).

I know--PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) gave her a Visionary of the Year award a few years ago. What was the justification? Something like "she did more to lessen the suffering of animals than any person on earth." It makes a kind of twisted sense to me, but I put the emphasis on "twisted." You cannot spend your life devising methods to kill animals and claim you are doing so out of love. Well, let me correct that. She can certainly claim it. But we should not accept it. Was it Bergman or Polanski who once said something to the effect that he loved women so much that he wanted to kill one someday? God save us from such love.