Temple Grandin on Animals and Activism

by Kristina Chew · 2009-01-24 21:51:00 UTC
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Ok, I am blogging about a book I haven't read, animal science professor and expert designer of livestock facilities Temple Grandin's new book about the feelings and emotions of animals, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals. The book is currently #13 on the New York Times best-seller list. Today's TBR-Inside the List column quotes Grandin saying that "cats seem autistic" (a point made in this book) and includes a quote that bears repeating here, with a nod to our friends over at Animal Rights:

Considering the animal rights movement, Grandin — who has drawn on her insights as an autistic person to design chutes that keep cattle calm before slaughter and developed a monitoring system for McDonald’s — writes: “I think people in general are becoming abstractified. You always hear about autistic children ‘living in their own little world,’ but these days it’s normal people who are living in their own little world of words and politics. Things have changed. People who wanted to help animals used to study animal behavior. Today they go to law school.” Not that she’s down on all activism. “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.”

Ah yes----walking down Kennedy Boulevard to meet Jim at the PATH train in Jersey City last night, every other person (certainly if they were a teenager) was oblivious to police sirens, car alarms going off, and horn-honking thanks to whatever tunes were streaming into their ears via their MPG devices or whatever text message they were composing or reading.

Charlie, on the other hand, could not have been more "in the world": We hadn't made the walk down Kennedy Boulevard since our trip to California and it was just fun to hurry past Bellaluna pizza and the travel agency, closed behind the metal grillwork, and the deli with 50 cent cans of soda and hookah pipes, and the Joyce Leslie store which was having a supersale ($3, $6, $9!). Charlie stopped at every intersection and waited for the light to change and when a bunch of teenagers in North Face jackets imitated his humming and laughed, I turned around and said, quietly and firmly, "he has autism." 

"Ok," said one young man, and kept walking, quietly now, in the opposite direction.

I'm not sure if I'm able to turn steel into "pretty grillwork and make reforms," as Grandin says she does, but if I can "soften the steel" a little---that would be enough.

Photo by didbygraham.

Kristina Chew
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