Animal scientist Temple Grandin often drops to her hands and knees to crawl through chutes in meat processing plants, striving to see the world the way pigs do - and fix what's spooking them. Sometimes it's the reflection on a puddle of water. Sometimes it's a change in floor surface, or a sudden draft of air. Sometimes it's a tiny piece of flapping plastic that no human would notice.
Humans tend to "live surrounded by our ideas of things" rather than noticing what's actually there, Grandin says. Animals, on the other hand, tend to notice every detail of their environment. Without language to process the world, animals navigate their lives by "thinking in pictures."
So does Grandin. Because the 57-year-old scientist has autism, Grandin's thought process works differently from that of most humans. While a normal brain will search for the "big picture," automatically screening out irrelevant details, Grandin's brain lacks such a filter. She believes that many, perhaps most, autistic people experience the world as animals do: "As a swirling mass of tiny details. We're seeing, hearing, feeling all the things no one else can."
Because she can discover what makes agricultural animals fearful, Grandin has revolutionized the way livestock is treated in this country. Her humane and innovative systems for handling cattle, sheep and pigs, used in most of the nation's stockyards and slaughterhouses, have created standards of animal welfare and auditing guidelines adopted by the American Meat Institute and required by many fast-food corporations such as McDonald's.
An associate professor at Colorado State University, Grandin has written extensively about autism as well as animal behavior. Her new book, the best-selling Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, reveals more about how animals think and how humans can better understand them. She recently answered questions about her findings.
What's the first step in trying to understand animals?
To really understand animals you have to get away from language and into sensory-based thinking where you associate pictures or sounds into categories of good things or bad things. Animals store their memories in pictures or sounds or smells or tastes. They can't do it any other way.
