Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behaviour

  • Temple Grandin &
  • Catherine Johnson
Scribner/Bloomsbury: 2005. 368 pp. $25/£16.99 0743247698 0747566682 | ISBN: 0-743-24769-8
An eye for detail: Temple Grandin believes her autism helps her to see things like a cow does. Credit: R. WINARD

There are two remarkable things about Temple Grandin. The first is that she has arguably done more than anyone else in the world to improve the welfare of animals in a practical way. Her major contribution has been to go into places that most of us would probably prefer not to think about — slaughterhouses — and imagine what it would be like to be an animal on its way to being killed. She has dramatically improved the welfare of these animals, not by making any expensive modifications to the slaughter plants but by suggesting simple changes that cost nothing, such as removing a yellow coat hanging over a grey fence, or altering the lighting to eliminate shiny reflections from a puddle. By removing stimuli that frighten cattle and cause them to stop and pile up on one another, the cattle move more easily, they don't slip and fall, and the use of electric goads is almost unnecessary. These things are all very simple and effective. It's just that no one had thought of them before.

The second remarkable thing about her is that she is autistic.

In Animals in Translation, Grandin argues that these two things are intimately connected. Her autism, she believes, gives her a remarkable insight into the way animals see the world. Animals, like autists, concentrate on detail. It is obvious to her that the yellow coat would be a scary stimulus to a cow, but the rest of us, concentrating on the bigger picture, would simply not realize unless it was pointed out to us. If Grandin's claim that her autism helps her to see the world through the eyes of other species sounds far-fetched, we have to remember her phenomenal success in making a difference in practice. Millions of animals are now moving through slaughterhouses more calmly because of what she has seen through her autistic eyes.

In some ways, this book is profoundly shocking, or at least it would be if it were not written by an autist. “Autistic people are closer to animals than normal people are,” she writes. “Autistic peoples’ frontal lobes almost never work as well as normal people's do, so our brain function ends up being somewhere in between human and animal.” Imagine anyone else saying that and getting away with it. But part of the power of this book is its innocence (her word too) and its genuine insights into a completely different way of thinking and seeing. Political correctness is not part of her world.

Grandin also states categorically that she doesn't have an unconscious and cannot repress unwelcome thoughts or emotions. This is one of many areas in which she has difficulty understanding normal people. She cannot understand why they deny what seems perfectly obvious to her, such as that something isn't going to work or shouldn't be said because it would offend people. Hearing her side of the story is a bit like being introduced to another culture by someone from that culture who has taken the trouble to find out which bits you are going to struggle to understand. Grandin straddles two worlds and, remarkably, can operate in both. If we want to understand her world, some of our preconceptions about what can and cannot be said will also have to be toppled. Being shocked out of our usual way of thinking is part of the process of understanding what it is like to be her.

At times, it is difficult to work out whether this is a book about animal behaviour with insights from autism, or a book about autism that uses animal behaviour to explain what it is like to be autistic. A major achievement of the book is that is both, and it should be read as such. If you disagree with some of the things she says about animal behaviour or brain function, you keep going because of the fascinating insights you are gaining into her experiences as an autist; and if you find yourself disagreeing with what she says about autism, you have the testimony of a unique human being about her life with animals.

Catherine Johnson has put Grandin's words into a form that is accessible to readers without any prior knowledge of either autism or animal behaviour. At the same time, people working in these areas will be given insights into the connections between these apparently diverse fields that will stick in the mind and change the way we look at both.