December
2005/January 2006
Can
Autism “Decode” Animals?
Book Review by Karen Davis
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Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of
Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson (New York: Scribner,
2005). $25 hardcover. 368 pages.
People and animals need to use their faculties, and curiosity is
an important faculty. So people and animals need new things to stimulate
their brains with.—Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin is an animal science professor at Colorado State University
and a consultant to the meat industry. Catherine Johnson specializes
in neuropsychiatry and the brain. Johnson has two autistic sons, and
Grandin has autism. Both writers have doctoral degrees and have published
other books. In Animals in Translation, they team up to argue that
autism is “a kind of way station on the road from animals to
humans—putting autistic people in the perfect position to translate ‘animal
talk.’”
People with autism have impaired social and communication skills and
do not relate to the emotional states of other people, so it is fair
to ask how autistic
people actually compare neurologically and experientially with competent adult
animals with complex social and communication skills. Are autistic “translators” of
animal life common and credible enough to support the contention that they’re
in a perfect position to do this work? How do autistic perceptions of nonhuman
animals compare with those of non-autistic animal empathizers? Bypassing these
questions, the authors contend that animals and autistic people are alike in
having mostly simple, unambivalent emotions. According to Grandin, animals “never
have psychodrama” (apparently she never spent time in a lively chicken
yard). “Children don’t either,” she says (oh, really?). “Emotionally,” says
Grandin, “children are more like animals and autistic people, because
children’s frontal lobes are still growing.”
This is a familiar grouping: normal human children, mentally-challenged human
adults, and nonhuman animals are pitted together as having the same basic level
of (in)competence and a simple pictorial view of the world as “a swirling
mass of tiny details.” Grandin writes that even though autistic people
have normal-sized brains, they have “trouble making connections.” Their
brains “function more like a child’s brain or an animal’s
brain, but for different reasons.”
Grandin says she loves animals, especially cows, yet she fully upholds the
human right to own, control, manipulate, mutilate, buy, sell, inseminate, incarcerate,
and slaughter animals, ship them into outer space, and have sex with them for
business purposes. (In, “How to Make a Pig Fall in Love,” she describes
men masturbating captive pigs—getting sows to “stand for the man”—and
concludes that these pig breeders “respect the animals‚ nature,
and they do a good job with their animals.”) Wanton and ignorant abuses
are of course unacceptable, but economics and the property status of animals
are sacrosanct. The question is not whether we should slaughter cows but “What
does a cow headed to slaughter need in order to have a happy life?”
Matthew Scully, in his book Dominion, marvels at how Grandin tries to balance
her purported empathy for animals with “her consistent support of intensive
farming and its economic objectives.” Grandin is commendable for getting
meat industry people to pay a bit of attention to the animals they slaughter
(at least when she’s around) and how the slaughterhouse (or “packing
plant”) environment affects animal behavior. Getting cows to walk “nicely” to
their death improves the bottom line (animal handling, meat quality and profits)
while reducing animal stress.
The Facts
Animals in Translation is a compilation of often contradictory scientific data,
personal anecdotes and conclusions (e.g. animals can’t have mixed emotions
though examples in the book show otherwise), little of which is owed to the “mysteries
of autism.” And Grandin is an iffy witness at best. Noting for instance
that chickens show pain following debeaking (“trimming”), she goes
on: “Ranchers trim chickens’ beaks because chickens get into horrible
fights and will peck each other to death. The vet trims off the sharp point
so the chicken can’t use it as a knife blade.”
For one thing, it isn’t usually a “vet” who debeaks chickens
at the hatchery but an ordinary assembly-line worker, and Grandin says nothing
to enlighten the uninformed reader that the pecking to which she refers is
abnormal behavior brought on by caging, crowding, boredom, filth, fear, disease,
intentional food deprivation and other destructive factors of human origin.
Her discussion of “psycho hens” focuses on the side-effect of high-strung
anxiety in egg-industry hens bred to be pure white and “feed-efficient.” She
attributes their “beating their own feathers off against the sides of
their cages, until they were [are] half nude” and their “violence” to
the point of killing each other, to “warped” genetics, without
a hint about the role of crowded cages. Indeed, Grandin says several times
in the book that horrible fights in the wild are not compatible with survival—“Few
adult animals apart from humans ever attack each other so violently that one
of them dies.”
In the section called “Rapist Roosters,” Grandin describes the
abnormal violence that has begun to appear in roosters used for breeding “meat-type” offspring
(the six-week old baby birds consumers know as “chicken”). These
so-called broiler breeder roosters often destroy the hens they’re locked
up with in the breeder houses. Noting that “If roosters killed hens in
nature, there wouldn’t be any chickens,” Grandin cites a poultry
researcher’s claim that these types of roosters attack the hens because
an unexpected consequence of breeding them for abnormally fast growth and overgrown
muscles for human consumption is that they don’t do the courtship dance
that tells the hen to crouch into a sexually receptive position. When the hen
tries to escape, the rooster attacks her with his spurs or toes and slashes
her to death. Grandin lulls the lay reader—who may not get her little
joke about “solving” the problem by “culling” the worst
offenders from the flock—into thinking it’s been fixed. “I
saw some of these chickens just a few months ago,” she says, “and
they all behaved just as nicely as can be.”
This pathological rooster behavior shows what happens when you breed obsessively
for a single trait at the expense of overall well-being. You get what Grandin
calls “warped evolution,” and humans adjust to “the bad becoming
normal”—a good way to describe the entire factory farm system and “evolved” depravity
that Grandin defends.
Her explanation of why “broiler breeder” roosters attack hens isn’t
satisfactory anyway, as we have these very kinds of chickens here at our sanctuary,
and I can tell you that the hens crouch during the spring and summer mating
season if you so much as lay your hand gently on the backs, or they will walk
or run a little, then stop and crouch abruptly as you come up behind them,
at which point I say to them, “At ease.”
Grandin’s proclaimed paucity of emotion, compartmentalized emotions,
and subnormal sensitivity to pain, her focus on technical fixes and disconnected
brain functioning, her contention that slaughterhouse cattle don’t know
they’re going to die and claim of being unable to watch horror movies
because the images stay in her conscious mind (because she doesn’t have
an “unconscious” like normal people, she says), while having a
stomach for the slaughterhouse but no stomach for vegetarianism (it makes her
sick, she says, and isn’t part of our “animal natures,” which,
elsewhere she says, humans have outgrown), dents the notion that she’s
an animal-friendly “savant.”
Many of the problems Grandin presents herself as uniquely spotting in the slaughterhouse
environment are the kinds of things that any sensitive non-autistic outsider
sees on entering an inbred culture comprising attitudes and customs that are
so “normal” to the enculturated as to be invisible to them.
When Bad Becomes Normal
At the beginning of Animals in Translation Grandin strategically distances
herself from the cruelty of the B.F. Skinner school of animal experimentation,
as she rightly observes, it is “totally artificial. What animals do in
labs is nothing like what they do in the wild—so what are you actually
learning when you do these experiments? You’re learning how animals behave
in labs.” In actuality, the whole world is becoming, and much of it already
is, like one of those labs, and Grandin shows no evidence of seeing this.
This laboratory is already being extended into outer space, and Grandin is
complicit, not because she’s autistic but because she epitomizes normal
societal schizophrenia—our “love” for animals is compatible
with subjecting them, anthropomorphically, to human-contrived dysfunction,
degradation, family and social dismemberment, imprisonment, prurience and death,
as long as it’s done “humanely.” If we ever become extinct, “the
bad became normal” should be our epitaph.
Karen Davis, Ph.D., is President of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization
that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
To learn more, visit www.upc-online.org.
