Temple Grandin – a Woman Who Breakes Barriers

Mary Temple Grandin broke barriers by changing the stereotype of spokespersons with autism which educated individuals on the effects of autism and animal awareness.

Temple Grandin became a leading influencer for animal rights activism all while facing the hardships of being a person with autism. This feat did not come easy for Grandin. As Temple grew out of her infancy, her parents worried about her health. She wasn’t speaking and she was very sensitive to the touch. Her father called her “stupid” but her mother was concerned. She took Grandin to the doctor and at two years old, Grandin was diagnosed with Autism. At this time in history, autism was perceived as brain damage. From that point forward Grandin began breaking barriers.

Grandin’s mother took the role to help support and raise her daughter with little to no knowledge about her disorder. Unlike her mother, her father was very unsupportive and abhorrent during Grandin’s young ages, even before she was diagnosed. He would call her names and slurs. And after being diagnosed, he insisted that she was insane and that she should go to a mental institution.

Grandin had difficulty learning how to communicate verbally, it wasn’t until she was four years old could she begin speaking whereas, most children begin speaking at 18 months to 2 years. Her mother put her into speech therapy; Grandin says during an interview with Medscape

“She (her mother) started working on me when I was 2 and a half years old, and then when I was 3, my mother hired a nanny who spent hours doing lots of little kids' turn-taking games. I can remember, after lunch, I had a rest period when I could revert to autism, and I would pick the fuzz off the rug and eat it, and dribble sand through my hands – I can remember just getting hypnotized doing this. If I had been allowed to do that all day, I wouldn't be here now.”

Once grandin learnt how to speak, it was easier to express how she was feeling. Her sense of hearing was affected the most, she states

“My senses were oversensitive to loud noise and touch. Loud noise hurt my ears and I withdrew from touch to avoid overwhelming sensation.”

While other kids could easily learn the subjects, Grandin had difficulty keeping up. Nevertheless, Grandin did not allow her disorder to hold her back in class. Grandin is an autistic savant. This means that she has unusual cognitive abilities, such as a photographic memory and excellent spatial skills. She learned in pictures

“Like if I say to you, think about a church steeple, I only see specific ones and I can tell you exactly where they're at. And I was shocked to find out that most of the people see a generalized sort of vague generalize generic steeple. For me there's no generalized one. There's only lots of different specific ones.”

However, she struggled with math and French since it was difficult to correlate pictures with these subjects. As soon as temple enrolled in school, she had to deal with bullying. Her classmates didn’t quite understand her autism and how it affected her. She once got expelled from school for throwing a book at a girl who bullied her. She dealt with a severe amount of anxiety during her highschool years. Grandin’s desire to treat animals started on her aunt’s ranch in Arizona.Temple would go to her aunt’s ranch in her free time and take care of nine horses. When at the ranch, she felt a bit of a connection to the animals. Grandin explains that she could relate her hard-to-understand emotions with animals,

“Well, my emotions are not as complex. I have a difficult time understanding how somebody can be jealous and love somebody at the same time. I definitely have emotions, but fear is one of my main emotions, and of course, that's one of the main emotions of animals”

This is when she started caring about animal cruelty.

'When I entered puberty, I began experiencing panic attacks and severe anxiety,I had observed cattle retrained in a squeeze chute, and I noticed that some of the cattle seemed to relax with the firm pressure. I tried using the cattle squeeze chute on myself, and then I designed a squeeze machine for personal us”.

She built what she called the squeeze machine to help cope with her tantrums. None of her peers or even her school psychologists couldn’t seem to understand the machine but to her, it was like a hug without the over stimulation.

After prioritizing her education and working hard, Grandin graduated from Hampshire Country School in 1966. Four years later she went on to receive a bachelor's degree in psychology from Franklin Pierce College. Then in 1975 she achieved her master’s degree in animal science from Arizona University which led to her earning a doctorate degree in animal science from Illinois University in 1989.

While studying to accomplish her degree in animal science, Grandin was engaging in the cattle industry. She also was employed as the editor of ‘Arizona Farmer Ranchman’

When Grandin was 39 years old she published her first autobiography titled, “Emergence: Labeled Autisitic” in which she outlines her life growing up in a time when autism was not understood nor accepted and how she contributed to animal studies.

Once she had received her doctorate she began working to help better slaughterhouses. Grandin made machines to make the merciless slaughter homes, humane. She exclaims, “Well, I've done a lot of work on putting in curved chute systems. And one of the reasons this works is because the cattle can't see people up ahead, they just sort of go round and round and round like the Guggenheim Museum.”

She also states,

“And then I designed a device called the center track restrainer system, and it replaced older-type conveyor systems, and it holds the cattle in a more comfortable manner, and they just follow through. They just keep following the animal in front of them, and they just go in there, and they're shot, and they don't know what's happened.”

McDonald’s, Burgerking, and ConAgra use Grandin’s method for slaughtering livestock which results in better produced foods.

'Our facilities have been designed with Dr. Grandin's philosophy in mind, and over the years we have continued to improve on this low-stress handling approach. We know these processes work based on how calm and quiet the cattle stay and ultimately how much easier it is for us to get our work done,' said Patsy Houghton, Ph.D. and owner of Heartland Cattle Company in Nebraska.

Grandin explains in her essay, “Animals Are Not Things”, that animals may be property in today’s society, however the law asserts protections amongst them.

“First of all, an animal does not understand an abstract concept such as being property or non-property. It is going to experience an environment that humans can manipulate the animal’s detriment or well being.”

Grandin goes on to explain that animals do feel pain and gives scientific reasoning through nervous system complexity.

As previously mentioned, Grandin has a photographic memory as a result of her disorder. She explains in a speaking at Stanford University that this allows her to make sense of how life might be as an animal.

“Autism helped me understand animals because I think in pictures. Since animals do not have language, their memories have to be sensory-based instead of word-based. In my early animal behavior work, I noticed that cattle often balked and refused to walk over shadows or pass a coat hung on a fence. In the 1970s, it was a new idea to look at things that cattle were seeing. There is scientific evidence that animals think in pictures, and that this learning is very specific. When an animal is trained to tolerate one type of activity, it does not easily transfer to another similar activity.”

Grandin truly helped improve the livestock industry by developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior and informing others of it through authoring 60 pieces of either essays, books, films, etc. regarding the topic.

“Temple's insight into animal behavior and low-stress handling is the foundation of the BQA assessment, which is the scoring system we use to verify cattle are handled properly. Her contributions are monumental,' said Ryan Ruppert, director, Beef Quality Assurance, National Cattlemen's Beef Association.