Temple Grandin

by Annette Wood

  “She has good advice, gives clear instructions, and listens well,” Conny said. “I’ve gained a great deal of knowledge from her. For instance, I’ve become independent in my research. Part of the job as research assistant is being a teaching assistant and working with students.

  “And I’ve picked up a lot of information about autism. I didn’t know anything about autism before I met Temple. I’ve also learned a great deal about the livestock industry—cows, pigs, poultry.”

  Conny did her dissertation on cow/calf protection, including how cows that are calm may fail to protect their calves. She spent three months on a Red Angus ranch in Colorado to study how cows protect their newborn calves.

  Numerous studies have shown that beef cattle selected for a calm temperament improve weight gain and meat quality. However, some ranchers comment that tame cows are not properly protecting their calves from wolves. Some ranchers’ losses have exceeded twenty percent. Good protective behaviors will become increasingly important as wolves move into more and more states.

  Conny made a three-minute video for Beef magazine in June 2012. The article, “Study Examines Cow’s Protection Behavior,” by Temple Grandin and Cornelia Flörcke, appeared in Beef magazine in June 2012.

  Researching with Temple pays off. “Temple’s students get great jobs,” said Cheryl Miller.

  Dr. Kurt Vogel, a recent student of Temple’s, is on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin in River Falls, where he teaches animal welfare and animal physiology. His research interests include food, animal behavior, the ethics of animal use, and the impact of management strategies on welfare, physiology, and product quality. He receives rave reviews from his students and has earned the respect of beef journalists.

  Vogel has absorbed Temple’s lessons on the treatment of animals: “My point is that most of society still understands that beef and milk come from the cattle, pork comes from pigs, and chicken and eggs come from chickens. For the most part, they don’t know the intricate details of how to raise and convert these animals to meat, but that is not necessarily mandatory. If they choose to consume meat, milk, and eggs, then they have a legitimate right to know how the animals are cared for if they would like to. They also have the right to ask questions about these processes. Animal agriculture has a legitimate obligation to educate, answer questions, and fix any legitimate problems that are identified by interested consumers.”

  Vogel was raised on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and has always been interested in dairy cows. While working at a slaughterhouse for used-up dairy cows when he was nineteen, he developed a restrainer for the older cows, but couldn’t get it to function properly. One day the general manager called him into the office. Kurt was shaking when he appeared before the GM, because he thought he was going to get fired.

  “I want you to watch this DVD,” said the manager. He handed Kurt a video called Cattle Handling in Meat Plants, with Temple’s business card taped on it. “Go ahead and call my friend Temple,” he said.

  Kurt did. He and Temple found that they had a common ground in their interests. When he was ready for graduate school, Temple invited Kurt to work on his PhD at Colorado State.

  He was a research assistant for Temple Grandin from 2008–2010. His dissertation discussed the impact of management on milk and meat. He focused on the practical and on making positive changes.

  He said that Temple was a pragmatic professor. She gave vivid descriptions that were easy to picture. She was objective, not easily swayed by emotion. She called a spade a spade. And she is passionate about what she does. Because she’s so intense, her students hang on to every word.

  “Working with Temple was one of the highlights of my life,” said Kurt. Temple and Kurt visited slaughterhouses for dairy cows past their prime. “She understands what goes on inside an animal slaughterhouse. We built a bond, sharing inside stories about experiences in an abattoir.”

  Although she works ceaselessly, Temple understands that people have lives outside of research. “She was respectful of my relationship with my wife,” said Kurt. “She understood I wanted to have quality family time.”

  Another of Temple’s students who grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin is Wendy Fulwider. Wendy has a bizarre sense of humor and has the distinction of being able to make Temple laugh. Wendy was thirty-four when she started her bachelor’s degree in zoology at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. She met Temple in Quebec while working on her master’s in dairy management. She didn’t know Temple was famous. Temple hired Wendy as a graduate teaching assistant while studying for her PhD in animal behavior. “Those were the best years of my life,” said Wendy. Grandin, an inclusive professor, took her to ranches and slaughterhouses and autism conferences. Wendy wrote papers on wild animals and visited more than ninety thousand cows on 113 dairy farms in five states for her dissertation.

  In 2009, Dr. Fulwider became the animal husbandry specialist for CROPP (Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool Cooperative) in La Farge, Wisconsin. She has helped more than twelve hundred beef, dairy, egg, poultry, and swine producers understand the importance of meaningful and measurable standards regarding animal husbandry and the importance of these standards as part of an Organic System Plan.

  “Wendy created her own job,” said Cheryl Miller.

  CROPP is the nation’s largest organic farmer cooperative, with a diverse product line and a varying member base. It gives organic farmers a unique opportunity to market products under their own label. CROPP sells meat products under the “Organic Prairie” label.

  Organic foods represent four percent of total food sales, and it’s rising every year. Consumers are demanding food produced without antibiotics, hormones, and toxic pesticides. “Temple still calls me when she has a question about something organic,” said Wendy.

  In 2014 Fulwider began a job as consultant for Global Animal Partnership in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

  Temple’s students’ jobs vary, but most of them find extraordinary employment. Her influence and ideas will survive and thrive, not only through her books and videos, but also through those who have studied under her.

  PART II

  AUTISM

  CHAPTER 8

  AUTISM ADVOCATE

  Autism affects people of all races, incomes, ethnic groups, and religions. Temple speaks about people with autism every day. She’s also an advocate, one who supports a cause. “Too much emphasis is being put on the deficits of autism and not enough on the strengths,” she often says.

  An obvious deficit is the area of social skills. Being social is not everything in life. People with Asperger’s have been the doers, the inventers, the thinkers since the beginning of human development. “Some guy with high-functioning Asperger’s developed the first spear. It wasn’t developed by the social one yakking around the campfire,” Temple said.1

  Many of the great minds in history probably had Asperger’s. “You can find examples of inventors and engineers with instinctive insights into complex problems throughout history. Perhaps they were Aspergians too,” writes John Elder Robison in Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian.

  Einstein was a visual thinker who failed his high school language requirement. Yet in 1999, Time magazine named Albert Einstein the “Man of the (Twentieth) Century.” Three of his papers published in 1905 led to lasers, global positioning satellites, and the atomic bomb.

  Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and other computer scientists who must have had Asperger’s are credited with inventing the Internet. Mark Zuckerman, who created Facebook, has certain qualities of Asperger’s. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Apple products, had Asperger’s traits. The technology revolution of the twenty-first century has led to a mecca for Aspies, who feel comfortable with computers.

  Jennifer McIlwee Myers, who has Asperger’s, explains: “The computer’s just there. It doesn’t pick up on context. It doesn’t care how I’m feeling. It doesn’t care if my facial expression and body posture are correct. Exactly what I say, it does.”2

/>   Daniel Tammet, born in 1979 in England, was diagnosed with autism but went on to write Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, a best-selling memoir, and two other books. His work has been published in twenty languages. He recited pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours. Daniel has learned ten languages, including Romanian, Gaelic, Welch, and Icelandic, which he learned in a week. Who knows what talented people with autism will do in the future?

  People with autism have several strengths, one of which is the ability to develop systems. “A system is anything that takes inputs and delivers outputs. It could be technical, like a computer, natural, like the weather, abstract, like the field of mathematics, organizable, like a DVD collection, or motoric, like a tennis shot. What is important about a system is that it is predictable and can be controlled,” writes Thomas Armstrong, PhD, in Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Brain Differences. Systems feel comfortable to people with Asperger’s.

  Another gift of autism is the ability to see details. In her book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, Temple lists eighteen tiny details that scare farm animals, including reflections on smooth metal, metal clanging, and sudden changes in color of equipment. She has used her ability to pay attention to details in constructing equipment for animals.

  Many neurotypical people consider overattention to details as a deficit. However, it can be a strength. “An individual in the Congo had all the classic signs of autism, but was regarded as gifted by his tribe. He was a master weaver. His love of meticulous detail and patterns gave him an important niche in the community,” writes Thomas Armstrong.

  Creativity is one more strength of autism. Temple says, “Bottom up, details-first thinkers like myself are more likely to have creative breakthroughs just because we don’t know where we’re going. We expect surprises. An attention to details, a hefty memory, and an ability to make associations can all work together to make the unlikely creative leap more likely.”3

  Knowing the strengths, skills, and talents of people with autism gives one more respect for those who do not function well socially.

  Temple emphasizes that further exploration is needed in sensory issues, which are complex and prevalent among those on the spectrum. “A person who can’t imagine being in a world of sensory overload is possibly going to underestimate the severity of someone else’s sensations and the impact on that person’s life, even misinterpreting behavior,” she said.4

  Having grown up with severe sensitivities in the areas of touch and hearing, Temple is very much aware of how much sensory sensitivities influence quality of life. Yet research in this area is ridiculously scant.

  She wrote: “In 2001, I contributed an article to a big scholarly book on autism. More than fourteen hundred pages. Eighty-one articles in all. Guess what. The only paper that addressed sensory problems was mine.”5

  Perhaps autism researchers don’t realize how pervasive the problem is. “They can’t imagine a world where scratchy clothes make you feel as if you’re on fire or where a siren sounds like someone is drilling a hole into my skull,” Temple said.6 Unfortunately, people differ in their sensitivities, making it extremely difficult for researchers to study. “Something that was downright painful for me could go unnoticed by someone else,” says John Robison in Be Different.

  In spite of this difficulty and the skepticism that these sensitivities even exist, someone who has lived with sensory sensitivities or someone who has loved someone with sensory sensitivities is very much aware of the reality of their existence.

  “Sound sensitivity can make it impossible for some people on the spectrum to tolerate normal places such as restaurants, offices, and sports events. These extreme auditory problems can occur in both nonverbal individuals and those who are very high-functioning, like college-educated people with Asperger’s,” Temple explains.7

  Sounds can interfere with eye contact, which is important to neurotypical people. According to Temple, “Eye contact is still difficult for me in noisy rooms, because it interferes with hearing. It’s like my brain wiring only lets one function or the other, but depending on the circumstances, not both at the same time.”8

  If someone as mature as Temple finds eye contact in noisy rooms difficult, think about how difficult it would be for a child on the spectrum with sound sensitivities.

  “What a neurotypical person feels when someone won’t make eye contact may be what a person with autism feels when someone does make eye contact,” writes Temple.9 If neurotypical people were aware of this, they might better understand someone on the spectrum who doesn’t make eye contact.

  Any of the senses can malfunction. When my daughter Lisa was four, she screamed in fear when riding on the escalator. Since I also had one-year-old Michelle in a stroller, a trip to the mall proved challenging.

  Imagine my surprise when I found out years later that Lisa had visual processing difficulties. She had trouble learning to read and was diagnosed as dyslexic. Both dyslexia and her perceptions of the escalator can be traced to visual processing difficulties.

  Even when he was younger, my dad hated driving at night. He also didn’t like going into dark movie theaters because of “night blindness.’’ He had mild vision processing problems, too. A person doesn’t have to be on the spectrum to have sensory issues.

  Sensory disorders are not just an autism problem. Studies of nonautistic children have shown that more than half have a sensory symptom, and one in six has a sensory problem significant enough to affect his or her daily life.

  “Sensory issues are very real and I think they are more a matter of degree rather than being either present or absent in people,” Temple noted.10

  Temple has participated in multiple autism conferences across the United States as well as in England, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. She’s been to France and other non-English speaking countries to talk about autism, where her speeches are translated for local audiences.

  Along with writing books and speaking about her experiences at conferences, Temple advises parents of children with autism and the kids themselves at conferences and book signings.

  Betty Lehman, executive director of the Autism Society of Colorado, said, “When people have children and they say, ‘Maybe they’ll grow up to be president,’ we (parents of a child with autism) can say, ‘Maybe they’ll grow up to be Temple Grandin.’”

  “For people on the autism spectrum and people who work in the field, this is like meeting a rock star,” said Connie Erbert, an autism specialist in Wichita, Kansas. “Her story gives so much hope.”

  Mike Sieman of Cargill said, “I’d been to livestock conferences with Temple and she is esteemed there. But she has far more emotional impact on parents, children, and educators of those with autism.”

  Temple shares her life. She impacted me through her books because she explained how Jan, my autistic sister, can see and hear details others can’t. “Animals and autistic people don’t have to be paying attention to something in order to see it. Things like jiggly chains pop out at us. They grab our attention whether we want them to or not,” she wrote.11

  Temple says, “We can’t filter stuff out. All the zillions and zillions of sensory details in the world come into our conscious awareness and we get overwhelmed. We’re seeing, hearing, and feeling all the things no one else can.”12 Her words gave me insight into some of Jan’s problems.

  Temple gives tips to parents of kids on the spectrum. “The trick for parents of children with autism is distinguishing between physical problems or physical ailments and bad behavior. I was expected to sit still at the table for twenty minutes, and I did. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to,” said Temple, who believes in discipline. She benefitted a great deal from her mother’s discipline.

  She advises those with Asperger’s on dealing with sensory problems. She encouraged a fourteen-year-old with Asperger’s to “use
headphones to block out unwanted sounds, just not all the time.”

  I was behind a mother at a book signing when I heard Temple say, “Get your four-year-old with autism at least twenty hours a week of therapy.”

  Temple is very practical. She knows that children need speech therapy. They also need to learn basic social skills such as taking turns; board games and card games are good instruction methods. Some of the first words they should learn are “please” and “thank you.” Table manners are important, too. So is behaving appropriately in a store or restaurant and being on time. These are all skills that can and should be learned.

  She complains about people who protect their Asperger’s kids too much. “Get those kids out into the world!” Temple advises.

  Temple suggests that you not allow your children to stay home and watch television or play video games. They need to be exposed to a variety of situations so they’ll know what interests them. The world is full of fascinating and life-altering things, but kids aren’t going to try them if they don’t know about them.

  “It’s essential for an ASD [autism spectrum disorder] kid to get outside the house and accept responsibility for tasks that other people want done—and need to be done on their schedule. Because that’s how work works in the real world,” she writes.13

  Kids who are eleven or twelve can play in an orchestra or mow the lawn. Playing in an orchestra is not a paying job, but it requires cooperation with others as well as a regular commitment of time. And it’s doing something worthwhile that will build self-esteem.

  Evan, who has Asperger’s, will be a senior in high school next year. He has a summer job with a company that cleans up after a house is built. Evan has dug trenches, helped the electrician, and done some landscaping. He works forty hours a week. It’s hard work and he’s tired, but he likes it. And he’s benefitting in many ways.

  Evan doesn’t like school. His mother has a hard time getting him up to go to school, but he gets himself up and off to work. He’s had two raises because he’s such a hard worker. At home, he’s also opening up, talking more, and expressing himself within his family. His mother and grandmother have worried about him because he’s so quiet and doesn’t usually take the initiative in doing things. When his boss told him he needed hard-toed boots, he drove himself to the shoe store and bought himself a pair. His mother and grandmother consider that real progress.