Animals in Translation

by Temple Grandin

  Chapter 2: How Animals Perceive the World

  Carter, Rita. 2002. Exploring Consciousness. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

  Gladwell, Malcolm. 2001. Wrong Turn. New Yorker, June 11. Mr. Gladwell’s articles can be found at http://www.gladwell.com/.

  Grandin, T. 1996. Factors That Impede Animal Movement at Slaughter Plants. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 209: 757–59.

  Grandin, T., and M. J. Deesing. 1998. Behavioral Genetics and Animal Science. In Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals, ed. T. Grandin. San Diego, CA: Academic Press: 1–31.

  Heffner, R. S., and H. E. Heffner. 1983. Hearing in Large Animals: Horses (Equus caballus and Cattle C Bos taurus). Behavioral Neuroscience 97:299–311.

  Jacobs, G. H., J. F. Deegan, and J. Netz. 1998. Photopigment Basis for Dichromatic Color Vision in Cows, Goats and Sheep. Visual Neuroscience 15:581–84.

  Kleiner, K. 2004. What We Gave Up for Color Vision. New Scientist (January 2004): 12.

  Krasnegor, Norman A., G. Reid Lyon, and Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic. 1997. Development of the Prefrontal Cortex: Evolution, Neurobiology, and Behavior. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing.

  Lanier, J. L., T. Grandin, R. D. Green, D. Avery, and K. McGee. 2000. The Relationship Between Reaction to Sudden Intermittent Movements and Sounds and Temperament. Journal of Animal Science 78: 1476–74.

  Lemmon, W. B., and G. H. Patterson. 1964. Depth Perception in Sheep: Effects of Interrupting the Mother Neonate Bond. Science 145: 835–36.

  McConnell, P. B. 1990. Acoustic Structure and Receiver Response in Domestic Dogs (Canis familiarus). Animal Behavior 39:897–904.

  Miller, P. E., and C. J. Murphy. 1995. Vision in Dogs. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 12:1623–34.

  Revkin, A. C. 2001. Eavesdropping on Elephant Society. New York Times. January 9.

  Talling, J. C., N. K. Waran, C. M. Wathes, and J. A. Lines. 1998. Sound Avoidance by Domestic Pigs Depends Upon Characteristics of the Signal. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 58, nos. 3–4:255–66.

  Chapter 3: Animal Feelings

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  Craig, J. V., and J. C. Swanson. 1994. Review: Welfare Perspectives on Hens Kept for Egg Production. Poultry Science 73:921–38.

  Danbury, T. C., C. A. Wecks, J. P. Chambers, A. E. Waterman-Pearson, and S. C. Kestin. 2000. Self Selection of the Analgesic Drug Carprofen by Lame Broiler Chickens. Veterinary Record 146:307–11.

  Dugatkin, Lee Alan. 2004. Principles of Animal Behavior. New York: W. W. Norton.

  Faure, J. M., and A. D. Mills. 1998. Improving the Adaptability of Animals by Selection. In Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals, ed. T. Grandin, 235–64. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

  Goodwin, D., J. W. S. Bradshaw, and S. M. Wickens. 1997. Paedomorphosis Affects Visual Signals in Domestic Dogs. Animal Behavior 53:297–304.

  Grandin, T. 2002. Do Animals and People with Autism Have True Consciousness? Evolution and Cognition 8:241–48.

  Grandin, T., and M. J. Deesing. 1998. Genetics and Animal Welfare. In Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals, ed. T. Grandin, 319–46. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

  Grandin T., M. J. Deesing, J. J. Struthers, and A. M. Swinker. 1995. Cattle with Hair Whorls Above the Eyes Are More Behaviorally Agitated During Restraint. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 46:117–23.

  Grandin, T., T. N. Dodman, and L. Shuster. 1989. Effect of Naltrexone on Relaxation Induced by Lateral Flank Pressure in Pigs. Pharmacological Biochemistry of Behavior 33: 839–42.

  Hemsworth, P. H., J. L. Barnett, and C. Hansen. 1981. The Influence of Handling by Humans on the Growth and Corticosteroids in the Juvenile Female Pig. Hormones and Behavior 15:396–403.

  Hughes, D. P. 2004. Songs of the Gorilla Nation. New York: Random House.

  Millman, S. T., I. J. Duncan, and T. M. Widowski. 2000. Male Broiler Fowl Display High Levels of Aggression Towards Females. Poultry Science 79:1233–41.

  Webster, A. B., and J. E. Hurnik. 1991. Behavior, Production and Well Being in the Laying Hen. 2. Individual Production and Relationships of Behavior to Production and Physical Condition. Poultry Science 70:421–28.

  Chapter 4: Animal Aggression

  Beaver, B. V. 1999. Canine Behavior: A Guide for Veterinarians. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.

  ———. 2003. Feline Behavior, A Guide for Veterinarians. St. Louis: Saunders/Elsevier Science.

  Gates, G. 2003. A Dog in Hand. Irving, TX: Tapestry Press.

  Grandin, T., and J. Bruning. 1992. Boar Presence Reduces Fighting in Mixed Slaughter-Weight Pigs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 33: 273–76.

  Landsberg, G., W. Hunthausen, and L. Ackerman. 2003. Handbook of Behavior Problems of the Dog and Cat. London: Saunders/Elsevier Science.

  Niehoff, D. 1999. The Biology of Violence. New York: The Free Press, 54–114.

  Price, E. O., and S. J. R. Wallach. 1990. Physical Isolation of Hand Reared Hereford Bulls Increases Their Aggressiveness Towards Humans. Applied Animal Behavior Science 27:263–67.

  Smolker, R. 2002. To Touch a Wild Dolphin. New York: Anchor.

  Turner, D. C., and P. Bateson. 2002. The Domestic Cat: The Biology of Its Behavior (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Chapter 5: Pain and Suffering

  Apkarian, A. V., P. S. Thomas, B. R. Krauss, and N. M. Szevcrengi. 2001. Prefrontal Cortical Hyperactivity in Patients with Sympathetically Mediated Pain. Journal of Neuroscience Letters 311:193–97.

  Bateson, P. 1991. Assessment of Pain in Animals. Animal Behavior 42:827–39.

  Boissy, A. 1995. Fear and Fearfulness in Animals. Quarterly Review of Biology 70:165–91.

  Colpaert, F. C., J. P. Taryre, M. Alliaga, and W. Koek. 2001. Opiate Self Administration as a Measure of Chronic Nociceptive Pain in Arthritic Rats. Pain 91: 33–34.

  Freeman, W., and J. W. Watts. 1950. Psychosurgery in the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher.

  Gentle, M. J., D. Waddington, L. N. Hunter, and R. B. Jones. 1990. Behavioral Evidence for Persistent Pain Following Partial Beak Amputation in Chickens. Applied Animal Behavior Science 27:149–57.

  Grandin, T. 1997. Assessment of Stress During Handling and Transport. Journal of Animal Science 75:249–57.

  Hansen, B. D., E. M. Hardic, and G. S. Carroll. 1997. Physiological Measurements After Ovariohysterectomy in Dogs. Applied Animal Behavior Science 51:101–9.

  Rainville, P., G. H. Duncan, D. D Price, B. Carrier, and C. Bushnell. 1997. Pain Affect Encoded in Human Anterior Cingulate but Not Somatosensory Cortex. Science 277:968–71.

  Rogan, M. T., and J. E. LeDoux. 1996. Emotion Systems, Cells Synaptic Plasticity. Cell 85:469–75.

  Sheddon, L. V. 2003. The Evidence for Pain in Fish: The Use of Morphine as an Analgesic. Applied Animal Behavior Science 83:153–62.

  Chapter 6: How Animals Think

  Ackers, S. H., and C. N. Slobodchikoff. 1999. Communication of Stimulus Size and Shape in Alarm Calls of Gunnison’s Prairie Dogs (Cynomys gunnisoni). Ethology 105:149–62.

  Bekoff, Marc, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt. 2002. The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

  Dawkins, M. S. 1993. Through Our Eyes Only: In the Search for Animal Consciousness. New York: W. H. Freeman.

  Derr, M. 2001. What Do Those Barks Mean? To Dogs, It’s All Just Talk. New York Times, April 24, D6.

  Domjan, Michael. 1998. The Principles of Learning and Behavior, 4th ed. New York: Brooks/Cole Publishing.

  Grandin, T. 1998. Objective Scoring of Animal Handling and Stunning Practices in Slaughter Plants. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 212:36–93.

  ———. 2001. W
elfare of Cattle During Slaughter and the Prevention of Non-Ambulatory (Down) Cattle. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 219:1377–82.

  Gray, P. M., B. Kraus, J. Atema, R. Payne, C. Krumhansl, and L. Batista. 2001. The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music. Science 291:52–54.

  Griffin, D. R. 2001. Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Louie, K., and M. A. Wilson. 2001. Temporally Structured Replay of Awake Hippocampal Ensemble Activity During Rapid Eye Movement Sleep. Neuron 1:145–56.

  Lund, Nick. 2002. Animal Cognition. New York: Taylor & Francis Group.

  Lyon, B. E. 2003. Egg Recognition and Counting Reduce Costs of Avian Conspecific Brood Parasitism. Nature 422:495–98.

  Milius, S. 2004. Where’d I Put That? Maybe It Takes a Bird Brain to Find the Car Keys. Science News 165:103–5.

  Pearce, John M. 1997. Animal Learning and Cognition: An Introduction, 2nd ed. East Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

  Pepperberg, I. M. 1999. The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Rogers, Lesly J. 1997. Minds of Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in Animals. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

  Slobodchikoff, C. N., C. Kiriazis, C. Fischer, and E. Creef. 1991. Semantic Information Distinguishing Individual Predators in the Alarm Calls of Gunnison’s Prairie Dogs. Animal Behavior 42:713–19.

  Slobodchikoff, C. N. 2002. Cognition and Communication in Prairie Dogs. In M. Bekoff, C. Allen, and G. Burghardt, eds., The Cognitive Animal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Chapter 7: Animal Genius: Extreme Talents

  Birbaumer, N. 1999. Rain Man’s Revelations. Nature 399:211–12.

  Judd, S. P. D., and T. S. Collett. 1998. Multiple Stored Views and Landmark Guidance in Ants. Nature 392:710–14.

  Miller, B. L., K. Boone, J. L. Cummings, S. L. Read, and F. Mishkin. 2000. Functional Correlates of Musical and Visual Ability in Fronto-temporal Dementia. British Journal of Psychiatry 176:458–63.

  Miller, B. L., J. Cummings, F. Mishkin, K. Boone, F. Prince, M. Ponton, and C. Cotman. 1998. Emergence of Art Talent in Frontotemporal Dementia. Neurology 51:978–81.

  Snyder, A. W., and J. D. Mitchell. 1999. Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Arithmetic? The Mind’s Secret Arithmetic. Proceedings Royal Society 266:587–92.

  Snyder, A. W., E. Mulcathy, J. L. Taylor, D. J. Mitchell, P. Sachdew, and S. Gandevia. 2003. Savant Like Skills Exposed in Normal People by Suppressing the Left Fronto-Temporal Lobe. Journal of Integrative Neurosciences 2:149–58. All of Dr. Snyder’s articles are available at the Web site of the Centre for the Mind, a joint venture of the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. http://www.centreforthemind.com/publications/publications.cfm.

  Treffert, Darald A. 1989. Extraordinary People: Understanding “Idiot Savants.” New York: HarperCollins. Dr. Treffert also maintains a useful Web page devoted to savant syndromes on the Web site of the Wisconsin Medical Society. http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/whatsnew.cfm.

  Webner, R. 2001. Bird Navigation Computing Orthodromes. Science 291:264–65.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the input from many people who shared their animal experiences with me. I am especially indebted to Mark Deesing and Jennifer Lanier. Mark has worked for me for over ten years on many different animal behavior projects, and Red Dog lives with him. Jennifer was my first Ph.D. student, and both she and Mark provided me with many insights during hours of discussions.

  I also need to thank all the people in the livestock industry who helped me start my career. In the early seventies, Ted Gilbert at the Red River Feedyard in Arizona and Tom Rohrer, manager of the Swift plant, tolerated my autistic obsessions and recognized my ability. Other industry people who helped me establish my career were: Mike Chabot, Gary Oden, Rick Jordan, Frank Brocholi, Wilson Swilley, Raoul Baxter, Glen Moyer, and Jim Uhl.

  Bonnie Buntain with the USDA was instrumental in commissioning me to do a USDA study that became the basis for the American Meat Institute scoring system for measuring animal welfare in slaughter plants. Janet Riley of AMI and the entire animal welfare committee have supported my work on the Institute’s guidelines, which are now being used by major restaurant companies to audit animal welfare. Bob Langert at McDonald’s Corporation and Darren Brown at Wendy’s International had the vision to implement the use of the objective scoring system to greatly improve animal welfare in slaughter plants.

  The Department of Animal Science at Colorado State University has been my academic home for the last fifteen years, and I am especially indebted to Bernard Rollin for recommending that I be hired.

  Last, I need to thank Catherine Johnson, my co-author. She made this book possible. Her beautiful prose found my voice and let me tell my story. I also wish to thank Betsy Lerner, my agent, Susan Moldow, my publisher at Scribner, Beth Wareham, my editor, and Rica Allannic.

  —Temple Grandin

  People ask me what it was like to write a book with an autistic person.

  The answer is, it was great. Temple has all the unsung virtues of people with autism. She is kind, even-tempered, and almost as focused as Lilly and Harley chasing their laser mouse. Temple loves animals and knows practically everything there is to know about them, and she is never “off-task.”

  In college Temple taught herself a skill she called finding the basic principle. She had to do this, because, as she was not a word person, the only way she could remember the details of her coursework was to corral them all inside one big principle. Today she can read through vast and conflicting research literatures on the brain, on memory, on emotion, on animal behavior and cognition—Animals in Translation draws on at least nine different fields—and see the One Principle that ties all these works together. As a result, Animals in Translation is more than a book of stories about Temple’s life with animals. It is also a book about the nature of animals and autism and how they go together.

  Temple, thank you. I will miss our talks.

  Next on the list is Betsy Lerner.

  In the beginning, Temple and I had a hard time trying to write just one book on two subjects. After we’d struggled through the fifth or sixth draft of a long and ever-expanding document and still hadn’t produced a proper proposal, we were stuck. One professional told us we needed to start over from the beginning; another advised me just to drop the whole thing and move on.

  That’s when Temple called Betsy, who had edited Temple’s book Thinking in Pictures, and was now working as an agent.

  Betsy read the proposal, called, and said she knew what the problem was and how to fix it. She did, too. Temple and I performed minor surgery on what we’d written, and voilà. The proposal was done. Then Betsy whistled up an auction and the book found its home. It was magic.

  Betsy, thank you.

  It’s to my own agent, Suzanne Gluck, that I owe thanks for this book happening at all, because it was Suzanne who put Temple and me together in the first place. This she did on the spur of the moment one day not long after I’d moved to New York. I wasn’t looking for a project at the time, but Suzanne had heard from a colleague that Temple wanted to write a book about animals, and that was that. “You’re the only one to write that book!” she said. I wouldn’t have put it quite that forcefully myself, but I’m glad Suzanne did. She got the ball rolling directly after lunch, and now here we are.

  Thank you!

  I haven’t seen too many authors thank their editor for being a hoot, so let me be the first: Beth Wareham, our editor at Scribner, is a big, brassy gal from Texas who gets animals, gets Temple, and immediately understood the book and what we were trying to do. She is a hoot! Like Betsy, she could see each chapter in a way Temple and I sometimes couldn’t. Beth is the “third brain” on this book (though this is the place where I should say that any errors aren’t hers, but mine and Temple’s.)

  Thank you
, Beth.

  I’m grateful to Susan Moldow, Publisher of Scribner, not only for her galvanizing enthusiasm and interest, but also for our book’s title. If it wasn’t easy for Temple and me to put animals and autism together in the same book, it was impossible to get them both inside a decent title. Susan did it—she found the basic principle! Thank you.

  And thank you, Rica Allannic, also of Scribner, for your competence, your efficiency, and your ability to open attachments no matter how many Mac-to-Word and Word-to-Mac iterations they’ve been through.

  I always cringe when I get to the part of an author’s acknowledgments where he thanks his wife and children for cheerfully enduring outright abandonment in the years during which he labored over his manuscript. In my case the disappearing act lasted months, not years, but it was still too long. I’m grateful to my husband, Ed Berenson, to our children’s caregiver, Martine Saidi, and to our children, Jimmy, Andrew, and Christopher, for hanging in there. In the midst of an extremely intense work year of his own, Ed took over virtually all homemaking chores on evenings and weekends, and Martine handled pretty much everything else during the week. The kids soldiered on. Thank you, everyone, for surviving.

  I want to thank my friend and neighbor (and fellow dog lover) Laura Read, who is a clinical psychologist, for talking through with me and clarifying a number of the ideas in this book. And I’m especially grateful to my co-chair on the PTSA after-school program, Penny Muise, for doing all of the heavy lifting. I owe you, Penny.

  Finally, I’m grateful to God or to the universe—to whoever is in charge of these things—for the blessings life has brought. Two of my children, Jimmy and Andrew, have autism. Their brother, Christopher, is what the professionals call typical. Having my children diagnosed with autism was certainly the worst thing that ever happened to me; there’s no changing that. But Jimmy and Andrew and Christopher, and the father they adore, are the best thing that’s happened, too.

  It was my children who brought me to this book, and now this book has brought me back to my children. Today I see autistic people a little differently, and I see typical folks a little differently, too. As for our animal friends and acquaintances, I know I will never again look a dog or a horse or a cow or a parrot or any other bird or beast in the eye and see the same being I used to see.