Reports of attacks in Hawaiian waters that had circulated over the years in which Cal had followed them tended to highlight the same things. There was generally surf involved, one way or another, and victims tended not to be diving but stretched upon the surface or occasionally wading to the shoulders. Spear fishermen reported encounters but mostly with smaller sharks like blues and oceanic white tips, which could be dangerous but rarely attacked divers. The tiger, on the other hand, was famously unpredictable. It was the foremost attack species in the Hawaiian archipelago. Most of the time it would circle and depart but if there was activity or fear it could remain, become aggressive. The key was to stay calm, not to turn your back, and so long as your eyes were in the water, drop both legs together to show your length. In any case, Cal had purposefully skimmed over the rare articles pronouncing incidents on the grounds that he, in the event of a sighting, would be in a kayak or well beneath the surface and Harold, in all likelihood, would be watching from the safety of the shore.
Now a kind of fuzz occupied segments of Cal’s vision, toward the peripheries, and a loud stillness sat in his ears as if the ocean had been amplified to the point where he ceased to hear it. He saw the shark surface to his right, perhaps thirty feet off. Seconds elapsed that he initially failed to register but that then filtered back as a vague gap in time. Harold, who somehow had been swept far left of Cal and slightly to his rear, emerged, surfacing loudly, still grasping the paddle and sputtering. In another moment he was performing the crawl, majestically and, for all that Cal could discern, steadily and calmly with the paddle crashing on the surface at the stroke of his right arm.
Yet inexplicably he was swimming outward, toward the depths, in the direction of the blue ocean. Cal hoisted himself forward to the center of the overturned kayak and called out to Harold in order to offer him direction. But, again, it was as though one or both of them could no longer hear, or as if the force of events had not only clogged Harold’s ears but in so doing made off with his mind.
“Harold,” Cal yelled, “over here.” But it was for naught. To his horror, Cal watched as the shark swam toward the kayak and submerged, sinking its bulk only just under, so he could nearly reach down and touch those irregular bands and follow the shadowy markings with his thumb. It continued beneath him, still submerged, toward Harold, who, bizarrely, horribly, was swimming out to sea in a beautiful, noisy crawl, pointed toward Maui and the deepening trench, moving like a great, slow van of milkshakes and sugar cones that was ringing all its bells.
“Harold,” Cal yelled again. “Shark!”
Now, as though this last word stirred something, awakened him, Harold lifted his head and peered in the direction of the voice, then sharply shifted course, his rough beard suddenly visible in the waves, his eyes heavily lidded at first, then wide open. He began swimming toward the tiger shark, and toward Cal, wielding the paddle out before him in awkward half strokes like a ridiculous spear. Then, without slowing his kick, which was shooting fountains behind him, Harold began jousting with his weapon, raising it absurdly and slapping the sea in front of him, spearing the space between him and the shark. If anything, it looked to Cal, lying motionless on the kayak, as though Harold was picking up speed and at last he was bellowing, making a noise that was unidentifiable but deep and final.
As the two of them converged, Cal could see the tall dorsal fin of the tiger shark that had been swerving on the surface rise mightily into the air and Harold begin to sink, as though he were cowering before a blow.
“No,” yelled Cal once again, slapping his own arm impotently against the ocean and nearly losing his balance.
But just before contact, Harold reappeared. Having lowered himself, he raised his whole chest out of the water, or nearly, and, once reared, brought the paddle, blade first, down like a javelin with what looked to Cal like tremendous force. There was a jerk and Harold was brought sharply into the air while the tiger flashed its tail and rolled seaward, turning abruptly, the dorsal sinking off and away.
Cal, meanwhile, watched in amazement as Harold, after vanishing again for what felt like ten seconds or more, surfaced twenty feet off, again farther to the left and closer to the safety of the lava floes. After briefly wiping his eyes, he resumed his slow, recreational crawl, his giant fountain kick, this time shoreward, the handle of the paddle still in his hand, the blade and much of the shaft now broken off and missing. Every so often, Harold would pause as he proceeded toward the lava and turn, dipping his head beneath the surface as if to gaze into the depths behind him, then lifting his eyes to scan the horizon. In these moments, he would raise the jagged shaft of the paddle and wield it threateningly and, having waited for an instant, turn back to the grand strokes of his crawl.
Finally, Harold stood in the shallows and was yelling out to him, “Stay where you are. Don’t move. I’m coming with the dinghy.” In another few minutes, there was Harold, having dragged the dinghy down to the shore from behind the house, the mynah birds quarreling over him in the jacaranda or swooping onto the sand to swagger like field generals at his feet. Then he was rowing swiftly through the lava breaks. A few minutes more and Cal found himself being helped onto the dinghy, Harold’s strong arms pulling him up over the gunwale and placing him gently onto the dry seat.
“Thank you, Harold,” said Cal, gathering himself and watching as Harold turned back to the oars, taking his sweet time now, his arms from that angle appearing particularly round and wide, pulling the two of them in to safety with long, powerful, leisurely strokes.
When they reached the shore, Harold beached the dinghy and they stood together, quiet, the two of them staring for a short time out toward the sea and shifting their bare feet on the lava. Cal could just see the rocking hull of the kayak, largely submerged, humped like the yellow rind of a melon.
“Tiger’s a brutal fish,” he sputtered at last, shaking his head. “He’ll kill you in an instant.” And he felt his whole body quivering, as though a wildness had corded his limbs until then, and only now, in a single moment, swung them back to his frame. Cal realized for the first time he could recall that he’d been fighting to hold himself upright. He decided, moreover, if he did not monitor his breaths and broaden his stance he would need to lean on Harold, or at least take him by the shoulder. Finally, so as not to fall over, he squatted down.
There was another long pause while the sun began to falter. The remaining light was slung low and sharp. A breeze had come up.
“Now everything has a belly,” said Harold softly, his voice even and serious. He placed his big paws on his own belly, which was beautiful, grand and drum-like, and began to chuckle so softly that Cal could scarcely hear him. Then Cal also began to laugh, glancing up at his lover, staring at him with a curious intensity, a kind of fascination, each of them coming to the other’s eyes, and for a moment they were laughing together before Harold was moving up the beach, looking every so often back at the ocean then swinging his grand neck forward toward the spreading shade of the house.
“Harold,” Cal called after him, but the sound got stuck in his throat. And he watched as that hulking form, still wet and scraped badly along one side of its ribs, the bright line of abrasion curving back almost to the spine, climbed surely, effortlessly, up onto the lanai as if it had only just stepped out from the froth of the waves, barnacled and metamorphosed.
“Harold, wait.”
Yet again he was voiceless, silent. Soon Cal was stumbling into the sand. Trying to keep up. Struggling to move closer to the house and farther onto land. Exhausted, he hung there out on the beach attempting to master himself but, as the pure soot of darkness rolled in from the sea, dropped first to his haunches and then to his knees.
An Interview with Temple Grandin
Conducted by Benjamin Hale
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN IS ONE of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. After earning a PhD in animal science at the University of Illinois, she went on to revolutionize practices for the hu
mane handling of livestock in slaughterhouses. In North America, almost half of all livestock cattle are handled in a center-track-restrainer system that she designed for meat plants. She is the author of ten books, including the classic autism memoir Thinking in Pictures (adapted by HBO films as Temple Grandin in 2010), Emergence, Animals in Translation, Animals Make Us Human, and, most recently, The Autistic Brain: Thinking across the Spectrum. She is a prominent proponent both of animal-welfare issues and of the rights of people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome. She lives in Colorado, where she teaches animal science at Colorado State University.
I had the great fortune of speaking at length with Temple Grandin by phone on a recent weekend, when we talked about horses, cattle, pigs, pigeons, agribusiness, dairy farming, corn ethanol production, dog breeding, domesticated foxes, rhinos, tigers, roosters, whooping cranes, bear cubs, and political polarization in Washington. There is something very familiar and refreshing to me about the way Temple Grandin speaks. Her conversation is colloquial, folksy, and no-nonsense—totally bare of sophistry. She is a matter-of-factly brilliant woman who would never, ever try to “sound smart.” In Grandin’s frank, direct way of communicating, her curiosity, her insistence on sticking to concrete particulars, her respect for pragmatic, hands-on problem solving, and her mistrust of abstraction, I recognized that refreshing worldview of someone for whom the quantifiable, observable reality of things is always the bottom line. I heard my own mechanical-engineer uncle’s voice echoing in my head at her rather ornery complaints about the disappearance of practical-skills classes such as woodworking and metalworking from high-school curricula. What I admire most in her blunt attitude is her old-fashioned respect for those people who see the world for what it is and work with their hands—for, no matter what puffs of thought-smoke in the realm of art, politics, and philosophy may indirectly stir others into action, it is always such people who will be the ones to put one stone on top of another, to physically move the matter that results in real change in the world.
BENJAMIN HALE: What are the main things that people tend not to understand about the way animals think? What do you wish more people understood about animal minds that they don’t?
TEMPLE GRANDIN: I think they need to realize that an animal is a sensory-based thinker. Animals don’t think in words, so they’ve got to store memories in images and sounds and smells. In fact, I just found an interesting paper on the Internet today that says even insects can categorize different shapes, like star-shaped flowers versus more round kind of flowers. And they can then pick out something from that same category that looks different. You’ve got to get away from verbal language. That’s the first thing that people have to do—totally get away from words. And think: What does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it smell like? What’s it feel like? It’s a very detailed, sensory-based world. Some research has shown that pigeons can be taught to differentiate Picassos from Monets, just by the style of the artwork. In my book Animals in Translation, I talk about a horse that was scared to death of black cowboy hats, but he was fine with white cowboy hats.
HALE: I remember that.
GRANDIN: The memory was sight specific. A white cowboy hat has never done anything bad to him, but a man in a black cowboy hat has done some really bad things to him. Animals tend to associate something that they’re seeing or hearing with a memory. If they’re looking at something, or seeing something while something bad happens, that’s what they’ll associate the bad thing with. So they see a person in a black hat again and they get spooked. I know a dog that’s terrified of men wearing baseball hats. Any baseball cap. Take the baseball cap off, then it’s fine. It’s a sensory-based world.
HALE: Do you think that it’s just humans’ tendency to think verbally that prevents them from getting into the minds of nonhuman animals?
GRANDIN: Well, I’m not going to say that every verbal thinker can’t get into the mind of an animal. But what I’ve observed over the years is some of the best people I’ve seen with animals—oh, they might be dyslexic. They’ve got some learning problems. There’s a lot of people on the autism spectrum that really get along with animals. People who have a tendency to be less verbal in their thinking often tend to get along with animals a lot better.
HALE: I’d also like to talk about the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. You’re a meat eater. I also eat meat, but I’ve always felt a little bad about it. Have you ever encountered an argument for ethical vegetarianism that made sense to you?
GRANDIN: Oh yes, I have. First of all, I can’t function on a vegetarian diet. I’ve actually tried several times. I cannot function on it. And my mother’s exactly the same way. When she goes to a hotel, she asks them to make sausage for breakfast. No bagels for breakfast—that doesn’t work for her, and it doesn’t work for me. I feel very strongly that animals that are raised for food we’ve got to give a decent life. That’s really, really important. We’ve got to give them a life worth living. That’s the terminology that the farm animal council in Europe uses. And another thing I’ve always thought about is, most cattle would have never existed if we hadn’t, you know, put the bull and the cow together. We bred cows for food. Another thing is, you look at the layout of this country—about 40 percent of the US is range land. You cannot grow crops on it. The only way you can grow food on it is with animals. Grazing animals—cattle, sheep, goat, bison—grazing, herbivore-type of animals. And if you use them right, you can naturally sequester carbon. If you raise them badly, you can really threaten the environment. We’ve got some real problems right now with mining water for ethanol plants—making corn ethanol, and I don’t think that’s a very good idea.
HALE: What do you think the average consumer can do, who cares about animal welfare but who also eats meat?
GRANDIN: Know where your food comes from. And you get into the whole argument about big versus small. I have a video called A Video Tour of a Beef Plant with Temple Grandin, where I show how a large plant works when it’s working right. I have a similar one called A Pork Plant Video Tour with Temple Grandin. And we just show it. And when things are working right, the animals walk up the ramp, and their behavior is the same as walking into the veterinary chute. I’m not going to say it’s stress free, because the veterinary chute also has stress, but the stress levels—and they’ve measured in both places—is about the same. Now when things go wrong and things are not managed well, you can have a real mess really superquickly.
HALE: And so you would say that, for an average consumer, the main thing is just to be aware of where your meat comes from?
GRANDIN: Yep. In fact, what I’m seeing now in the slaughter plants are problems like lameness. Animals can be lame and have painful walking for different reasons. It can be genetics, or they push the animals too hard to go really fast. Or it could be they’re lame because you fed them too much grain. It could be a lot of different things that make animals lame. Like dairy cows that are just being pushed, pushed, pushed, to give more and more milk, to the point where their body condition gets really low, and they get into what I call biological-system overload. Those are some of the biggest problems now. Problems that are going to have to be fixed on the farm. I’ve seen pigs with arthritis, and they squeal when they lie down because they’re in pain. That’s absolutely not acceptable. And then you’ve got housing issues, like sow-gestation stalls. That needs to go. In fact, I just got off the phone with a good friend of mine who consults for the pig industry, and she’s helping them make the conversion from sow-gestation stalls over to loose housing, and she was telling me how much she wants to get them converted—[the pigs] actually like it, how nice and quiet the sounds are.
HALE: Do you think the best way to go about improving conditions for farm animals is through better policy and legislation?
GRANDIN: One of my big concerns in legislation, and I don’t care what you’re legislating, is what I call abstractification. We’re dealing with a Congress now and a Senate that ar
e so far removed from reality. I read the other day that forty-two senators, in their whole entire career, had never had a job outside of politics. I think that’s a very sad thing. I think that’s one of the things that’s causing all this radical partisanship in the government, is everything becomes an abstraction. Nothing gets done until something real happens. Like the sequester was going to furlough the air-traffic controllers, and make [lawmakers’] flights get canceled—and then they instantly did something about it. Because now something affected them. And I think one of the big problems we have in government, and a big problem we have with our activists, is that they’ve gotten too far away from what is actually happening in the field. I think this is true for many issues. Animal issues, environmental issues, lots of different issues.
HALE: Do you think that this problem of abstractification is getting worse over time?
GRANDIN: Yes, I think it’s getting worse. For instance, schools are taking out all the hands-on classes. Kids don’t know how to sew, they don’t know how to cook, they don’t know how to do woodworking or steelworking or automobile shop. All those classes have been taken out. And those classes teach a kind of practical problem solving. And so issues turn into abstractions. And then it just turns into pure ideology, rather than, how do we solve problems?
HALE: Is this a big problem in animal science?
GRANDIN: It’s a problem in many different fields. I’m not going to single out animal issues—it’s also a big problem in environmental issues. People who work in the field, they may be right or left on an issue, but they tend to have more moderate views than people who just live in offices. And the other problem we’ve got now is that the Internet magnifies the voices of ultra-radicals on both sides of the issue, both right and left. And that’s not a good thing. That’s not going to solve problems.
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