HALE: Do you think that the Internet abstractifies our thinking in other ways too?
GRANDIN: Well, you can’t blame the Internet for all the problems. I think the thing that’s doing the worst abstractification, I think it’s very bad, is that somebody gets a college degree in political science, goes right into working with legislators and lobbying groups in Washington, DC, and then becomes a congressman, and they’ve never worked outside the Beltway. They’ve never done what I’d call a real job.
HALE: Do you think that people have less daily contact with animals than they used to?
GRANDIN: Yes. I witnessed a really disturbing thing—I did my book Animals Make Us Human, and I did a big book signing, where I was going to be at a big Costco store for eight hours. And I decided to just walk up to people and just show them the book, you know. I wasn’t going to wait for people to come up to the book table, I was just going to walk up to them. So I walked up to all the retired couples and all the young families and I just said, My name’s Temple Grandin, and I have a book about animal behavior. Do you have pets? And I was shocked to find out that in south Denver, about 20 to 25 percent of young families with children had no pet of any kind. No gerbil, no parakeet, nothing. Those kids are growing up totally away from animals.
HALE: So you think it’s a good thing to grow up with pets?
GRANDIN: Yes, I do think it’s a good thing. There’s a wonderful book called Last Child in the Woods, and it talks about how kids don’t play outside anymore. I think about growing up in the fifties—oh, we’d go out and collect leaves, and we built things, and we floated boats in the brook, and we were out in the natural world.
HALE: Here’s a question I was thinking about just the other day. Just a few weeks ago, the black rhino became extinct in the wild. Whenever I read about something like the black rhino going extinct, or the fate of the orangutan, which is just barely holding on, it profoundly depresses me.
GRANDIN: It’s bad. It’s really bad.
HALE: And I’ve always thought of the conservation of endangered animals to be an inherent good, an end in itself. And then the other day I was talking to a friend about the whooping crane, and she was talking about how the people who have been trying to rehabilitate the whooping crane go to great lengths, dressing up in costumes and things like that, in order to revitalize this animal—and she said, To what end do we save these animals? Is it for the animals, or is it somehow for us?
GRANDIN: I think to let beautiful animals just disappear is a terrible thing. Especially animals like whooping cranes. And there’s a lot of controversy about a lot of things, like the whale, and problems with elephants in captivity and things like that. I was reading a super-interesting book that I got a galley proof of, it’s a book about a guy who raised bear cubs. And he’d take them out for walks in the woods, and then he’d be able to turn them loose in the wild, and they would function in the wild. In fact, they’d function both in the wild world and in our world. In other words, animals are very compartmentalized in their thinking: In this situation, I do these behaviors, and when I’m in this other situation, I do these other behaviors. And these bears would be functioning out in the wild, and he’d go out there and see them, and change the batteries in their radio collars. And he understood how bears communicate—he would watch their ears and know when they were starting to get angry, and things like that. I think it’s a shame to lose all the wild animals. I want to conserve them.
HALE: In the case of the black rhino—
GRANDIN: Has that species actually gone totally extinct?
HALE: I believe the black rhino has officially been declared to be extinct.
GRANDIN: They have to make sure whether the black rhino is truly a separate species from the other rhinos. You’ve got things like different kinds of rhinos. I don’t know much about the black rhino, but I know something about genetics. In fact, my book Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals we just updated, and I talk about how genetics can affect behavior, and there’s some discussion in science as to exactly what a species is. Now, I think everybody would agree that a tiger, an orange-and-black tiger, is definitely its own species. But then you get into, say, twenty-five different kinds of sparrows—are those really each a unique species? You see, evolutionary pressures work on animals. I read an interesting paper about—oh, I don’t remember what kind of bird it was, but you know, birds get hit by cars. And the birds that manage to not get hit by cars ended up having shorter wings, for faster takeoff. And so in places where there tended to be a lot of roads around, the birds that went out on the roads ended up with shorter wings and faster takeoff. That’s evolution. Is that shorter-wing-and-faster-takeoff bird a different species from a bird that lives away from cars that’s got longer wings? These are animals that will interbreed with fertile offspring. One of the definitions of a species is: has to have fertile offspring. Where if you breed a horse and donkey, the mule is not fertile—you can’t breed mules.
HALE: Is that your definition of a species?
GRANDIN: That’s most people’s definition of a species: two individuals that can make fertile offspring. I mean, it’s possible to breed bison mixed with cattle and stuff like that, but most of those hybrids are sterile, they don’t have fertile offspring.
HALE: In a lot of your work I’ve read about this really fascinating thing, and you were just talking about it a moment ago, about the relationship between genetics and behavior. For instance, I remember reading in one of your books about an experiment in Russia to domesticate a wild fox—
GRANDIN: That’s in the genetics book—that’s the Belyaev experiments. Years ago, they wanted to breed a fox that wouldn’t bite your hand off, to raise for fur coats. And so they just selected for the foxes that licked your hand instead of wanting to rip it off, and they ended up with this black-and-white border collie fox-dog. In the updated version of my genetics book, there’s a new chapter, written not by Belyaev but by some people who worked in the same lab, on the continuation of those fox experiments. And basically, you’ve got foxes that look like dogs and act like dogs.
HALE: Reading about that experiment, and also reading what you wrote about the hyper-aggressive roosters that had accidentally been bred to be aggressive when they were breeding for physical traits—
GRANDIN: Yes, they weren’t trying to breed hyper-aggressive roosters. These things are side effects of selecting for other traits. Also, this has been somewhat corrected now. But twenty years ago, when they bred pigs to be really, really lean, they accidentally bred a pig that was really mean, and it was real aggressive, and it fought a lot. And nobody was deliberately breeding aggressive pigs. But the thing is, traits are linked in ways that can sometimes be surprising. The pigs turned out to be lean and mean. Now they’ve been selecting away from that, and a lot has been corrected.
HALE: The idea that behavioral and physical traits can be connected in surprising ways can have uncomfortable implications.
GRANDIN: I always say over-selecting for a single trait will wreck your animal. And I don’t care what the trait is. I was in the airport the other day, and I saw a dog that looked like a cross between a Pomeranian and an Australian Blue Heeler—you know how those miniature breeds often have those hydrocephalic, really rounded foreheads? And the lady told me it was a miniature Australian shepherd. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t! And now you’ve got a bulldog where the nose is smashed in, it can’t breathe, it can’t walk, it can’t have babies naturally. And if you look at a picture of a bulldog from 1938—go on the Internet and type in “Bulldog’s Dilemma”—you’ll find the 1938 version, and he’s actually got a snout, he actually can function.
HALE: Do you think it’s unethical to breed dogs for physical traits?
GRANDIN: I think it’s unethical when it gets to the point where it causes welfare problems. When they have difficulty walking, they have difficulty birthing, they have difficulty breathing. Those are big welfare problems. That is unethical. I think an animal needs to b
e sound. And that animal, the bulldog, is not physically sound. How do you get in a mess like that? You get in a mess like that because it happens slowly. So young people now coming in to the bulldog breed say, Well, that’s just the breed. Yeah, but I’m old enough to remember when it didn’t walk that way. It’s interesting to go to a college or a high school where the bulldog is their mascot, and look at their old sports pictures, and the bulldog’s not this monstrosity that you’ve got now. It is unethical. I think it’s very unethical to breed animals that have got behavior problems, that have lameness problems, or they’ve got problems with giving birth, problems with breathing, heart-failure problems. I have a real problem with what I call biological-system overload. Now the dairy cows are starting to get some big problems. This is all developed genetically. They just push them so hard with genetics that you’re having problems with the body condition. She’s putting everything she’s got into milk, there’s nothing left for the dairy cow. So she’s getting really skinny, really lame, and they’re having a really difficult time getting her to rebreed.
HALE: You’ve written that in animal science, it’s always the debunkers who are on the attack—you’ve said that you couldn’t remember a single big academic fight where someone got fired or lost their funding for doing a study where the animal turned out to be dumber than people thought. Why do you think this bias exists? Do you think it’s especially particular to academic science?
GRANDIN: I don’t want to single out academics, but there’s a tendency for people to get single-minded on a single thing. I’m an associative thinker. A lot of people are much more linear in how they think. You see, I tend to associate a lot of different things, and I’m concerned about over-selecting for single traits. You see it with monocultures in crops too. We’ve had trouble with wheatgrass, and we’re having trouble with a disease in bananas. I think one of the things that’s difficult for a lot of people to understand is, what would be the optimal solution over time? What is the optimal milk production? You see right now, you push that dairy cow too hard, she’ll only last you for two years. It takes you three years to grow the heifer and make her into a dairy cow, and then you only milk her for two years. That’s not great economics. If you cut back production just a little bit, she’ll last you for three or four years. That would actually make more sense. But people just get single-minded on one thing. People are always looking for the one single magic thing. They don’t tend to look at the whole system. And that applies to lots of things, not just farms.
HALE: You’ve worked with ranching and animal science for more than thirty years—how have they changed over the last three decades?
GRANDIN: People are thinking a lot more about ethical issues they never used to think about. When I first started, people just beat cattle up, and the treatment of animals was terrible. But what kept me going was there were some ranchers who really did a good job. I can think of Bill and Penny Porter, with their ranch in Arizona. It was people like that that kept me going. There were good people raising cattle. About 80 percent of them were bad, but there were some that were good. So that was sort of like the sun behind the clouds. And that was real important to me.
HALE: And that’s what’s changed?
GRANDIN: Well, one of the things that really pushes the big changes is when a major company like McDonald’s insists on changes. I worked on implementing the McDonald’s animal-welfare program, and then the other big companies like Wendy’s and Burger King started implementing animal-welfare programs too.
HALE: I’m really interested in the categories that humans tend to put animals into. There are companion animals, like dogs and cats and horses, which we consider taboo to eat, and then there are other animals we think of as food animals, like cows and pigs. Do you have any ideas about how these categories of thinking develop?
GRANDIN: A veterinary student asked me one time, why do we have to give anesthetic to castrate a dog but not a bull, when they both feel pain? Dogs are an animal that we bred in a real special way to be hyper-social. We’ve bred them to be hyper-social and loyal, and there are lots of emotional traits in dogs that make them good companions. Cats have a lot more of the wild in them. And then food animals, we’ve tended to domesticate large, social animals simply because they’re easier to manage.
HALE: So you think that pigs and cows have become food animals because they’re easier to corral and things like that?
GRANDIN: And also they’re herbivores, which makes them easier to feed. When agriculture first started, cows were just out on the pasture, they just grazed. There was a lot of grass around, so we didn’t have to feed them.
HALE: Where do you see the future of industrial meat production going?
GRANDIN: We’re running out of water, for one thing. And the only reason grain was fed to animals originally was because it was cheap. That’s the only reason. We had surpluses. Now we’re running out of water. Right now we’re mining water to feed ethanol plants and then export ethanol. That doesn’t make any sense at all. We have no net energy gain on ethanol. I am not a fan of ethanol. We’ve got to figure out practical ways to solve problems. And I recommend that anyone who wants to solve problems get out in the field and figure out what’s actually going on. Get out of the office. Get out of the Beltway. You stay in Washington, DC, too long, you’re going to turn into one of those pods—like that movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers? You know that old movie?
HALE: Yes, I know that movie!
GRANDIN: That’s what people in Washington, DC, do—they turn into pods. Everything becomes ideology and power. They forget what the issue actually really is. And the thing is, when you really get involved, the right thing to do is always something messy in the middle. That’s true for anything, I don’t care what it is.
Two Poems
Andrew Mossin
ECLIPSE
The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world.
—Wallace Stevens
Wave gull call
striped black fluent wave down an arm
Set back from the shore in blue water
a body in long strides walking in wrinkled shadows
walking into the water there is a system
of working one’s way out
wave by wave the common whiteness of grave
stones drenched in sunlight.
*
Coercive bridge and crease of elbow. Shroud liniment applied to its surface.
Gulf bones dragged into human lots. Back slotted spongy knots of coral.
Aroused one wakes on bone-mottled gray cloth.
And the wind that knots itself. One gray-green scarf coiled around the hand.
Plastic tarps spread on shell-soaked ground. Necklace bone shields borne out
[in a stream.
A grove of shells held against copper the color of sky at sunset.
The opacity of smoke.
*
(prayer bell)
Shoal surface shine. To go down to it paler in light to see the pale waters
[removed.
Low gull cry spilled downstream. Wind-yipped gulls in formation above.
Caught sight at dawn of barrier boom. Stray slotted bloom of ash in palm.
Another broken from the first uncapped. Bodiless mercy. A line pulled in
[two directions.
Stained sea mottled black then blue. Line flowing into line a flower of
[hands almost.
Stood under the surface itself a scenic cloud. Musical almost. Weightless
[beam of water.
Our hunger for the ordinary. Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Night after night no night but forms of waiting. One grows attached to
[the images.
A plume rising through half-light. Well wide open.
Bell buoys rising underwater. A crown of waves encircling soft black lines.
Plume night sail blue acquiescent at sea. Tar balls floating on ochrous flinty
Mute stars sited dusk inside its channel. Spume sea-white foam palm
[plankton side first.
Black wooded sea surface bucolic coral faded brown and bees of paradise
floating in ash.
*
A line in oil or sand is still a line.
To break the form of it to sing again.
Carrying some weight inside the song that opens and abandons one to what
cannot last.
White crystal under the tongue. Bleached hand folded black wing.
*
No child can wander inside its foamy circle.
Shed shards of its gull shape. Loose forms dragged bone. A pit where the
[hands were.
A child in the form of a bird landing beside it. Body’s bell diving for salt.
[Bone stalks of
black sand on white.
Color disappears from the world when you least expect it.
Gulf tide looping climactic shifts. Follow the cycle it comes around washed
[back to
shell-beaded shore.
Shapely brown combed shell carriers on shore gone on all fours.
An old man standing in the middle to find what is the middle of blackness.
Seeing anything gone seeing it go where it goes underneath it goes …
Carried back again piles of white plastic bags arranged in rows of white.
Nude hands weighted without shovels. Who is near when no one is near.
Edge to edge hooked smooth surfaces hooked together.
One colony below the surface one above shining aerial view of their forms
[silvery black lines
congregating at dusk.
*
No panic in the moon light it comes to nothing.
Surface of one then another like a hand
passed through black jelly.
Dipped below what one has lost or not known was there.
In place of it a shapeless moon eye. Beam and edge of beam
“the final mountain the last glowing tower.”
*
Sea bones passed through hands of the living. The blades of oars passed over
Menagerie Page 14