Animals in Translation (50 page)

T
his 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

P
eople 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.

I have Temple to thank for that, Temple and all the researchers, trainers, wranglers, handlers, and vets who've spent their lives listening to animals. Thanks to all.

—Catherine Johnson

T
EMPLE
G
RANDIN
has redefined society's perception of what is possible for people with autism. Her world-famous “hug machine,” a pressure device she invented to alleviate her own anxiety, led to the invention of pressure therapies for autistic people worldwide. She has been instrumental in explaining sensory sensitivity as well as how autistic people think. Grandin is perhaps best known, however, for being a passionate and effective animal advocate and for explaining to humans how animals think. She revolutionized animal movement systems and spearheaded reform of the quality of life and humaneness of death for farm animals. In fact, half the cattle in the United States and Canada are handled in systems she designed.

An associate professor at Colorado State University, Grandin holds a Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois. She is the author of four books:
Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals,
and
Livestock Handling and Transport.
Through her company, Grandin Livestock Systems, she works with the country's fast food purveyors, including McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King, to monitor the conditions of animal facilities worldwide. She lectures widely on both animal science and autism and serves as a role model for hundreds of thousands of families and people with autism.

 

C
ATHERINE
J
OHNSON
, Ph.D., is a writer specializing in the brain and neuropsychiatry. For seven years she served as a trustee of the National Alliance for Autism Research, returning to civilian life just in time to begin work with Temple Grandin on
Animals in Translation.
She is the mother of three boys, two of whom have autism, and lives with her husband and children in Irvington, New York.