Animals in Translation

About one in every 500 people has autism, a condition characterised by severely impaired social and communication skills and by repetitive interests and activities. The author of this eye-opening book, Temple Grandin, believes that such people have an especially close affinity with animals and are better placed than others to empathise with animals and to understand their behaviour. Many experts ridicule such generalisations, but Grandin is utterly confident that she is right, and she speaks with authority: not only is she a professor of Animal Science but she is autistic.

Grandin deserves to be taken seriously since she has unequivocally demonstrated her special understanding of animals. Hard-nosed accountants in the fast-food industry pay her considerable sums to advise them on how best to treat the cattle in their slaughterhouses. By dramatically improving the conditions in abattoirs, often through insightful but inexpensive changes to conventional practices, she may well have done more for animal welfare than anyone else in recent history.

In Animals in Translation, Grandin explains why she believes autistic people have so much common with animals. The answer lies in their brains: "Autistic people's frontal lobes almost never work as normal people's do, so our brain function ends up being somewhere between human and animal," she writes. The frontal lobes, in the front of the skull, are the parts of the brain involved in planning, organisation, speech and voluntary motor movements.

Whereas most humans are good at viewing the "big picture" of their surroundings, autistic people, Grandin believes, tend to be much more sensitive to the details. This hypersensitivity led her to notice things that have evidently been traumatising animals for centuries in human-imposed environments but that other experts had missed. Her checklist of 18 "tiny details that scare farm animals" includes sparkling reflections in puddles, hissing and high pitched-noises, moving pieces of plastic and even a piece of clothing hanging on a fence.

Grandin has improved the lives of millions of animals by removing these irritants. Churlish critics, however, point out that Grandin has done much of her most effective and lucrative work in slaughterhouses, where her employers send animals to an early death. This is undoubtedly true, but the animals would die whether or not Grandin were involved, so anything she does is surely a bonus.

Her book gives many fascinating examples of how human beings mistreat animals through a lack of understanding and empathy rather than through unkindness. She explains, for example, why collies are getting less intelligent. The answer is that breeders like these dogs to have a thin nose and so selectively breed collies with the narrowest skulls, leading to a distortion of their brains and to a lessening of their intelligence. The result is that the breed once symbolised by Lassie is now, in Grandin's rather cruel description, a bunch of "brainless ice picks".

In another case, a farmer noticed that many of his roosters had unaccountably formed a gang of rapists. When Grandin looked closely at their surroundings, she saw that the problem was that there was not nearly enough room for the chickens to practise their instinctive mating ritual, leading the male to take the short-cut to have his way. When the farmer gave his chickens more space, the rapes ceased.

Animals in Translation is full of such examples, sufficient to convince us that Grandin indeed has special insights into the way animals think, feel and behave. This is a strange book - a cross between a memoir, a layperson's guide to autism and a how-to guide to animal welfare. Though readable and intriguing, it is 50 pages too long and burdened with too much pseudo-scientific hokum.

Nevertheless, we have much to learn from this real-life Dr Dolittle. After reading Grandin's book I could not help thinking that Rex Harrison should have played Dolittle in the 1967 Hollywood film as an autistic uncle. Or perhaps it would have been better to cast Dustin Hoffman in the role, in his "Rain Man" persona?

[From The Telegraph]