Animal magnetism Temple Grandin delves into the non-human mind BY AMY FINCH
	Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior By Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Scribner’s, 368 pages, $25.
	Related Links Dr. Temple Grandin's official Web site

In describing herself to Oliver Sacks, eminent animal scientist Temple Grandin provided the title for his 1995 essay collection An Anthropologist on Mars (Vintage). As an autistic, Grandin cannot fathom the social complexities of human interaction and emotion, or even perceive the simple beauty of flowers, with anything other than an intellectual awareness. As Sacks concludes his profile (which first appeared in the New Yorker), he is about to say farewell to Grandin when she suddenly begins to weep. "I don’t want my thoughts to die with me," she says. "I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution — know that my life has meaning."

Ten years and three books later, Grandin has made an enormous contribution to the lives of millions of factory-farm animals worldwide and to the study of autism. In Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism To Decode Animal Behavior (Scribner’s), which she wrote with Catherine Johnson, Grandin broadens the examination into the similarities between animal and autistic brains that she introduced in Emergence: Labeled Autistic (Warner Books), which she wrote with Margaret M. Scariano, and Thinking in Pictures (Vintage). In those books, Grandin put into words what it’s like to navigate a world exploding with sensory details — colors, sounds, smells, and intense tactile stimulation — but in which she has crippling difficulty pulling all the details into a cohesive whole. Yet she has always felt at home with animals: identifying what scares or hurts them comes to her automatically, and she has designed about half of the cattle-handling facilities in the US and Canada.

Cow thoughts are again the backdrop for Grandin, but Animals in Translation stretches outward to explore how humans have influenced animal genetics, creating rapist roosters, psycho hens, aggressive dogs, and nervous pigs, for instance. Without anthropomorphizing, she delves into animal fears, curiosity, patterns of dominance, ways of communicating, and different types of aggressive behavior. She backs up her perceptions by citing specific examples and fascinating studies involving a Noah’s Ark of pigs, primates, prairie dogs, parrots, giraffes, rats, quail, and cattle.

As ever, Grandin writes with clarity and often a dry wit. "You can’t get anything past a cow," she notes. Like an autistic person, a cow surveys her surroundings detail by detail by detail, whereas a normal person’s brain has a better-functioning frontal lobe that merges all the details into the whole but is often blind to the particulars. Being a visual creature, a cow, like an autistic person, will be struck by the contrast of a dark barn on a sunny day and might refuse to enter. Normal people are likely to see the nuts and bolts of the set-up as being identical to a million other situations and will fail to notice the sun’s unusually blinding angle. Normal people might not notice a chain swaying in the wind or a draft blowing into animals’ faces, or a slowly turning fan. Or any number of details that can result in one herd of uncooperative cows.

Besides visual (and aural) acuity, autistic people and animals share an inability to generalize. As a child, Grandin could not understand that a dachshund was a dog. All the dogs she knew were large, and she finally had to zoom in on a common detail: dogs have big noses, and that’s how she figured out they belonged in the same category. (She doesn’t explain how she dealt with flat-schnozzed breeds like the pug and the Pekingese.) And dogs themselves must learn that, though the family toddler is not prey, the one next door isn’t either. Like an autistic person, a dog must learn to generalize from one situation to another. It must be taught to make conscious inferences based on past experience, something autistic people also must struggle with.

Grandin asserts, "Autistic people are closer to animals than normal people are," by which she means that they process information in a simple way, seeing what is in front of them without the distraction of expectations. She cites studies that demonstrate just how mind-bogglingly unaware people can be — pilots who "land" a virtual plane right on top of one already there without even seeing it, people watching a basketball-game video who don’t see a woman in a gorilla suit jumping around in front of the camera.

Autism is a tragedy, but Grandin has used certain aspects — its "extreme perceptions," almost wholly visual thought processes, and microscopic, relentless focus on detail — to give herself a purpose in an often incomprehensible world. Above all else, she wants people to pay more attention to animals, what they see, hear, feel, think. (Plenty of research proves that they do think.) Human beings bred domestic animals into being, Grandin writes, and therefore we are responsible for them. In the past, she advocated for animals a "decent life and a decent death." Now she wants more for them. "I wish animals could have a good life, too."