I caught part of the new made for TV movie on HBO about Temple Grandin a few nights ago.  Since I’m a huge fan of Temple Grandin, I’m really excited about this!  Temple Grandin has done so much to improve the horrible conditions cows face in slaughterhouses.  Thousands of cows are slaughtered in peaceful conditions every day because of her influence.  You know those horrible slaughterhouse videos PETA occasionally airs?  Grandin-designed slaughterhouses keep cows from being treated horribly like that.

Temple Grandin also revolutionized the way people think about animal behavior.  I highly recommend her book on animal behavior “Animals in Translation” — it has wonderful insights into how animals think.  Once you read it you’ll have a newfound understanding of how your dog sees the world — basically, Dr. Grandin suggests that animals, and autistic people, have trouble seeing overarching patterns.  As I understand it, this means that the reason your dog wraps his leash around a stake you tie him to and becomes all tangled up is because he can’t see the overarching pattern that walking in figure 8s and circles around a stake would cause the leash to tangle — he just can’t see that overarching pattern.  Similarly, (some) autistic people have trouble following the storyline of a movie — just like the dog wrapping the leash around the stake, they can’t see how the first scenes of a movie would lead to the last scenes.  They can’t see that overarching pattern.  Surprisingly enough, this is what makes autistic people smarter than nonautistic people in some situations.  For instance, some autistic people can see subliminal messages hidden in movies — they see the movie as a series of unrelated scenes, and when the subliminal message pops up for a hundredth of a second, it leaps out at the autistic people, and they notice and comment on it and wonder why there’s an advertisement for popcorn.  Whereas a nonautistic person is following the overarching theme of the movie, and their brain discards the subliminal message without even allowing their conscious mind to notice it because the subliminal message doesn’t fit in within the storyline of the movie.  Autism is a really fascinating condition!  Dr. Grandin actually relates normal peoples’ abilities to discard nonpattern related information as why airport concourses are so poorly designed — the nonautistic engineers are looking at the big picture and their minds are unable to see the tiny details that make the airport concourses hell on earth.  They see the overarching pattern of getting people from the parking lot to the planes, but they really just don’t see the bottlenecks their design creates by the ticket counters because they aren’t focused on details in that way.  Dr. Grandin would probably recommend that someone with autistic tendencies design airport concourses!

“Animals in Translation” is a really great book — I’m including a link at the bottom of this post because it is so awesome, and I think anyone with an interest in animal behavior would read it.  It provides a much more subtle and sophisticated analysis of how animals think like autistic people that my little explanation above.

I think it’s so great that Temple Grandin is getting so much recognition due to this movie, and I think it will be a huge boon to the humane-farming movement.  (Though I admit I find it really strange how Temple Grandin has this tremendous love of animals and hates animal suffering violently, yet designs systems that kill them, and actually writes about how she thinks killing animals is a ritual-like experience.  But she did grow up in a much less animal-friendly culture than today’s, I suppose. That’s my explanation for that, anyway).

However, the bad news is I only actually saw a few minutes of the Temple Grandin movie — it was a part in which they showed Dr. Grandin, as played by Claire Danes, thinking about how to improve slaughterhouse conditions, and it showed a cow struggling in a poorly designed slaughterhouse.  I turned the TV off pretty quickly — I just can’t watch that sort of thing.  I guess I should have expected it — a movie about someone who vastly improved slaughterhouse conditions would have to have some film footage devoted to “bad” slaughterhouse conditions, right?

Maybe I’ll give it another try when it’s available on Netflix?  At least then I can fastforward through any animal suffering parts.

Also I’m really hoping no animals were made to suffer during the filming of this movie.  That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?  A film promoting a humane-design specialist who has made the lives of millions of cows sent to slaughter a less horrific, suffering-filled existence leading to a film in which animals suffer?  Please no.

Categories : cruelty free