Word: grandin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Take these two specimens. Hannah Holmes is a tall, blond, personally assertive science journalist. Temple Grandin is an eminent scholar of animal behavior who also happens to be autistic. These humans have written two books that look very different but are, in their warm-blooded, four-chambered hearts, very similar. In The Well-Dressed Ape (Random House; 351 pages), Holmes attempts to produce a thorough description of Homo sapiens using the kind of language we ordinarily reserve for animals. In Animals Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 342 pages), Grandin does the opposite: she describes animals in terms we usually...
Holmes and Grandin share the habit of putting everyday phenomena under the kind of scientific scrutiny usually reserved for giant squid and black holes, which causes them to notice things that regular civilians wouldn't pick up on in a lifetime. For example, Holmes points out that even though humans are covered in hair follicles--we have more of them than chimpanzees do--most of our fur grows in an "extravagant topknot" on our heads. In the context of the wider animal kingdom, this is a bizarre, even perverse evolutionary innovation. We also have more sweat glands than any other...
...Grandin isn't much of a writer (nor, on the evidence, is her co-author, Catherine Johnson), but she's at least as astute an observer as Holmes, plus she's an actual scientist and an influential designer of humane cattle-handling systems. Grandin is also famous for being one of the world's most professionally eminent autistic people, which gives her work an ineffably distinctive perspective. In Animals Make Us Human, she's particularly interested in a kind of behavior called a stereotypy: an abnormal action that someone can't stop repeating. Autistic people often have stereotypies...
Animals Make Us Human is a practical, species-by-species guide to making animals happier, grounded in Grandin's belief that "all animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain." For most people, her chapters on dogs and cats will be the most immediately rewarding--it never would have occurred to me that one reason cats' emotions are so hard to read is that they have no eyebrows--but there's a world of insight to be gained from her work on farm animals as well as more exotic zoo animals. Grandin shows a startling tenderness...
Chaffee says horses that are taken north to Canada are treated humanely. But with the long-distance hauls now being prohibitive, horses in the southern U.S. are being laundered through a series of dealers into Mexico. Says Colorado State's Grandin: "At the Mexican border, they just wave the trucks through. The conditions down there are horrible." Proposed legislation to outlaw U.S. horses for slaughter may get passed, says Grandin, but the law won't be enforceable because Mexican "kill buyers" can circumvent the law by labeling horses as breed stock or for riding purposes. And such...