Customer Reviews

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior

5 star:		(145)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I savored every moment of reading this book. Grandin has an enthusiasm for her subject that she combines with endless quantities of fascinating research and observations about animals. The book isn't exactly what I expected - I thought it would focus more on her own interactions with animals. However, because the book is so engagingly written and the information is so interesting, the difference between what I expected and what I got didn't diminish my enjoyment in the least.

Grandin does a much better job of making the scientific information more interesting and less dry than in her previous book, Thinking in Pictures, which contained long passages about medications that could be used to treat autistic people. I found that book to be much more uneven. Animals in Translation, however, held on to my attention from the first page to the last. While she also includes a generous amount of scientific information in this book, it is all so interesting and sometimes surprising, that I was never bored. If you have pets or are simply interested in animals and/or biology, this is a must-read.

When the author focuses on what she knows - autism, neurobiology, and domestic livestock - this book offers many insights. By applying some excellent existing research in neurobiology about what animals are truly capable of perceiving and feeling (read some of the referenced books for confirmation of emotions in animals) and applying her own experiences with domestic livestock and insights founded in her autism (a much more visual world than "normal" people (her word, not mine)), Dr. Grandin shows how a more visual, detail-oriented animal encounters the world.

Sadly, Dr. Grandin - perhaps wanting to appeal to a wider audience - tries also to include predator species such as our companion dogs and cats in her book. Her lack of direct experience with predator species is palpable in everything she writes about them. Her data sources are extremely outdated(Monks of New Skete, anyone?) and her own discussions are highly anecdotal ("my neighbor's dog..." "my childhood cat..."). Her word choices reveal her discomfort with the subject matter (much use of terms such as "probably" "pretty much" "nobody knows why"). Nor does she make any effort to validate her suppositions. Her "Troubleshooting" chapter should be avoided like the plague (recommending a shock collar for chasing behavior can create aggression, as the dog learns to associate the chase object with pain).

If you read this book, take it with a grain of salt and by no means use it as your only reference. Her own references are excellent and can be used for further study. Also, for those interested primarily in dogs, Patricia McConnell has an exceptional new book, For the Love of a Dog, that is grounded in more recent data and a lifetime of working with dogs.

What author Temple Grandin has attempted to do here is to use her own experiences as an autistic person to gain insight into the way animals perceive and react to the world around them. She explains that autism seems to impair the ability of the neocortex, or frontal lobes of the brain, to obtain and process information, and that animals likewise have less well-developed frontal lobes than normal humans do. Her theory is that the impairment of an autistic person's brain, in essence, makes them far closer to other animals than to non-autistic humans in how they view the world. As a result, Grandin has largely been able to help people better relate to their pets, and also to design more humane slaughterhouse equipment and more effective auditing procedures for slaughter facilities.

The book starts off well, with Grandin offering many insights that show that, in some ways, she really does have a better understanding of animal perception and thought than "normal" humans. Her principle examples revolve around the fact that animals, like autistic people, are detail-oriented. Their inability to generalize and see the "big picture" often leads to fixations on small things that the average person would not notice. Grandin illustrates this with stories from her inspections of meat plants, where something as simple as an abrupt change in lighting, or a reflection on a puddle - things which have entirely escaped the plant operators' notice - have been causing cattle to balk and refuse to go where they are being directed. She goes on to explain exactly why these details, which don't seem like much of a reason to be afraid, are so disturbing to the animals. Her observations, while not things that would immediately jump out at most people, make a lot of sense once she has explained them. Grandin also includes a useful checklist of things to look for when trying to determine what may be frightening an animal.

However, there are also some not-so-positive aspects to the book. In many places Grandin deviates from her theme of using autism to understand animals, and starts making speculations that not only have no connection to autism, but which seem to have little to back them up at all beyond the author's own opinions. She uses phrases like "statistics have shown" but then fails to elaborate on these supposedly evidential statistics, giving no information on who collected the information, when the study was done, or how large of a sample was used. This particularly comes into play when she discusses pit bulls - a topic she turns to repeatedly throughout the book. Grandin makes no attempt to hide her great distaste for pit bulls (she does not specify whether she is referring to American Pit Bull Terriers in particular, or all of the various breeds that fall under the generic "pit bull" label) and also Rottweilers, German Shepherds, and Chows.

In addition, Grandin puts forth some opinions on dog training that range from strange to absurd. Two things in particular caught my attention. First, she strongly advocates the outdated "alpha" theory for establishing dominance over one's dog. And secondly, I found myself greatly puzzled when she posed her theory that leash laws result in undersocialized dogs. She goes on to reminisce about how, when she was a child, dogs in her neighborhood were allowed to roam free, and that there were rarely any fights. Perhaps this was the case in her neighborhood, but in most places allowing one's dogs to roam free without supervision poses many risks. And leash laws in no way prevent a dog from being well socialized - they just require that a dog owner take an active role in introducing their pets to other animals and humans.

Finally, I was slightly dismayed with Grandin's writing style itself, though I'm not sure whether this is just a lack of writing skill, or a by-product of her autism. Grandin is obviously well-educated and experienced, but the text felt more like a junior high research report with a lot of scientific words thrown in. She often uses the same phrases repetitively, and also uses juvenalized terms for some things. However, the author does admit that written language does not come naturally to her, and that she often draws on a collection of "stock phrases" to communicate, which is what makes me wonder if this aspect of the writing is actually due to the nature of her autism. However, she also makes the mistake of repeatedly using terms like "I believe" or "my opinion is" when putting forth her theories. While these theories obviously ARE her ideas, making statements of the "I think" variety in scientific writing makes the arguments sound weaker, especially when she fails to back up her claims with research or other evidence. Many times she simply concludes an argument with the statement "and I can prove it!" but then fails to go on to give actual proof.

On the whole, the book is a bit of a mixed bag. Though my previous three paragraphs focused on things I found disappointing, I do not mean to give the impression that Grandin's work is all bad. It's certainly not. She does have a lot of good insights, and when she backs up her assertions with specific evidence, her ideas are quite fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the beginning of the book, where she explains the differences in detail-perception between animals, autistic people, and non-autistic people, and also the sections devoted to animal language / communication, and the co-evolution of dogs and humans. In the end I would probably still recommend Grandin's book to readers, with the provision that one should take a slightly hesitant approach in deciding which of her arguments should be readily accepted, and which need further proof.

Animals in Translation: Using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behavior.
I will never think about animals, and about autism, and about "normal" people quite the same way again. This is a landmark book.

The book is badly organized. You will have to read every page. You may not be interested in the long pages where she talks about slaughter houses, but then right in the middle of a paragraph you suddenly come across a bit of wisdom that you would not want to have missed. Right then you must underline it or you will never find it back again.

The upshot of this book is that animals do not have a fully functioning frontal lobe, nor do autistic people, and she tells us throughout the book what that is like, over and over again until you start to get a deep understanding of what it is like. We get a better understanding of ourselves too. The frontal lobe "puts it all together", and having put it all together, we race over the details like a speed boat over water. We do not see the details. An autistic person on the other hand, can not help but see them. He sees all the details, and only the details. He is overwhelmed by them. He sees all forty shades of brown. He can not see the forest for the trees, and more trees, and more trees. He hears every tone. He smells every odor. His life is a jumble of details. As you might expect, her book is rich in details about her own life and about all the animals she knows and when you emerge at the other end of the book, you feel immersed. Being a "normal" person you can not remember all the details, but you "know" something about these people's lives, and about animals' lives in a way you could never get from a text book. And yet, at the same time, she also has a doctorate and she does her own research. She has the training to write the text book, but then, being autistic, she can not. She does not hold the whole picture and therefore it remains a badly organized book. That is the message. That is what it is like to be autistic. That is what it is like to be an animal.

Nicholas Dormaar
British Columbia, Canada.

I am a wildlife rehabilitator and do a good deal of reading about animals and their needs/behavior etc. 'Animals in Translation' is the most facinating book on animals that I've ever come across. It includes examples of wildlife as well as domestic and farm animals. It's beautifully written and the author makes very complicated information completely comprehensible to the non scientific person. In her book, Ms Grandin has opened the door to the mysteries of the animal kingdom and in doing so, made us wiser to their plight of living amongst humans. This book has answered many questions and given me a whole new perspective on our furry friends. Anyone who is curious about animals, has a pet or works with animals, should be reading the material written in this book.

Let me just say up front that this is a wonderful book in many ways, and offers a unique, and in most cases, accurate view of animal consciousness. My own area of expertise is canine behavior, so I was really looking forward to Temple Grandin's perspective on that. She's absolutely right when she says that animals are specifically geared toward perceiving vivid sensory details rather than the way the human brain tends to automatically generalize things and gather such details into conceptual, symbolic, or "meaningful" chunks.

I hope all dog owners will read this book and finally realize that their dogs are both "smarter" and not quite as smart as they thought they were. I tell my dog training clients that dogs are natural-born geniuses at pattern recognition--which goes beyond the sense of smell, by the way, which Grandin focuses on, and includes visual data (body language) and aural input (vocalizations)--but that they're innately incapable of symbolic, conceptual, or linguistic thought processes.

So imagine my disappointment when instead of continuing to break new ground, Grandin and her co-author trot out the washed-up alpha theory* with most, if not all, of its attendant fallacies firmly in place. Just where I was hoping to get her unique perspective on something truly important (at least to me and the dogs I train), her insight fails her and she falls back on old, outdated, and thoroughly discredited research.

This is maddening since her views on aggression are semi-accurate (most aggression in dogs IS based on fear). But how can she believe in this myth of alpha, especially since she's put forth the position that animals aren't capable of symbolic and conceptual thinking, and for the alpha theory to be true it would require dogs and wolves to be able to think this way?

Let me make another thing clear: dogs are not inherently dangerous! They are genetically programmed to want to attain a state of harmony with other dogs and with people. It's what they live for. In fact, this is what the pack instinct is really about since it's what enables canids to hunt large prey, by working together in group harmony. The primary thing that makes dogs dangerous is the way they've been mistreated by people who've been brainwashed about having to be the dog's pack leader, which has been woefully misused in many cases as an excuse to hurt, scare, intimidate, and punish these innately loving and sweet-natured animals... (whew! -- glad I got that off my chest...)

Anyway, that's why I'm only giving this book three stars. Grandin has done good work, at least partially. We should all be thankful for her insights and her unique perspective. Just ignore most of what she says about canine social behavior.

*Wolf experts don't even like to use the word alpha anymore because, as Dr. L. David Mech puts it, "it falsely implies a hierarchical system in which each wolf assumes a place in a linear pecking order," (Canadian Journal of Zoology, 2002).

I bought this book because I have a special relationship with my dog and was attracted to the topic offered.

I got much more than I expected and I am a new devotee of Ms. Grandin and her writing. I am not autistic, however after reading Ms. Grandin's book I recognize that I have autistic tendencies; that is some of the ways of autistic thinking that Ms. Grandin describes in this book are the same as mine, causing me to believe that there are just degrees of autism. I always thought that I was missing something in life; I couldn't understand how other people did things so easily and I could not; how other people seemed to handle people and situations with ease and I could not. In my family there are several members with ADD or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and being able to find a connection between those things and my thinking was nothing short of miraculous. I have learned to embrace my different thinking and be able to understand how others think differently and I have found strength in that and can offer my strengths instead of focusing on my weaknesses.

In addition, I have a new appreciation for my dog and feel that I can relate to her and her needs much more effectively than before reading the book.

I think that this book should be required reading in school and I am it's new champion on the street; I tell everyone I meet with a dog about this book and I have told my friends and family. I think about it's themes almost every day, thinking in pictures, compression, abstract thinking versus reality and I hope to get as many people to read it as possible and spread the word.

I thank Ms. Grandin for putting herself out there in such a personal and understandable way.

The only thing that I can say as a negative, the reason for my four stars, is that Ms. Grandin's writing style is sometimes repetitive and jerky. Despite that, I couldn't put it down until I was finished reading it.

I was interested in this book as a dog trainer, hoping to acquire insights into dog behavior. Unlike some other reviewers, I am also happy to read about autism and the meat packing industry as well. On those subjects I am incompetent to judge. However, as far as dogs go, Ms. Grandin has nothing on truly observant experienced dog trainers. She makes wild generalizations I know are not supported by evidence ("all Labs are like x"; "wolflike-appearing breeds are actually more wolflike in behavior"; "white dogs are crazy", etc.) Her ideas about dogs might be taken as remarkable by the complete novice to the subject--which is most people--but are no news to anyone who has been around the block, except where they are apparently inventions of her own.

She could be way cool on the other subjects she touches on. She has a very accessible style of writing, possibly attributable to her co-author.

If you want an understanding of dog behavior, try the classic "Culture Clash" by Jean Donaldson.

This is the fourth co-authored book featuring Temple Grandin as one of the authors, here together with Catherine Johnson, the author of 'Shadow Syndromes' and its an interesting combination of authors who have come together on this book.

One of the myths Temple Grandin, perhaps unintentionally, busts in this book is the view that people on the autistic spectrum are not interested in other minds.

As a person labelled in infancy as autistic and rediagnosed in adulthood with Asperger's Syndrome, Temple displays an intense, obsessive observation of detail of her animal subjects which, whilst its not the work of a zoologist specialising in animal psychology, her contribution to this book comes from the heart of Temple's work as an engineer renowned for designing humane slaughter facilities for cattle.

Already emerging as a clearly scientific mind in childhood, Temple is clearly the born scientist and here she turns that scientific mind to the study of animals, in particular perhaps those she has the most experience with, cattle and extrapolating many of those experiences to dogs and other animals.

Whilst humans may fastidiously study animals to the degree they imagine or believe they know how they think, doesn't necessarily follow, however, that this is so.

Whilst Temple thinks in pictures rather than in words, visually rather than auditorily, this doesn't necessarily mean that animals think this way even if, like her, as a scientist, they notice and react to detail. If a water bowl is placed on the ground for a new dog, it doesn't necessarily recognise what it is, even if its seen 20 water bowls. But if you tap the bowl or flick the surface of the water it comes running to the bowl. Does the cat which has already had 10 similar toys, know what the new toy is visually until it taps it and smells it? Hence, is this visual thinking or is it kinesthetic in which the animal can't interpret things once they are moving, making noise or somehow in action? Whilst those in educational psychology would use awareness of three main modalities of processing; auditory, visual and kinesthetic, Temple seems to have little grasp that there is as vast a difference between the visual and kinesthetic worlds of processing as their are between the visual and auditory.

Whilst not all people on the autistic spectrum have deeply scientific minds (for this is a common stereotype) nor think in pictures, it may true that humans have lost a valuable piece of understanding and key to empathising which they can find through connection with animals, or perhaps, more to the point, that animals retain a 'system of sensing' as captured in Donna Williams' (another autistic author) book, Autism And Sensing; The Unlost Instinct (1998). If this is so, then where Donna suggests we re-discover our capacity to use this kinesthetic system of sensing that we lost in moving into using our interpretive minds and language, then here Temple shows us that scientific minds of verbal people which rely on interpretive thinking (whether visual or auditory) may find a pathway to re-discovering this system of sensing through relationships with animals.

Studying animals as a scientist is a different way of grasping their world than that of feeling their systems and nature through being with them without analysing them. What Temple shows us in this book is that even the most clinical, logical, emotionally detached and scientific of minds can attempt to build a capacity for empathic understanding and put that into occupational uses, in Temple's particular case, within the slaughter industry.

This book has a great idea at its core, but the authors don't really pull it off. "Using autism to understand animal behavior" would be very interesting, but that would imply a much more thorough discussion of autism than this book provides. Unfortunately, the book will go twenty or thirty pages at a time without even mentioning the word "autism," much less discussing it seriously. Chapter 4 on aggression does not contain the word "autism" and several other chapters mention it only at the start or end of the chapter. However, the conclusion does tie together the themes of autism and animal behavior, though it's really about animal talents.

Instead, this book is mostly about Temple Grandin's personal insights into animal behavior. These are interesting. She is autistic, and the first, autobiographical chapter explains how she learned that it gave her a different perspective into animals. She is also a professor of animal behavior and draws extensively on the scientific literature. Despite the use of science, the book is very easy to read; in fact, it's written at about a 9th grade level.

The core idea is that animals, like autistic people, tend to think in pictures. They are also much more sensitive to detail and generalize less widely than typical people. Grandin makes these claims plausible and interesting. I learned why my dog will walk through one of our doors in only one direction, for example.

Much of Grandin's career has involved the behavior of livestock. Some animal lovers will not like her discussion of humane slaughtering methods, and will not be impressed that she works with McDonald's and Wendy's to improve the life quality of cattle that grows up to be hamburgers. She talks about her own feelings on this issue a little, but it would be good to have more.

In addition to livestock, she discusses the behavior of other domestic animals, mostly dogs and cats. Sometimes she extrapolates to wild animals but I'm not very confident about what she says there, as some of her claims about wolves are flatly contradicted by the literature.

You may have noticed that my review says Temple Grandin this or that, though the book is co-authored. They wrote the entire book in the first person *singular*, and whenever the authors say "I," they clearly mean the first author. I found this repeatedly odd but it doesn't really affect the quality of the book.

Those weaknesses aside, this is a very interesting book about the behavior of domestic animals and livestock. I understand some of my dog's quirks better now. But if you're looking for insights into autism, you'll be disappointed.