Module 3: "Animals in Translation" by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Chapter 1

They think I must have had an epiphany.

I was never mean to the horses at the school (other kids were sometimes), but I wasn’t any horse-whispering autistic savant, either.

It was the same level of anxiety I felt later on when I was defending my dissertation in front of my thesis committee, only I felt that way all day long and all night, too.

The rancher has plenty of space for his hands and the hypodermic needle between the metal bars.

I was riveted by the sight of those big animals inside that squeezing machine.

When a horse is cantering around the ring one of his front hooves has to thrust out farther forward than the other one, and the rider has to help him do that.

People who love animals, and who spend a lot of time with animals, often start to feel intuitively that there’s more to animals than meets the eye.

Also, I’d taken an animal ethology class at college — ethologists study animals in their natural environments — and Thomas Evans, the teacher, had taught us about animal instincts, which were hardwired behavior patterns the animal
was born with.

For instance, both the ethologists and the behaviorists were in total agreement that practically the worst thing anyone could possibly do was to anthropomorphize an animal.

During the 1990s I knew all the dot-coms would go to hell, because when I thought about them the only images I saw were rented office space and computers that would be obsolete in two years.

When I saw cattle balking and acting scared I just naturally thought, “Well let’s look at it from the animal’s point of view. I’ve got to get in the chute and see what he’s seeing.”

Cattle are extremely susceptible to bovine viral diarrhea and to respiratory diseases like pneumonia.

Cattle are extremely susceptible to bovine viral diarrhea and to respiratory diseases like pneumonia.

With animals there’s no ambiguity: stress is horrible for growth, period, which means stress is horrible for profits.