Temple Grandin

"I have the nervous system of a prey species animal," remarks Dr. Temple Grandin in the documentary The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow, available on Google Video. Fear, she says, is her main emotion, and often in the course of this 40-minute film, she looks and acts as if she were being hunted. Some of the time, in my view, she is.

Dr. Grandin's reputation is such that she needs little introduction. Severely autistic as a child to the point where her father almost had her institutionalised, she achieved a breakthrough when she was sent to an aunt's ranch in Arizona and discovered a remarkable affinity with animals. Since then she has gained a doctorate in animal sciences, and has made a worldwide reputation as an expert in animal behaviour at the slaughterhouse. Her insights have made the slaughtering of animals less of an ordeal for them, and along the way more straightforward and presumably profitable for the meat industry. Whether there's a conflict between the two, Dr. Grandin takes a resolutely realistic line. She's not interested in ideology, she points out, but in what is practical and applicable in real life.

The title of the film is sensationalistic, and doubtless intended to evoke Oliver Sacks, in whose book An Anthropologist on Mars Dr. Grandin was featured. It also sets up a strange paradox. Aren't we supposed to think that autistics are unable to empathise, to put themselves into another person's shoes, or brain? If autistics are supposed to be assumed to have no Theory of Mind where fellow humans are concerned, what are we to make of one who sees the world through a cow's eyes?

In the event, I don't think on the basis of this film that such a thing is happening at all. I should issue the caveat that although I have recently bought Dr. Grandin's book Animals in Translation, I haven't yet got around to reading it, and so this opinion will be, as all opinions should be, subject to later review as more information comes in.

What I think Dr. Grandin is doing, is looking at the situation cows are put into not from a bovine point of view, but with a problem-solving clarity. It doesn't strike me that she wants to improve efficiency and profit, which will doubtless have been the approach of most or all of those attempting to design slaughterhouse procedures in the past. She says she wants to take care of the animals' welfare, which is a slight bias. But her advice appears to me to be based on descriptive insights, rather than prescriptive principles. In other words, she seems to arrive at conclusions based on what she sees, and to see things based on her ability -- and willingness -- to look. That it can be stated in such apparently simple terms doesn't make it any less remarkable.

Temple Grandin is a remarkable person, for having overcome what seemed like a crippling disability to achieve the respect of the academic community, and also for having dared to enter the fortress of the macho meat industry as a woman and an academic, and brought them round to her way of thinking.

But the persistence of her feeling like a prey animal is still visible in this film, in large part because of the excruciatingly ham-fisted way she is handled. The interviewer/reporter is not credited, so I'm assuming she is writer-producer Emma Sutton. The questioning is as crass as you could imagine. Dr. Grandin is asked about boys she may have liked at school, just as she's busy talking about the far more important subject of being picked on for being different. When Dr. Grandin picks out some magazines to take on board a plane for a flight to a meat-industry convention, and expresses a preference for fact-based magazines, Sutton still feels the need to press her on what she thinks of women's magazines. In her home, meanwhile, Dr. Grandin is as edgy and wary as a prey animal, and one is forced to conclude that Sutton wants it that way, for she does nothing to put Dr. Grandin at her ease. I had the unpleasant feeling during those exchanges that Sutton was prodding her to expose her freakishness -- because without such prodding she comes across as slightly awkward, but not freakish in any way.

And why on earth is Dr. Grandin referred to throughout as "Temple"? Does the BBC make documentaries on Professor Stephen Hawking in which he's called "Stephen"? Is Professor Dawkins "Richard"?

Oliver Sacks (perhaps I should just call him Oliver) offers a clue. In his written work, Sacks consistently refers to the subjects by their first names, perhaps to preserve a measure of anonymity. As he's writing of her as a subject in his book (see above) he calls her "Temple".

But Emma Sutton is not in that position, and it's notable that other people in the film are given their proper names. There's no talk of "Bruno" when she's referring to the famed developmental psychologist Bettelheim. The constant reference to "Temple" throughout the film was the most grating thing about it. I found it inappropriate, demeaning and disrespectful, in a "Does he take sugar?" kind of way.

The film also missed the chance in its concentration on the meat industry to explore two aspects of Dr. Grandin's experience which are common among autistics and which she might be in a position to articulate more fully: the attention -- often to the exclusion of all else -- on tiny details of a picture; and the problem of sensory overload, which to be fair was dealt with more extensively, especially as it gave the film-makers a chance to show Dr. Grandin enclosing herself in a grab-chute of her own devising, the Squeeze Machine, modelled on the ones found on cattle-farms, which she uses to apply the deep all-over pressure which she needs to calm herself in stressful times.

The film is of great interest, finally, because its subject is. Anyone interested in autism cannot pass over Temple Grandin as a matter for study, and this film was worthwhile despite its makers' approach, not because of it. Luckily, Dr. Grandin's own books and other autobiographical works (see her own website for details) more than cover for any failings on the part of the BBC. If the film sends people in that direction to find out more, it will have served a useful purpose. But what a missed opportunity.