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| Temple Grandin, a life of chutes and ladders |
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Temple Grandin is not a fan of the movie City Slickers because the filmmakers obviously were city slickers. Temple Grandin is all about keeping animals from freaking out. The professor of animal science at Colorado State University has built a stellar career on humane livestock handling, a career that is even more remarkable – and movie-worthy – because she is autistic. “I spent a day with Claire Danes. I gave her the oldest VHS tapes I had so she could get my mannerisms. She plays me in the ’60s and ’70s. It was like seeing a weird time machine seeing her play me. It was just weird,” Grandin said. Funny thing is, Grandin recognized some people on the Austin, Texas, film set – not as individuals, but as people touched with Asperger’s Syndrome, the high functioning end of the autism disorder spectrum. “Down on the movie site there were plenty of Asperger’s doing special effects and stuff like that. That’s where your Asperger types end up,” she said. “Geeks, nerds and Asperger’s, same thing. People on the high end of the spectrum tend to be specialist thinkers. Good in one subject at school, terrible at something else. You wouldn’t even have a phone to talk on if you didn’t have geeks and nerds. They’re socially awkward and are more interested in things.” Temple Grandin’s story is all that more amazing because she was not just a nerdy Asperger’s sufferer; she had full-blown autism – inability to speak, noise and touch sensitivity, the appearance of deafness, fixation on spinning objects, preference to be alone, temper tantrums and destructive behavior. “I was diagnosed brain damaged originally,” said Grandin, who was born in 1947. “Then nobody knew what it was. They did an EEG on me. That was normal. They checked me for deafness and I was not deaf. They thought it was mental retardation. Today I would have been diagnosed as autistic. I had classic autistic symptoms, early onset. I wasn’t fully verbal until I was 4.” In 1949 she was brought to Boston neurologist Dr. Bronson Carothers, who declared her “an odd little girl” and recommended normal therapy. “She referred me to an excellent speech therapy school that two teachers taught out of their basement. They had a couple of Down syndrome kids – they called them mongoloids back then. And Miss Reynolds, my speech teacher, did the same thing ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) teachers are doing today. “Then my mother hired a nanny when I was 3 who just played turn-taking games all day with me and my sister. And teaching table manners. So I had really early intensive therapy and mother could see that it was working, so she kept doing it. Later on I got the autism diagnosis. In ’49 they didn’t even know what autism was.” Grandin detailed her early years in her first book, Emergence: Labeled Autistic (1986), an amazing tale of self-discovery and recovery from autistic behaviors that were preventing her superior mind from engaging with the world. She writes about first having the thought in 2nd grade of a “magical machine that would soothe me and make me less different.” The dream persisted through childhood, into adolescence and young adulthood. It began to take shape as a reality that would turn into a career direction after graduating from a private high school in rural Vermont and spending the summer at her aunt’s farm in Arizona. She became fixated on her aunt’s squeeze chute, a device used to hold livestock in place for veterinary treatment, marking, castration and for slaughterhouse death. One of Temple’s autistic behaviors was withdrawal from touch, even that of her loving mother. Yet she wanted to be held. The squeeze machine was the answer. With the help of Mr. Carlock, a science teacher and intellectual mentor from high school, she created a prototype for a human squeeze machine. She continued to work on the design of the machine through college, and believes it helped her to be more empathetic – with humans and livestock – and eased her anxieties over simple everyday moments where people touch each other with handshakes or pats on the back. “Well, that really did help,” she said. “The other thing that helped me was excellent teachers. An excellent science teacher (Mr. Carlock) that motivated me to study. When I was goofing around in school and didn’t want to study, he motivated me.” She received her BA degree in psychology in 1970 and that September began graduate school in Arizona. In February of her first year in grad school, Temple got a job operating a cattle chute at a feedlot, where she started noticing that normally nice people were doing cruel things to make livestock behave. Her personal interest in developing her own squeeze machine intersected with the design of livestock handling procedures. She started becoming attuned to the emotions of the animals, an ability she believes is directly related to her autism. At a slaughterhouse she could feel the nervousness of animals standing in line, waiting to go to slaughter. She found that touching the animal often calmed it. As her interest in livestock and their handling increased, she switched majors from psychology to animal science. Her master’s thesis was on cattle chute design in feedlots, and was one of the first livestock behavior research projects in the U.S. Today she is recognized as a pioneer in humane livestock handling facility design. “What started out as just a fixation has turned into a lifelong dedication of improving the welfare of farm animals by designing humane equipment and facilities,” she wrote in Emergence. She attributes her understanding of animals to her autism. In her 2004 book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, she explained, “Autism made school and social life hard, but it made animals easy. …Because of my own problems, I’ve always followed neuroscientific research on the human brain as closely as I’ve followed my own field. I had to; I’m always looking for answers about how to manage my own life, not just animals’ lives. Following both fields at the same time led me to see a connection between human intelligence and animal intelligence the animal sciences have missed.” Temple Grandin knows she is an anomaly in the world of autism. Her ability to overcome her disabilities and successfully navigate the world has made her an inspiration to many who are touched by autism. For years she has been a sought-after speaker at autism conferences. She comes to the area in her role as autism activist as one of the keynote speakers at the Autism Society of Wisconsin Annual Conference in Green Bay March 18-20. Grandin said she is particularly concerned about the alarming number of autism diagnoses, but feels the number issue is clouded by the range of behaviors included under the very wide autism umbrella. “You have to remember autism is a spectrum that goes all the way from very, very, very severe where the person is going to remain non-verbal and handicapped, to people that are brilliant scientists. It’s a huge spectrum,” she said. “I don’t think the increase is the mild end because the Asperger types have always been there. I think some of the real mild autism – some of the Asperger’s – there’s increased diagnosis. “But in young kids where you have speech delay and autistic-type behavior, that’s not increased diagnosis. Something’s going on. And nobody really knows what. There’s a lot of speculation. I think there has been an increase in some of this very severe, early onset autism, especially this regressive type, where the kid seems to be somewhat normal – verified by looking at birthday party videos in a study by Geraldine Dawson at the University of Washington. The parents are right. There really is a regressive form of autism. If this is something happening at 18 months to 2 years of age – there’s some other insult getting in there acting with susceptible genetics – that needs to be looked at very, very carefully. That’s some of the real severe stuff. That regressive sample needs to be looked at separately. “We don’t understand the whole increase thing. It’s complicated genetics. But genetics is half the story,” she continued. “One thing that everyone knows is that early intervention helps to improve the prognosis immensely. Other things that help are some of the special diets. Gluten-free, casein-free, cutting out tons of carbs. They don’t cure autism, but they really help some kids. Some of these regressive kids tend to respond to the diets. “I also think the American diet is bad. I’d say of all of the alternative treatments, diet is the single most important thing for parents to try. The other thing that’s getting really good science now are the Omega 3s. They have tons of good science. Give them Omega 3s.” Mention the spoonful of cod liver oil you had to take daily as a kid, and she says, “Your granny was right about that.” |
By Jim Lundstrom