Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
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- ISBN13: 9780547248233
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
How can we give animals the best life– for them? What does an animal need to be pleased?
In her groundbreaking, best-selling book Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin drew on her own experience with autism as well as her experience as an animal scientist to deliver extraordinary insights into how animals reflect, act, and feel. Now she builds on persons insights to show us how to give our animals the best and most pleased life– on their terms, not ours.
Knowing what causes animals physical pain is usually simple, but pinpointing emotional distress is much harder. Drawing on the latest research and her own work, Grandin identifies the core emotional needs of animals and then clarifies how to fulfill the point needs of dogs and cats, horses, farm animals, zoo animals, and even wildlife. Whether it’s how to make the healthiest environment for the dog you must place alone most of the day, how to keep pigs from being bored, or how to know if the lion pacing in the zoo is miserable or just exercising, Grandin teaches us to challenge our assumptions about animal contentment and honor our bond with our fellow creatures.
Animals Make Us Human is the culmination of nearly thirty years of research, experimentation, and experience. This is essential reading for anyone who’s ever owned, cared for, or simply cared about an animal.
How can we give animals the best life–for them? What does an animal need to be pleased
In her groundbreaking, best-selling book
Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin drew on her own experience with autism as well as her experience as an animal scientist to deliver extraordinary insights into how animals reflect, act, and feel. Now she builds on persons insights to show us how to give our animals the best and most pleased life–on their terms, not ours.
Knowing what causes animals physical pain is usually simple, but pinpointing emotional distress is much harder. Drawing on the latest research and her own work, Grandin identifies the core emotional needs of animals and then clarifies how to fulfill the point needs of dogs and cats, horses, farm animals, zoo animals, and even wildlife. Whether it’s how to make the healthiest environment for the dog you must place alone most of the day, how to keep pigs from being bored, or how to know if the lion pacing in the zoo is miserable or just exercising, Grandin teaches us to challenge our assumptions about animal contentment and honor our bond with our fellow creatures.
Animals Make Us Human is the culmination of nearly thirty years of research, experimentation, and experience. This is essential reading for anyone who’s ever owned, cared for, or simply cared about an animal.
A Q&A with Temple Grandin, Leader of Animals Make Us Human
Q: In
Animals Make Us Human, you chat about a wide range of animals, from dogs to pigs to tigers. Which animals do you delight in studying and effective with the most?
A: I’ve worked with cattle the most, so I really delight in cattle. I permanently liked to sit in the pen and let the cattle come around me and lick me–they’re really peaceful animals when they’re not worried. But the thing about cattle is they’re a prey-species animal and they get frightened really easily–and I can tell to that because as a person with autism, dread is my main emotion. So I can tell to how cattle are permanently hypervigilant, looking for rapid movements, looking for small signs of things that might be danger.
Q: How has autism helped you in your work with animals?
A: I’m a total visual thinker. And you’ve got to reflect about it: animals don’t reflect in language. If you want to know animals, you must get away from language. Animals are sensory-based thinkers; they reflect in pictures, they reflect in sounds, they reflect in touches. There’s no additional way that their brains can store persons memories.
Q: How has your work affected the treatment of animals?
A: I’ve been effective on improving the treatment of cattle for years. When I ongoing out in the seventies, people were incredibly rough and abusive with cattle. The thing that kept me going was that there were some really nice people who handled their cattle well, and their cattle had a fantastic life, and so I could see that it was possible to handle animals right. And today many more people are now involved in teaching low-stress stockmanship and excellent cattle handling. When I ongoing in the early seventies, I was a lead the way in the U.S. on this; nobody else was effective on these things.
Q: How will this book be useful to people effective with cats and dogs in animal shelters?
A: People regularly don’t admit emotions in these animals. I went to a very nice animal shelter recently that had group housing for cats that had tree-like things with platforms and cubbyholes for the cats to get in, and a very astute worker there noticed that you can have a situation where a cat seems very cool in a shelter, but he’s not really sleeping, he’s constantly keeping an eye out for another cat. And people need to watch for that kind of situation, because even though it looks peaceful, that one particular cat that never sleeps is going to be stressed out.
Also at this shelter, I was very pleased that the amount of dog barking was way less, and I reflect one of the reasons for this is that every day, every dog is taken out for an hour of quality time, playing and being walked and interacting with a person. That’s going to help lower the stress. Dogs need to be taken out every day for quality interaction with a person, exercise, and fun play.
Q: What are the things you really like about making a book like
Animals Make Us Human?
A: I really loved getting into all the neuroscience information. Another thing I talked about in the book are the problems with not having enough people effective out in the meadow to apply things. We’ve got policymakers who never work out in the meadow, and some of the policies can backfire. We need to have more people effective in the meadow. In the wildlife chapter, I talk about who’s going to be the next Jane Goodall–we need a lot more of that kind of on-the-ground work.
Q: You mention Dr. Nicholas Dodman and some additional people in your meadow. Has anyone in particular been a fantastic inspiration for you?
A: One of my huge inspirations when I was starting out was a scientist named Ron Kilgore, who studied sheep handling and sheep behavior. At the same time that I was effective on cattle handling in the U.S. in the early seventies, Ron Kilgore was doing the same sorts of things in New Zealand. I learned one of his papers early on, and that really was an inspiration.
Q:What do you reflect of the more extreme animal activists?
A: Violence I’m really against–that’s very counterproductive. All that does is make the animal industry go and get more lawyers and more security systems. Demonstrations–sometimes there may be a place for that. In some situations we might have philosophical differences. I eat meat. I get hypoglycemic if I don’t eat animal protein. But I feel very fervently that we’ve got to give the animals a decent life. A woman effective at Niman Ranch said that we’ve got to give animals “a life worth living.” These cattle can have a decent life: the cows and the bulls, out on a ranch eating grass. The calves spend half their lives in a feed yard, but they’re still outside. Another way I look at it is, persons cattle would have never been born, would have never existed, but now that we’ve made them exist, we’ve got to give them a decent life.
Q: If you could give your book to one person or one group of people so that they could learn more about animal care, who would that be?
A: I reflect any kind of person who works with animals, whether it’s a pet owner, a cat owner, people who work with horses, people who work on farms–anyone who works with animals on a daily basis is going to like
Animals Make Us Human, and they’re also going to like
Animals in Translation.
Q: Proposition 2 in California just passed. Its aim is to lower the inhumane confinement of farm animals by giving them enough room to stand up, turn around, and stretch. What do you reflect of this, and what do you reflect the real effects will be?
A: Veal stalls and sow stalls we need to get rid of, unadorned and simple. Putting a sow in a box where she can’t turn around for most of her life, that’s absolutely not acceptable. Two-thirds of the public have problems with it. With hens and chickens, that’s a more intricate issue. It’s so much more expensive to place them in systems that are cage-free, and what I’m apprehensive about is the egg industry migrating to Mexico and being a real mess, where we have no controls at all. What people don’t realize is that half of the egg industry is liquid egg, which can be easily shipped in persons stainless-steel tanks. It’s the eggs that go into bread, the eggs that restaurants use…And I’m concerned that that might migrate to Mexico.
There needs to be a lot more thought going into how we’re going to apply things. What’s happening in a lot of fields now–with any issue, not just animal issues–is we’re getting more and more policymakers really separated from the reality of what’s happening on the ground, where ideology takes over from practicality.
Q: What are your future plans relating to animal promotion? What is the next issue that you want to tackle?
A: I’m an implementer. Somebody has to work on implementing things. I want to continue effective with people on practical guidelines that will result in improvements. I spend a fantastic deal of time effective with large meat buyers, because economic forces can regularly bring about fantastic change. One of the things that should be a major criterion in judging welfare is when there are too many lame animals. And lameness is something I can measure. I want things I can measure. Too regularly we’ve got our best and brightest going into policy, and they haven’t done anything practical. All I can say is, whatever meadow you’re in, whether it is animals or something else, you need to get out in the meadow and find out what’s going on in the trenches, so that you don’t make policies that might have unintended, terrible consequences. Get away from the lobbyists, get away from all that, get out and visit farms, visit ranchers, because with a lot of issues, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
(Photo © Joel Benjamin)
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Seems to be a problem, does not hold your place in the book. Everytime I go to read I am stuck back at the biginning and cannot get back to where I was. I gave up trying. Sounded like it could be excellent but from what small I have managed to read it’s not what I expected from the title. Not one I would consider.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
If animals have feelings, maybe then that – just before being slaughtered – they feel the same feelings as the the people in the Holocaust, just before entering the gas chambers. It’s a pity we cannot question them anymore. So, since not a single one is going to be able to tell it, let’s just forget it and go on with the killing. Bon appétit.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I admit to not having read this book. But I did see the HBO movie about the leader, Temple Grandin. By the time I realized her aver to fame was inventing “humane” slaughter houses, I had already invested over an hour of viewing time. It’s a bring shame on her talents were wasted on what she feels is a humane way to slaughter animals. How can you have humane and slaughter in the same sentence? I agree with additional reviewers that I remain unconvinced that these animals are cool to the very end.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I establish the book dull to read, could not get past the first chapter on dogs. I disagree with her concepts on pack leadership in dogs, and really disagree with her opinions of Ceasar, dog whisper. I am ditching this book. Very disappointing.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I was going to buy Grandin’s book until I read T. Harless’ comment. By any standard definition, cats are truly domestic animals who seek out human companionship and, yes, like. Just question the innumerable strays whom humans have taken into their homes (and laps, couches, chairs and beds) over the centuries. Moreover, Grandin’s comment about cat survival in the wild ignores the fact that cats in the wild live about a year and change on average, as opposed to cats in a home who typically have a lifespan north of 10 years. So, if that fits your definition of survival, then yes, Temple Grandin is right. But it’s disingenuous and unfair.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5