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I suppose it's a long shot that anyone's read any of Grandin's books but she certainly is a fascinating read. She's an autistic woman who works with the meatpacking industry to help them make improvements in plants, conducts animal welfare audits at the plants, etc. I'm currently reading her book Animals in Translaton - her other titles are Emergence: Labeled Autistic, Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports From My Life With Autism, Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals, and Livestock Handling and Tranpsort.
Grandin feels that as an autistic person she better understands animals than do "normal" people (her terminology) because she believes she has more in common with animals in brain function - including hyperspecificity, focus on detail, and visual thinking. One of her specialties as a livestock expert is being able to go into a meatpacking plant and tell the managers why exactly, for example, the cattle won't walk into a chute, because she sees what they see when most people don't.
A lot of what she talks about is really interesting, both in understanding animal minds and the minds of autistic people. And yet I find a lot of this book extremely frustrating, because her research is so sloppy and at times nonexistent. She puts forth a lot of "theories" based on anecdotes, secondary sources, guesses (her own word), and at times obvious logical fallacies. It's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, which is disappointing when she clearly does have a lot of important information and insight to offer.
And to me it borders on irresponsible to publish some rather bizarre theories on dog ownership when some dog owners reading may put those theories to use. Her most troubling statements, to my view, are the ones that deal with genetics. She advocates breeding mutts, for one thing, when the "hybrid vigor" theory she obviously subscribes to has as far as I know been discredited.
She theorizes that in any single-trait selective breeding program, physical changes correspond to neurological/emotional changes and vice versa. She claims that Labs being bred to be "calm/calm/calm" has made them lazy and untrainable - based on a conversation with ONE dog trainer. She also claims that mutts don't chew shoes as much as purebred dogs, based on having one friend with two mutts and a purebred Lab as pets. Some of her other highly questionable theories include - blue-eyed animals tend to be crazy, animals with light skin and noses are often aggressive, and black animals with a patch of white fur (especially on the chest) are the friendliest.
Interestingly, she notes that one of her mental obstacles as an autistic person is being able to put details together into a coherent whole. She writes that autistic people can't see the forest for the trees, often quite literally but also in the sense of putting together mental sequences and tying ideas together. However, though she knows that's how her brain works, she doesn't appear to acknowledge how it affects her animal science writing. I can see it in the way she writes, how she's often quite brilliant in observing detail, but when she puts together the meaning from those details she comes to some rather shaky and dubious conclusions.
On the off-chance that anyone here has read her, I would love to discuss Grandin's books more. |
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